I think these type of experiments are good for personal projects, but to clone someone else's work and charge for an unfinished ripoff seems like a scummy thing to do, especially when notch is such a valuable member of the dev community and a great model of indie dev success. Not only that, but the game markets itself as a clone and even steals part of the Minecraft name. When has that ever been acceptable in a for-profit context? I'd find this a lot less annoying if it were free and open source, as long as it didn't have reverse-engineered Minecraft source code.
The *craft name might be temporary, I haven't really decided yet. But at this point, it just gives people the right association, because the gameplay is so similar to Minecraft :)
As for my scummyness: Didn't Notch do a somewhat similar thing with Infiniminer? Didn't he build on it, make it better/different, and charge for it early? Just because it isn't much more than Minecraft right now, doesn't mean it won't be in the future. And there are some big differences already, like the theme of the world, the block size, and the technology. Hopefully, in time I'll get to show how big an impact all three can have on a game! :)
As for Notch, I couldn't agree more with you: He is a very valuable member of the dev community, and someone I have an incredible respect for.
