Currently, the popular Minecraft server 9b9t employs a rather inefficient strategy of "security through obscurity" for its plugins. The server in itself is great, the owner is readily available and engages with the community, but many of its plugins are lacking in several features and slow to update.

One can understand jj20051 (the owner)'s reluctance to release all the code, since it seems reasonable that, if the code was public, more people would try to study ways to exploit it.

However, "open source" does not just mean "readable by everyone".

The system of pull requests and issues would easily make up for the security holes in having code readable to everyone. 9b9t has a wide and solid developer community, and many of them would gladly help improve the server, free of charge. Many do not have the resources to fund 9b9t with money, but are very much willing to donate their free time to fix bugs and improve the existing plugins.

jj is often complaining about lack of time, money and manpower for development, and this would be a fantastic solution to his problem. His job would shift from the very time consuming ordeal of writing the patches, to simply reviewing pull requests.

On top of that, with multiple players from several different rival groups looking at the code, the chance of backdoors would, ironically, be reduced, as everyone would be on the lookout to not give their rivals unfair advantage over themselves.

In short, here are the reasons to open source the code:

• Faster and better bugfixes.
• The community gets to suggest and develop the features they want to see, instead of just bitching about them in the Official Discord.
• Everyone - and not just jj - helps review the code for bugs, backdoors and the like. Two heads are better than one, and 9b9t has a lot more than two.
• Closed source has NEVER - and never will - stopped anyone from exploiting.
• Less money "wasted" in paying professional developers.
• More people working on it.
• People have now more ways to help the server, aside from throwing money at it.
• A lot less time wasted by jj.
• Makes the server much more developer-friendly.
• The GitHub issue system (or anything similar) will make tracking bugs way less painful.
• Open sourcing plugins is a chad powermove and anyone claiming otherwise is in bad faith.