Minecraft is free to play for the weekend, possibly longer.

[Arcanum]

Yeah I know we have our NPF minecraft server thread, but I felt like this deserved its own. Due to server problems that Notch (minecraft creator) is currently trying to fix, Minecraft (the full alpha version that usually costs $10) will be free to play until he gets everything fixed.

In his own words:

Until this all gets sorted out, I'm officially calling a "free-to-play weekend", or however long this will take to fix. You will need to have a paid account to play it later on when this gets fixed though.
If you want to keep track of the latest developments, please follow my blog. I also post stuff on my twitter, but there's a lot of nonsense there as well.

So if anyone was interested in Minecraft before but never payed for the full version, now's your chance to try it out. The client can be downloaded here: http://www.minecraft.net/