Is Bukkit going to continue?

I think there is still hope for Bukkit/CraftBukkit however perhaps there will always be hope. Mojang has been silent on the issue for awhile and unless something is going on that we aren't aware of, it appears nothing is happening for the time being. Sure, some people comitted to upadating the project, but this was months ago before the DMCA was even issued. It's hard to tell whether Microsoft will want to take action on this, as rcade said, they only officially aquired Mojang about a week ago. It's hard to tell at the moment where Bukkit/CraftBukkit will end up, or if it will remain on this same course, only time will tell. As of now though, like others have said, there is always hope.

 

Can you give me a hint as to what I'm missing then? I have read it, the complaint is that non-GPL code (NMS) is being distributed with GPL code (Bukkit), right?

 

What Wolvereness is claiming is that bundling NMS and Bukkit together is a violation of the Bukkit license. If you stop bundling NMS, then the violation goes away.

 

I'm not sure what you disagree with?

 

There can be other pitfalls and traps in the whole thing, which are not obvious by common sense criteria, regarding only the text of the DMCA. I would not do without legal advice if i was trying to revive "it" or create something "very similar, so the old plugins still run on it, with only minimal changes".

You may speculate on recoding the full API "similar" under a better license and somehow integrate it into the old CraftBukkit code, or on recoding conflicting parts of CraftBukkit (risk of new DMCA), or on re-crafting the build- and/or distribution-process such that it's GPL-conform. Someone might still go to court without changing a line of code, but with the long period of silence you won't find too many people betting on that very scenario right now, yet again... what's a week at court. Either way means a lot of work for some people.

 

Yes.

But removing NMS also makes Bukkit/CraftBukkit no longer operable.

No one would have to go to court to contest what Wolvereness has done.

All they would have to do is release Bukkit/CraftBukkit (or a derivative of them). If he sent a DMCA takedown and they filed a counter-notice, the burden would be on him to file suit. If he didn't, in 21 days all the files would go back online.

I'm not recommending this as a course of action, just explaining how the process works. A DMCA is not a court judgment. It's just one party's claim. The other party can counterclaim at any time.

EDIT by Timtower: Merged posts

 

Which really raises the question of why Mojang have done absolutely nothing about it, other than to assert that the claim is unfounded.

 

I forgot about the counter notice - what i mean is that we don't really have any assurance with the current project setup, if it's not brought to court. Since the impact of another dmca would be becoming much lower after a counter notice getting through, having covered largest chunks of code, it could be sufficient to continue the project, adding licensing exceptions and alterations for all future contributions.

I know some people don't like speculation, but apart from not wanting to interfere or from judging to not stand ground in court, there are other thinkable reasons:

• Microsoft locked them down for "purchase" + briefing until now, possibly having their own lawyers look into it, after purchase + briefing.
• They wait for the immediate community effects to evolve up to a certain point before interfering. E.g. to see if it pays.

Especially the upper point might lead to a new judgement of the situation, taking into account, that some projects close in on 1.8-compatibility (with and without Bukkit API). Knowing that, i restart counting from now +- 7 days rather...

 

My contributions to Bukkit were made free of charge, in my spare time. I didn't make enough money from thank-you-donations to buy a bicycle let alone make a living from the project.


And since this conversation keeps looping, I'll throw this back in:

The only statements suggesting they would update to 1.8 were on August and there's been no further info since then. Mojang staff explicitly stated they have no interest in maintaining Bukkit. In this thread I'm seeing a lot of denial, anger, and bargaining. We need to move past this to acceptance that it's gone and not coming back.

It'll be alright, this isn't the end of Minecraft modding. It's just time to say goodbye to an old friend and find some new ones to fill its place.

 

I never saw a cent from Bukkit either, although my contributions weren't quite as large as a few other peoples were, as I understand it, once Curse "sold" Bukkit to Mojang, nobody was getting paid. And from what I have gathered, the donation button on Bukkit saw less action than I did last year. Spigot on the other hand, receives quite a large amount of "donations," from what they publicly post, it is likely enough for their team to make a living off of. So I can only guess that your post was a mistake and you used the wrong name, or that you are severely misinformed.

 

My contributions to the Bukkit ecosystem were free of charge as well and consumed a great deal of time as well.

The information to use from the post you cite there:

• Details on Microsoft buying Mojang.
• Other projects to move on to, including ones that implement the Bukkit API and more.

By all means move on, if you found a workable alternative for yourself - i for my part will keep watching until the day-count since "purchase by Microsoft" is high enough to come to a reasonable conclusion, including having an eye on the other Bukkit alternatives, concerning if they should prove to be workable or dead. Currently there is no indication that "dead" would apply to those i am considering for myself.

It's not even the end of the Bukkit API yet, as other projects are still using it. No problem with moving on, but i'll keep watching for a while.

I can understand that people feel it would be injust if others get donations for a fork, i'd be interested in the financial "reports" on such a project as well, because i can't see much data to judge this, other than interpreting rumors that many bigger servers use their mod (pro), and by judging their asking for donations for legal support (contra). I don't assume they lie if they need donations. Probably they can support the Bukkit ecosystem with a legalized/cleaned up fork of the API + CB, which could be something that not all people would hate.

Concerning the naming i may have been a little too informal initially, not taking into account the strong separation between some Bukkit staff and the other project. But essentially Bukkit plugins have a very realistic chance of a continued existence on 1.8. I personally always had CanaryMod and Sponge and some others on the radar as well, it's just that i invested a huge amount of work into the Bukkit-ecosystem, so i prefer a smoother transition, e.g. with a fork/whatnot that essentially is like CraftBukkit + Bukkit, just legal + working.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

I think you missed my point, and it is that this statement by you: "Is it ok that Bukkit team got money and made a living of modding a game made by another company, even using open source libraries to compile Bukkit-API and CraftBukkit, libraries made by others free of charge?"


Is completely unfounded, as the Bukkit team did not get money or make a living from Bukkit.

 

Oh that's a misunderstanding - i am by no means intending to include the "current" retired staff in this statement . I was refering (didn't i write that) to the times when the Bukkit project became big, and when they actually were receiving donations until some time around the transition with Mojang employing the team lead. I don't intend to really compare this 1:1 with another mod, but it's a fact that they had received donations which allowed at least one of them to live through one month ("make a living" ~ surviving), in addition Curse then has been paying a lot of bills (not negligible, but of course not benefiting staff). The context involves that Bukkit is modding a game made by others, and that the project is including other open source libraries to do its work. I personally don't see a problem with that and i don't intend to throw anything at anyone with this, on the contrary. But if they had had no support back then, some of the programmers might have had to take a job instead or at least dedicate more time to other things, which could have resulted in slower progress and less people using the mod. Other mods could have benefited from that and other things might have happened. I just wanted to spin back the view onto the question if donations for projects that are based on other projects are bad per se. I don't know any details about the donations other projects receive and if their teams can make a living of it.

Well, i don't have a fork, i just follow what people write and what kind of information i can find on things. Concerning the claims you make about Spigot, can you back them up with anything? Can you back your reasoning up as to why it's so bad what Spigot is providing, even if what you claim initially was right? You are also claiming that the Bukkit team lead was forced to do anything - but i assume that's just a very biased view, because they had not been forced to couple with Curse, neither had they been forced to go with Mojang. They could have done without it ... to what effect? You don't seem to like assumptions and speculation, but you don't have more to present yourself. I don't see your claims backed up by that "1.7 announcement", maybe you can link it from the forum that's been made for discussing Bukkit alternatives, to disambiguate what post you might have had in mind?

My "claims" are based on publicly available information, e.g. Bukkit team lead having received donations during a certain phase in the past and one of them living off those for a while (or "surviving" rather). That's not news. You can't define me to be outside of "the discussion", but you could calm down and also read what others are writing. My posts are refering to a "Bukkit ecosystem" surviving a little longer (angry staff is inappropriate), which perfeclty fits this discussion.

I suggest taking this discussion into the apporopriate forum, you are running a hot flame on Spiugot, but you are not presenting much of backing up, other than speculation, so the flame probably won't be confined.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Mojang just became an official part of Microsoft Studios last week. They had more on their plates than just Bukkit.

The fact you are no longer on the Bukkit staff means you're guessing like the rest of us, doesn't it?

 

rcade That's what you choose to believe. I don't believe they were too busy for this.

 

They could have stayed smaller and without the protection and speed of the infrastructure - not suggesting they should have. Criticising Spigot for donations effectively means that you want them to stay similarly small in comparison. A just cause to demand that kind of fairness, but also somewhat demanding. I am lacking the information to judge what their financing looks like, concerning donations. Thus i look at what the project does, what it does different in quality and quantity (improvements, changes, changes to vanilla behavior, more experiments, more risk). Their efforts for 1.8 seem to indicate, that they could in theory have been part of the Bukkit project for a longer time - now i don't know what conflicts there have been and also don't really intend to open that thread within this thread, as such would have meant a different project structure and lots of complicated other things.

You just wrote that they "were forced to sign away their rights to the project" - it's not my major point in this, they just knew what they were doing, at least to some extent, wouldn't blame anyone for this.

I don't see much change with the EULA for once, but even disregarding that, all future Minecraft modding will always be at the grace of Mojang+Microsoft as long as they are developing the game. This aspect has been discussed a lot, while there are differing opinions how much of a difference it is, claiming that Mojang "now suddenly" puts CraftBukkit into trouble doesn't seem to have much base, at least it depends on a not too high probability, also because killing off one mod has no significance whatsoever unless you kill all. I can't judge if you have any special insider knowledge about the plans of M+M. Asking all others to follow is asking a little bit too much, in my opinion.
The text of that "1.7 announcement" is not known to me, and without any hints on the actual content, i can't judge if it would change my view in any way. All in all i would excuse people for a random number of silly posts, to me md_5 used to appear pretty professional all over and also used to stand in for the Bukkit project in discussions on IRC and elsewhere where i happened to read a bit, and i can't think of basing a campaign against him on one announcement, even if it should have been outright stupid, given how i perceived him relating to the Bukkit project in the past, but as i already have stated, i wasn't following him all the time and everywhere.

I already qualified the "angry staff" part as inappropriate - though disturbingly it is not even fully wrong, as it had been Bukkit staff trying to end the project, even if team lead was involved, some seem to be angry and some write posts of the kind "let it end". Please acknowledge that i am refering to the Bykkit ecosystem and the project code-wise. Your view on Bukkit may be strongly centered on the staff and developers, but you have to see that it also consists of all that surrounds its, like Curse, Mojang, plugin developers, external contributors, server owners, random artists, supporters... if you like it or not. As it stands right now, i don't want it to sound too much compromising, but there roughly are no staff nor developers within the official project at present, however that doesn't mean that the project in total is fully gone, though it's of course a heavy and disturbing change. I also don't claim that X will be Bukkit, or Bukkit will be Y, still more is possible than some people may believe.

Actually this has by no means been my main point - however you can't really deny the theoretical possibility that a fork becomes "the" or "the most popular" successor, given the case that they do the work to create a legalized version of the whole code base. I was brainstorming, but not without imagining some probabilities for different things to happen, but i won't reiterate those. It's not my wish that anything happens that hurts ex-staff, but i am not exaggerating if i state, that the ecosystem of code base + plugins seems to have a realistic chance of a smoother transition towards not existing anymore. In fact i am also glimpsing at other project than the slightly too often mentioned one, again if you like it or not, even the "official" Bukkit project could in theory come to life again, be it good or not good wanted or unwanted.

I wasn't generalizing on "you" or your experience. You were claiming/speculating that they probably make a living of donations, never mentioning the amount of work they invest to create a customized fork. So i acknowledge if you detest it, but with the given information (even with some guessing) i for myself can't rate it as such a disturrbing possibility up to this point.

Now that is enough text, so i won't add to details of other projects outside of the forum part that was made for that anymore. However i will still consider to relate to stuff, if i'm not provided with more informtion for what to base that kind of criticism on. Note that both Spigot and me were attacked here, while i was trying to point towards the possibility that the Bukkit ecosystem an project are still not full-dead, including the possibiliy of the mentioned mod playing a role in it, including a lot of maybes. While you can state that it's not the case because it's not right now that way, the potential of a continuation for the code base and plugin ecosystem is there, and that's what the OP was asking for.

This one:

I said: Without Curse + Mojang... slower Bukkit, maybe less Bukkit. Impossible? No. Did they know what they were doing? Likely somewhat.

You are twisting (too). Maybe i used to build in too much redundancy into my posts, i will be more concise from now on. (Edit: The OP asked about code rather.)

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Ive come to the conclusion that some members here simply want to see bukkit burn! Pointless arguing with people like this imo

 

I think you mentioned it with a "maybe even", if i remember right. I read that you dislike how that other project is relating to donations (and maybe more), but i can't see reason to adopt the opinion that they are doing something very bad with forking CraftBukkit. No doubt they are relating slightly differently to money than Bukkit did, given they satisfy the needs of bigger servers, the EULA should actually could have let Bukkit benefit more than Spigot - but admittedly that's probably another thread of threads to not open.

There is woods everywhere, developers do grow on rare kinds of trees. Even if that means that they have to start over with a small team and few contributors, that would not be the end of "it". I am not claiming they can or want to keep up the quality level of code (and so on... moderation, code review, speed of development builds ~ disregarding 1.7 and 1.8, for those are refactoring internals too much to not hurt modders), but it would be a continuation.

Wait a second - i don't know what happened there....

I am capable of reading text in general. Let's assume i just imagined that and that it was not edited away - so i apologize for that.

You do however "counter post" with critique on Spigot+donations, as well as claiming stuff i'd be doing. It all doesn't change my judgement of things too much. You could also decide to read my posts and attempt to understand the basic calculus. If you try to argue against my mentioning the efforts of the Spigot team to revive the Bukkit code base for MC 1.8, you need to back it up with something more than finding inconsistencies in my posts.

Cite me.
Actually, i have clarified how i view the Spigot part and how it relates to Bukkit from my side - also that i view Bukkit from differing angles. I don't need to state more here and that's thanks to you, so i will cease to "defend" or dig for stuff, i'll also work on a stricter paradigm for quoting (always).

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Necro, its perfectly obvious that if the bukkit situation was sorted out tomorrow and the best developers ever took it over you would sulk off into some corner and cry!
You would rather it burn than be saved... shame, its says quite a lot about the type of person you are!
You have spent a good part of today argueing with asofold about things that really are irrelevent, if you really didnt care about the furure of bukkit you'd be history on this forum! Instead you are here trying to make damn sure of its destruction along with any hope of its return! Shame on you!!
Sorry about my bluntness but people should either be constructive/helpful or STFU (sorry about that but no other word in my limited vocabulary conveyes the emotion i wish to right now, if anyone wishes to educate me, please do so )

 

Necrodoom Good point (edited above).

Please don't exaggerate, while i didn't miss my "foggy calculus" i did misread at least two posts by Necrodoom in two threads, which gave some things a slightly different direction, which was unnecessary. Are you being constructive?

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Im being both constructive and helpful, albeit in a slightly blunter way than you guys appear to be used to. I dont dance around with words and niceties. If i have something to say i make it as clear and straightforward as possible, if someone chooses to be offend by that, thats their problem! If someone is acting in a certain way ill point it out, we all need people to stand up and tell us when we are being an idiot ( thats generally and not aimed at anyone, id say if it was). I was pointing out how this is coming across to the general viewer, if thats not the intention then my comment is helpful and attitudes can be adjusted accordingly! sometimes a blunt slap is the best help you can get!

The fact is, i could give you a link to the post on the spigot forum stating craftbukkit and bukkit 1.8 are almost ready for release, you know this and its obvious this grates on you BIG time! What is your problem! If they have found a legal way round the DMCA or rewritten the code so what? They got the job done and should be applauded!
The only reason i can see that you would not be happy about this is that you want to make sure bukkit stays dead, which is to be honest blatantly obvious, so yeah, shame on you!

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Necrodoom might have a precise idea of what to call Bukkit. An extrernal project using/recoding/updating the Bukkit and CraftBukkit code base, does not mean they can call it "Bukkit", unless they are put in by Mojang to be official successors - because Mojang seems to hold various rights to parts of the "Bukkit" project (forums, repositories, ...). Apart from that it's up to your point of view, what "Bukkit" is for you, does it need to be reiterated!? The above discussion has already touched that topic (if not squeezed).

 

You mean like Mojang 'officially created' bukkit?......
The only way they are not official successors (going by historical examples) is if Mojang step up and say they are not, which they wont.
The only way Mojang will get involved is if everyone just down tools and walks away, and even then i have my doubts.
And it doesnt matter what developers call it, its being sold as bukkit. To the end user, if it fits and works and its got bukkit on the tin, guess what.. its bukkit.
Reminds me of vacuum cleaners here in the UK, everyone calls them Hoovers. Hoover is a brand name not a device.

 

History: Mojang holds rights to the Bukkit project - which exactly no one seems to know, but at least it seems to be things like repositories, these forums, the names Bukkit and CraftBukkit and the code that the original creators had contributed, who then got hired by Mojang, some time in 2012 or so.
Point: Mojang decides who would lead the Bukkit project, naturally the project can't "revive itself" under the name of Bukkit.

So no, Mojang has not created Bukkit, but they have acquired rights to parts of what Bukkit consists of, leading to my assumption that Mojang would have to decide who can lead the project and who not, at least when it comes down to granting access to forums and the official code repositories.

 

My impression was you need a working bukkit to develop spigot with but that you don't have to release that bukkit to release spigot. I.e. they will release a new spigot patch but they will not release the new bukkit.

I could be mistaken on this.

 

From what i've heard they plan on releasing a fully functional server jar. From their announcement i read that they have been working with the Bukkit and CraftBukit code base to update to 1.8, and there was something about recoding the API.

I don't know what parts of CB or B they might have recoded now, or whatever method they are using to working around the DMCA, if it will be fully Bukkit API compatible etc.

 

But hopefully it will..