Wolvereness Got Letter from Mojang's Attorney

Discussion in 'Bukkit Discussion' started by rcade, Oct 10, 2014.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Offline

    mbaxter ʇıʞʞnq ɐ sɐɥ ı

    Making accusations won't bring back Bukkit or make your book sell.
     
    AdamQpzm likes this.
  2. Offline

    rcade


    Thanks for the plug. It's called the Minecraft Mod Programming Absolute Beginner's Guide and it was released on November 5.
     
  3. Offline

    Blkscorpion2

    I've said it before and I will say it again.. Something smells fishy here. No reason for the DCMA given, besides the usual "want's to protect his copyright" Bull. I guess you realized how much money you can make and decided to file it. But I guess time will tell. Thanks for killing Bukit, which was your intention.
     
    Shaggy67 likes this.
  4. Offline

    mbaxter ʇıʞʞnq ɐ sɐɥ ı

    Please, feel free to back up any of your accusations with information.
     
    Wingzzz and pookeythekid like this.
  5. Offline

    Fuzzybear04

    He's got balls
     
  6. Offline

    ColonelHedgehog

    *Cue You're Playing With the Big Boys Now*
     
  7. Offline

    Blkscorpion2


    Just read the forums enough info provided to see my point.. BTW this is my opinion.
     
  8. Blkscorpion2 I found the following post on the forums somewhere does it constitute valid evidence for anything?

    So unless you have any actual evidence to back it up, it's probably best not to make accusations and later pass them off as 'an opinion' :)
     
  9. Offline

    ColonelHedgehog

    I'm also a turtle.
     
    AdamQpzm likes this.
  10. Offline

    Blkscorpion2


    It's true, all true I'm the man behind it all. Oh btw I'm man enough to admit my reason for creating it. BTW did you shave?;)
     
    AdamQpzm likes this.
  11. Offline

    Shaggy67

    How is the DMCA good-for-the-community?
     
  12. Blkscorpion2 Shave for what?

    Shaggy67 He didn't say that, he said he looks for opportunities in which his interacting with them would be good for them. i.e. responding to a 5000 word essay that just rants at how much they don't like him probably wouldn't do any good if he chose to comment on it ;)
     
  13. Offline

    Shaggy67

    Filing a DMCA is a pretty significant interaction, is it not?
     
  14. Shaggy67 You say that as if he's asserting that all his interactions with the community are good.
     
  15. Offline

    Blkscorpion2

    Disregard got you confused with someone else.
     
    AdamQpzm likes this.
  16. But why is fundamental, so the rest of his statement is void.
     
  17. asofold What? That makes no sense. Just because he won't tell you why, you won't listen to anything else he has to say about it?
     
  18. He stated that there would probably not be a all-encompassing answer to the "why?" question, but then asserted a "lack of purpose" in the question.
    "Why" already covers up for enough of a purpose, even if Wolvereness himself won't or even can't fully answer it (at whatever space-time junction).
     
  19. asofold You misunderstand. From what I understand (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong Wolvereness), he wasn't stating outright that answering the question "why?" would server no purpose, he was simply stating that the way it said it wasn't being asked as a question, he was venting about it. Having a discussion based on someone's venting is what he is saying serves no purpose.

    As it happens, though, I personally don't think an answer to "why?" would clear up much. Why is only one question, and it may not be as fundamental as you think. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter why. What matters is will Mojang do anything about this? (probably not), what should we all do? (move on) and questions such as that. Regardless of the reason why, this questions are still ones that are going to be posed. It wouldn't matter whether he did it to get back at Mojang, to save the community from a hostile takeover, he just wanted to protect his copyright, or it was an unfortunate series of misclicks and typos. We'd still ask these questions, meaning why doesn't matter as much as some might think.
     
  20. AdamQpzm Well, there sometimes is more than the minimal logical formula on "stuff", so while Wolvereness is right about what people can expect to get for an answer or another, asserting "venting" does perhaps not match all posts that state more than the what fits into someones calculus.

    "What" is not the grand scheme of things :p, unless you are able to process "all".
     
  21. Offline

    Shaggy67

    Knowing "why" may give us an idea of whether or not this situation is likely to be resolved.
     
  22. asofold He wasn't aiming generally, he was aiming it at the specific post.

    I don't see why it would.
     
  23. Offline

    mactso

    No hard feelings, you have to follow your code.

    That being said, I can't see how I would ever use any software, or participate in any project that wolverness was involved with going forward. And I say that while respecting and giving him and his position the benefit of the doubt that he is completely correct in his position and everyone else was completely wrong.

    Who would ever want to take the risk again?

    It also opens up an entire window of risk around LGPL and GPL projects. If one developer can nuke an entire project for at least several months at any time, how do you address that risk? Similar risks exist for closed source when a company fails. The pretense as a business owner is that they give you access to their code in a lock box in case they go belly up- but the reality is it will be easier to buy another product than to try to maintain and use their code.
     
  24. The project licensing with the GPL for the Bukkit API which then is used within CraftBukkit has been problematic from start, at least it allows for this DMCA within the context of current law of some countries. So a project that has a more water-proof licensing setup might not ever get affected, no matter who participates in it. He has not placed that "licensing bomb" himself, it's been there from the start, due to what ever.
     
  25. Offline

    mactso

    And how, as a potential user of or contributor to a project, are we supposed to be able to determine that a legal risk exists in the project?

    I've read that some people raised the legal risks for this project and their posts were removed. In Bukkit, you had an entire community of hundreds of people who were coding based on copyrighted code and most didn't see a risk or a problem until fairly recently.
     
  26. If the project continues, or another project continues "it", that'll need to be within some kind of "cleaned up state", which will involve legal advice and a lot of work done to ensure that the licensing concept works out with the code in use.

    You could extend your point to "how can we be sure that modding will stay possible at all?". You can't be sure, technically at least modding for future versions of Minecraft can be killed off "any time". That does not appear to be very probable to happen.

    What posts were removed? I remember a discussion about plugin licensing years ago, which also touched the problem of using Minecraft code. But i don't remember any really "convincing" statements on the topic, so my guess is that no one really has had too much of a clue. The smallest formula the situation can boil down to could be very small, so it could be as simple as some people have already suggested at whatever point of time, but it could also lead to court with lots of text to consider to even understand the final result. We just have no clarification of that, until law "decides", which might or might not happen. (Edit: Should note, that a counter notice still can happen, without leading to court, though that wouldn't necessarily increase trust in the project.)
     
  27. Offline

    mactso

    When this situation started back in august, there were posts in the minecraft forums discussions stating that people had tried to raise the legal issue previously on the bukkit forums but that their posts had been deleted. Other than those posts, I don't know much else. That is a side issue however as either
    a) some people raised legal risks and their posts were removed and no one else saw the legal risk.
    b) no one raised legal risks, their posts were not removed and no one saw the legal risk.

    So the general risk of contributing to an open source project or using an open source project as a basis for your business still exists.

    Bukkit specifically faces the risk (that's been mentioned several times) that even if Wolverness's DMCA is cleared, any of the other contributors could then immediately DMCA their code too and kill the project for a few more months.

    Your point on plugins is a good one. We have to trust Mojang if we are going to put a lot of work into plugins, mods, etc. And now we have to trust Microsoft which has end of lifed projects before. If we lose the login servers because microsoft "end of lifes" the game in six years, we'd have to go to cracked versions of the game to continue.

    I've had mmorg's end of lifed on me before and it's unpleasant.
     
  28. I can't judge it, but i assume that a lot of momentum can be gained by connecting more platforms to multiplayer and (public) servers including modding, while killing off modding is a direct risk. But i wouldn't plan too many years ahead.

    In my opinion the only reliable way to keep modding forever is to write your own version of the game, of course it's not entirely realistic to start a modding community for a commercial game with "let's clone it" and gain such momentum like Bukkit did.
     
  29. Offline

    LokiChaos

    The "risk" is entirely due to Bukkit (well rather CraftBukkit's) highly unusual ties to proprietary software.

    The vast majority of FOSS projects are not so intimately tied to proprietary code, choose a more permissive license when it comes to linking, or add in the appropriate exceptions to the GPL to permit such linking. This sort of situation is a complete non-issue for most projects and those where it could potentially become an issue take more care in the licensing to ensure something like this can't occur.
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page