DMCA

Discussion in 'Bukkit Discussion' started by grid21, May 15, 2015.

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  1. Offline

    Bobcat00

    Bukkit is not dead. It's still alive. You can go make your own CraftBukkit 1.8.6 server right now. There are tens of thousands of server owners using CraftBukkit 1.8.6 right now.

    You seem to forget that Bukkit/CraftBukkit is open source, which means that anyone can pick up the project and continue it, no matter what Warren Loo wants to do. Yeah, you can argue about the use of the name (which cannot be trademarked/copyrighted under US law), but the fact is the project is open source and is being continued by another team. It was never dead.
     
  2. Invisible

    nverdier

    Except CraftBukkit is DMCA'd, so it is no longer 'open source'.
     
  3. Wow, such ignorance.

    First, there's no Bukkit/CraftBukkit 1.8. The final version for Bukkit is 1.7.9, or 1.7.10 if you consider the latest commit stable. What' you're talking about is a fork which was not renamed for unknown reason.

    Also, you don't seem to have any idea of what Open Source actually means, so I can give you a link: http://opensource.org/definition

    CraftBukkit is not (or at least no longer) an Open Source Software, as it doesn't match the first point. CraftBukkit contains both code derived from Mojang code, which isn't Open Source (lol) and code from Wolverness, which effectively denied the use and distribution of his code in every ways.

    "The Bukkit Project" is dead. The Bukkit team is no longer working on Bukkit. The CraftBukkit project is illegal* to own, use and distribute. The fact that a fake/fork of Bukkit-CraftBukkit exist doesn't have anything to do with this.

    You cannot just decide to "pickup" a dead project. If the leader of a project decides that it's dead, it's dead. No matter what you do. You can only fork it and create a new project. The only things that this "new" CB and the old one have in common are the code and the name. You will never see the same level of quality that was put in B/CB before. See all the random breaking changes those "devs" did.

    *until somebody actually sends a counter-notice to the DMCA. Otherwise, the DMCA is valid and everything Wolverness claims and says about his contribution is right.
     
    korikisulda, gdude2002 and Lolmewn like this.
  4. Offline

    Bobcat00

  5. Offline

    gdude2002

    Nope, @Ribesg is quite right actually.
     
  6. Offline

    Pocketkid2

    The SpigotMC team has done a pretty darn good job of forking, maintaining, and providing means to obtain an updated Bukkit, Craftbukkit, and Spigot. They may not legally be "official", but in my eyes, I see them as the qualified new devs. Thanks to them, I still have fun projects to work on, and even job and education opportunities.

    Long live SpigotMC! Rest in peace, "The Bukkit Project!"

    P.S. Mojang and Microsoft, now would be a great time to get your act together!
     
    mactso likes this.
  7. You're so much right, i am totally unable find even one correct thing there, except maybe for grammar :).
     
  8. Offline

    gdude2002

    @Pocketkid2

    What do you mean by this? They're simply not legal at all.

    Aside from all the breaking changes, sure - shading in different versions of libraries that plugins depend on (for example, Guava), breaking Bukkit internals (The scheduler behaves differently in some circumstances, and things like Bukkit.broadcast() don't work quite right), introducing extra or modified API calls, subtly changing Minecraft internals.. Aside from all that, I'd agree with you.

    Job opportunities from Bukkit? The only thing I can think of is being hired to write plugins, which is already a waste of time.. You want something to do? Start writing plugins for Sponge, which has recently seen development releases.

    As Ribesg put it:

     
    Ribesg likes this.
  9. Offline

    Bobcat00

    Don't like the new CraftBukkit/Spigot? Then don't use it. No need to go around badmouthing people who provide this for free.

    I find the new CraftBukkit works great. And certainly better than any other Minecraft server.
     
    mactso and pookeythekid like this.
  10. Offline

    gdude2002

    I'd feel like I was doing people a disservice if I didn't point out what they were getting themselves into.
     
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  11. Offline

    Bobcat00

    And the alternative is... Don't run a server? Good advice!
     
    mactso likes this.
  12. Offline

    gdude2002

    The alternatives are to run vanilla (Not very viable, I agree), Canary (hmod fork), Glowstone (although it's not suitable for survival yet), Forge, or the Sponge development build.
     
    Ribesg likes this.
  13. Free as in price, but not free as in freedom. And I always value freedom over price. You may be able to download Spigot for free (albeit have to build it yourself) but you sure as hell don't have any real freedom as far as that project is concerned. Either way, I'd prefer not to violate the license of the developers that put in a lot of work.
     
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  14. Offline

    Bobcat00

    None of which are as good as the new CraftBukkit/Spigot.

    WTF are you even talking about? Lack of freedom? Yeah, I'm not free to run the server and write plugins and use plugins and decide when I want to take a piss. And there is no license violation involved (and if you dispute that, please provide your credentials in this matter of law). Jesus, I'm glad you're on my ignore list (made the mistake of looking at your post). I'll be adding gdude, too.

    EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 12, 2016
  15. Offline

    gdude2002

    Enjoy your.. one semi-useful plugin for a dead server software? If you're asking me why there are license violations, you know absolutely nothing about the situation, and since you're clearly not doing any research, are no longer worth my time.

    @AdamQpzm We should probably stop feeding the trolls. What was this topic supposed to be about, again?
     
    Last edited: Jun 5, 2015
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  16. Offline

    ZeldoKavira

    The topic needs to return to its original discussion or the thread will be locked.
     
    gdude2002 likes this.
  17. Offline

    gdude2002

    Agreed.

    Alright, so to get back to the original post, yes, Bukkit is dead. The specific problem, to my knowledge, was that CraftBukkit contained decompiled Mojang-written code, none of which was actually licensed to the team for distribution and use. Since CB used a GPL-based (read: viral) license, their project was incompatible with the decompiled code, in terms of licensing - Mojang wasn't interested in releasing it under a compatible license.

    Additionally, I believe that Wolv and others weren't aware that Mojang owned the Bukkit project. They were committing under the OSS license, which in reality had been voided. So, Wolv filed a DMCA claim against the repositories which contained code of his that he had contributed under a license that was no longer valid - that is, that code was no longer licensed for use and distribution by anyone other than himself.

    In my opinion, Wolv was entirely within his rights to do this, and while it is disappointing to see the Bukkit project come to a close, it was on the cards for some time. The majority of the Bukkit team wanted to close up shop for various reasons, which aren't my place to explain. Mojang revealed that they owned the Bukkit project and didn't agree to its closure, which lead to the above. It makes sense for him to retract his code, honestly.

    I might be wrong on some of the above details, my memory isn't fantastic. Anyone, feel free to correct me.
     
    pookeythekid and Ribesg like this.
  18. I'd agree about sending the DMCA being within the rights of someone, but i'd strongly disagree on "Bukkit being dead", because "Bukkit" is not specified as what some people seem to be propagating. The name Bukkit is not dead, the code is not dead, because the API is still used by alive projects and even the Bukkit + CraftBukkit code has been brought to a legal shape within the Spigot project (i know some still think that it's not legal or that it's fishy, but basically it seems to be valid by the GPL and also by all sorts of national/international laws. As much as the DMCA is "legal" by a couple of ten thousands of $ spent by various parties for legal advice on it, Spigot is legal by now, and a couple of experts and legal $ seem to at least consent with that, at least i haven't heard of anything of substance that would oppose it.).

    So i'd say, the Bukkit project as we knew it is dead, because the project does not have any (official) people and the CraftBukkit code is DMCAd, but the code base and "Bukkit" in terms of the core API and other server implementations is far from dead - but that is even off topic :) - on topic is probably stating that the DMCA seems striking and that the Bukkit project has come to a stopped state - still the forums and the code base (in modified form or without CraftBukkit) are still existing, and more important large parts of the community do still exist, and a working server implementation still compatible with much of the old Bukkit/CraftBukkit coding base exists (that would be Spigot) .

    Future-wise it's interesting which concept will "win out" or if any would at all, could be large parts of the original Bukkit API will have to vanish, but so what... it's been months of having something with Bukkit, certainly Canary, a good lot of Rainbow, (Forge)... we will see which (other) projects will manage to provide a stable/mature/convenient environment for plugins and how fast+reliable they'd update and how long they'll manage to keep what types of plugins compatible etc. etc.
     
    Last edited: Jun 6, 2015
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  19. Offline

    gdude2002

    Bit of a fallacy there, I'll try to keep this simple.
    • There is no GPL - the license was voided. Spigot, even though it's not shipping binaries directly (since you have to compile them), is still shipping Wolv's code, which is in direct violation of the DMCA and the non-license (Not having a license does not, as commonly misunderstood, make anything open-domain - the opposite is true, it grants no rights whatsoever to anyone)
    • The DMCA has not been challenged and a counter-notice has not been sent. If Spigot was able to prove that it was legal, it would have sent a counter-notice.
    People are still working on Bukkit plugins in the interim because the situation has forced everyone to move to Spigot. When Sponge is released fully and in a usable state, I have no doubt that Spigot will become irrelevant, if it isn't pounded into the ground by some legal team or another.

    Agreed, it's very interesting to see how things have been progressing. I note that a lot of people (including myself) have started to port their plugins to Sponge or add Sponge support - while I do have a lot of issues with Sponge, that's not really a discussion for this topic, and it really does seem like that's going to be the go-to plugin loader.

    It's kind of neat that it supports the client as well.
     
  20. Bukkit is GPL - conerning CraftBukkit you have to distinguish clearly what a contribution is, what a file is, what a project is, what a line of code is... in short: there is GPL somewhere and the licensing of the Spigot project seems valid and no less legal than the the DMCA being legal at stopping the former Bukkit project. Note that a DMCA is not much more than an email, which the providers may or may not follow on.

    Indeed interesting.

    Note that the Spigot project has reshaped the whole process and what code they use and how. There is no more source code mixing with GPL-incompatible code, though at the cost of having to run the build process yourself.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 7, 2015
  21. Offline

    gdude2002

    This is stuff that's already been discussed and (mostly) verified over the past couple months. I'm bad at explaining it, unfortunately.

    Yeah, but they're still distributing the source code. It doesn't matter whether they mix or modify it, even distribution isn't allowed.
     
  22. The Spigot project seems to have a valid licensing and they can distribute what they distribute.

    You are probably refering to "distributing GPL licensed code bundled with GPL-incompatible code (or binaries)" or the idea that the DMCA can take away "the code" from the internet/world, in terms of "every contribution and every line of code" - both is not the case. The Spigot project is using a patching-technique to apply changes to the Minecraft server jar file amongst other changes - distributing the patch-file sources and the tools is not illegal.

    The last even distantly interesting argument for the "illegal" thing was the claim that the Spigot project would have had to provide a properly "cured" version of their project in compliance with the GPL within so and so days, because there is some part of the GPL mentioning such, and that they have failed to do so, thus being on illegal ground now. Just nothing of all that remains after all the $ spent on legal advice, but people still think that an email can rule the whole planet - luckily it doesn't.

    So all the "just cause" for wanting it die is gone, i am afraid there is not much more left than belief, dislike or even misinformation, as far as i can judge it. No intention for offending anyone there...

    If you want a "just cause" argument, why would you have an open source project with 180+ contributors die on base of a "so and so days" period, which probably doesn't actually apply by laws, would any reason suffice to kill it off?
     
  23. Offline

    Bobcat00

    The GPL license was wholly-unsuitable for CraftBukkit, and Mr. Loo was told that in the beginning. But he and the rest of the Bukkit staff chose to ignore those warnings and distribute CraftBukkit in violation of the GPL license. So it's not like some evil person violated the license and Mr. Wolfe needed to protect himself and others from this evil person; The project leaders themselves knowingly violated the license from the very beginning.
     
  24. Offline

    mactso

    At this time the status is

    The original craftbukkit implementation is stopped, the original team has mostly quit, the original project is dead and won't come back to life.

    Possible replacements will not be "production ready" for months and perhaps not even during 2015. Some of them appear to be stalled.

    We still don't know why Wolverness did what he did. Perhaps on principle, perhaps due to bitterness he wasn't hired after contributing so much, perhaps he had a bad cup of coffee one morning. In any case- he apparently can't legally say much without putting himself inb some kind of legal risk. Mojang can't say much on the advice of their lawyers.

    Predictions of the "death of the server age" were wrong- server count and user count are both way up.

    Dinnerbone will not be able to upgrade the original project while it is under DMCA.

    SpigotMC released 1.8.7 versions of spigot and a bukkit implementation they call craftbukkit this week. It's solid, it works, and it will work for 1.9 when that comes out. It's now on over 85,000 servers. People who would not be able to play multiplayer minecraft are playing. People are developing and updating tons of plugins for it. It is trivially easy to set up an eclipse environment and write a plugin for spigot. Seriously- under 30 minutes.

    The last word from Wolverness was half a year ago. There has been no lawsuit, injunction or restraining order against SpigotMC after his last tweeted threat. Mojang was completely uneffected by his actions which mainly created several months of pain for minecraft players and plugin developers. Perhaps they raised the priority of the API project as a result- we'll see when 1.9 comes out.

    The original craftbukkit implementation is DMCA'd and will not be coming back. It is demised, passed on, deprecated, left the mortal coil.

    Unless minecraft picks up the pace on features- I think its heyday has peaked. A year for a dozen features is ridiculous. The current equipment and mob model is painfully limited. You need plugins to get any kind of a challenge.

    The entire thing makes me leary of using projects that involve GPL unless they are standalone.
     
    pookeythekid likes this.
  25. Offline

    Bobcat00

    I'm sure we'll get an update at Minecon in 3 weeks. But don't forget that at Minecon 2013, Jeb said he had "high hopes" that the API would be released in 2014.
     
  26. Offline

    pookeythekid

    @Bobcat00 Hopefully high hopes for 2014 means even higher hopes for 2015.
     
  27. @pookeythekid Don't forget that, regardless of when they actually release it, it's still years overdue for when they said it would be released. Mojang cannot keep to their deadlines.
     
    pookeythekid likes this.
  28. Offline

    Tecno_Wizard

    @AdamQpzm, or Curse. When was the Javadocs supposed to be fixed? Oh yeah, almost a half year ago. lol.
     
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  29. Offline

    Bobcat00

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