If Mojang owned Bukkit then why did they ask for donations?

Discussion in 'Bukkit Discussion' started by DrPyroCupcake, Aug 22, 2014.

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  1. Offline

    DrPyroCupcake

    Hello forums
    Now. I am no expert, but here are my two cents.

    Now we can all agree one some certain facts:

    1. Bukkit is a non-profit as stated here by a staff member, and here in the Bukkit License.
    2. Non-profits cannot be owned by a person, staff member, or Board of Directors as stated here, here, and here.
    3. If no one owns a non-profit then this cannot happen:
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    4. We have now run into some Legal issues.


    This is now what is in my mind:
    [​IMG]

    Please tell me I am wrong.
     
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  2. Offline

    deltahat

    The following is pure speculation. I know nothing about the internals of the Bukkit -> Curse -> Mojang sale.

    If I had to guess, Mojang doesn't own bukkit wholesale. My hunch is that they own the intellectual property surrounding the Bukkit trademark like the logo, associated brand names (CraftBukkit, BukketDev, etc), and domain names. Mojang may also own the rights to all the decompiled code in CraftBukkit.

    Mojang cannot own ALL of Bukkit because they would first have to ask all 130+ contributors to legally transfer copyright for the code they wrote to Mojang. Since they haven't contacted me, I can only assume they haven't contacted anybody else.

    I don't think the money donated to bukkit went to Mojang. I think it mostly went to buying pizza for the dev team.
     
  3. Offline

    DrPyroCupcake

    deltahat They said they owned Bukkit. There is no speculation. Even if Mojang owns the intellectual property, Trademark, brand names, and domain, they would still be in legal trouble since Bukkit could not sell that. Did you not read any of the links I provided?

    They even said they bought it:
    [​IMG]
     
  4. Offline

    lukegb

    As EvilSeph has previously mentioned elsewhere, the donations we received were negligible. Where they existed, they've gone towards paying for necessary expenses, such as the xenForo license, and the domain renewal before Curse took that over. In addition, the donations have been going to the actual Bukkit team, not to Mojang, who were entirely hands off (as you may have noticed for the past few years...).

    As far as what they own, I don't know, not being party to the applicable contracts. I do know they don't own the domain names (bukkit.org and cbukk.it) - the former is owned by Curse who pay for the domain renewal. The latter is owned by me, and I pay for that out of pocket, along with some non-public server infrastructure.

    The current services that we make use of are provided by a mixture of Curse, Multiplay Game Servers, and the aforementioned server that I pay for personally.

    EDIT: Bukkit is not a registered non-profit organisation, nor is it under the license terms you linked to. The license you linked to is a possible license for plugins to be under - we offer a set of pre-vetted licenses on BukkitDev that can be easily selected by plugin authors. That license is one of those.
     
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  5. Offline

    DrPyroCupcake


    Since Bukkit is not registered as a non-profit I have nothing more to say. If they are not non-profit there is no trouble here.
     
  6. Offline

    lukegb


    We are non-profit in that we do not work for a profit, but we never actually registered a non-profit organisation under US (or any other) jurisdiction - there wouldn't really be any benefit to us at the stage we were/are at. Since we don't own any assets, there's no real point, as far as I'm aware.
     
  7. Offline

    DrPyroCupcake

    Sorry, that is what I meant.
     
  8. Offline

    deltahat

    What I want to know is how is what parts of the Bukkit/Craftbukkit source code does Mojang actually own? Bukkit never made me sign a Contributor Assignment Agreement (CAA) to transfer the copyright for the code I wrote to Bukkit and/or Mojang. I still own that code, even though I have agreed to license it irrevocably for free to the world via the GPL3.

    Mojang can own all the trademarks, but who owns the code?
     
  9. Offline

    lukegb

    As far as I understand it, the community owns the code, at least the parts not written by those who signed contracts with Mojang, due to the lack of a CAA/CLA. *shrug*
     
  10. Offline

    Exlll

    So there was sold code, that didn't even belong to them?
     
  11. Offline

    deltahat

    No. None of us know who owns exactly which parts of the Bukkit/Craftbukkit codebase.
    • Each contributor own's their own code because we didn't sign away our rights.
    • Some Bukkit developers may have signed away their rights as a requirement of being hired by Mojang.
    • Mojang probably owns the rights for the decompiled code embedded in Craftbukkit.
    Nothing is certain. Only time will tell.
     
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