dl.bukkit.org - 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons?

No, its quite bullshit.

Decision to close was made by the team, EvilSeph spoke on their behalf.

Mojang replies that EvilSeph cannot close Bukkit. Dinnerbone twits, on his own personal behalf, that he will try to update Bukkit to 1.8.

EvilSeph says that if they want to take over it, thats fine.

Jadedwolf has no idea what he jumped to, failing to actually present valid facts on most of his post, then proceeds to speculate despite having absolutely no idea why the DMCA was even issued, based on his own misinformed facts.

 

i've seen this argument before, and i've seen it deconstructed too. i'm not buying into it.

 

So Dinnerbone has been updating Bukkit to 1.8 for a week now, does anyone have any insight when can we expect it to arrive and comply with GPL, LGPL, whatever?

 

This situation reveals one of the flaws of some Free Software development. When you have a bunch of people that generally agree on a direction that all work together for some time with "mutual understanding", you can build great things fast. If, at some point, goals diverge, and you never had a formal agreement about what those goals were, things quickly fall apart.

If anyone decides to take this to the courts, it will take a long time to sort out, and the only winners will be the lawyers. There are enough "implied" things here that just establishing the facts could take years. A few examples: What is the legal transfer of ownership when code is committed to the Bukkit project? What rights is a contributor actually assigning the Bukkit project for their code? What kind of legal entity is the Bukkit project? Was it ever legally "acquired"? Was the Bukkit project accepting contributions in "good faith"? Did the Bukkit project fully disclose the terms under which the volunteers were participating?

The discovery process alone would consume tons of time and money. In the end, everybody loses.

All that said... Don't hate Wolverness for his decision. Instead, try to understand that these people feel betrayed. I don't think for one minute that any of them want to see Bukkit die. But I also don't think they have a lot of emotions around Mojangs approach to this. It's a slap in the face, to a community that didn't deserve it.

I also don't think people should hate Mojang. Nobody could have predicted how organic Minecraft would be. Some of the growth was in ways that didn't meet it's creators vision. I can understand their desire to prune back some of the less pleasant parts of that growth. They haven't done it in a very "market friendly" way, which is probably their #1 mistake. But hey, they're a bunch of gamers and developers, not a bunch of businessmen. (That's not a compliment nor an insult, just a command about where I think their strengths lie).

Personally, I'm somewhat ambivalent on this. I toggle between being very annoyed, and the thought that "this too, shall pass".

If nothing else, any developers around here should pay attention to what happens here. It will definitely be a learning opportunity.

-Sage

 

Point of order: Jadedcat is a she But the article she posted does have some serious flaws: not least that there's precisely zero evidence that Wolvereness is planning to close-source any of the code he contributed to CraftBukkit.

 

Posting here for clarity since y'all decided to jump me on twitter.

1. I am female.
2. The name is JadedCAT
3. I posted a summary of all pertinent links with personal interpretation.
4. I clearly marked it as personal interpretation and snark and stated I am not a lawyer.
5. Unless and until people start displaying their license to practice international copyright law everyone is just posting their own opinions and interpretations of the drama. Mine is as valid as any other.
6. I did say I am not a lawyer... nitpicking over mistakes in exact legal terminology is kinda silly since I didn't claim to be an expert.

Y'all really shouldn't listen to "experts" unless they provide proof of their license and experience in international copyright legal claims. Otherwise its all opinion, interpretation and discussion as to possible motives and outcomes.

 

buying an open-source project doesn't really require that you actually purchase the assignment of copyrights. the names bukkit and craftbukkit are presumably trademarks, so if you purchase them and hire the members of the dev team you want, there's no need to actually purchase the codebase if you're happy with the license it's released under.

usually, if a team of OSS devs split, the project forks with them, and apart from arguing about who gets to keep the children (oh, sorry, the name), the codebase is simply forked and the two new teams go on developing their forked projects. what i'm pretty certain i've seen before is OSS projects that had some annoyingly tight relationship to closed-source code get bitten in the ass by it, and that's what happening here. realistically, unless you have amazing lawyers, it's usually better to distribute open and closed source code seperately, even if they work together.

 

Well, at very least, the statement that "Mojang owns Bukkit" doesn't tell the full story.

I still think there's some issues around the transfer of ownership, what assets were transferred, and whether or not the sellers had the legal rights they needed to actually make a transaction. This is a bit of a tangent, though.

I think this seems to be the basis of Wolverness' complaint. A simple solution to the DMCA issue might simply to be unbundling of the bukkit component from the NMS component, and giving end users a script to jar them together. I don't know if this would satisfy the complaint, though.

I still believe, however, that the EULA, "Bukkit ending", and DMCA issues are all symptoms of a much bigger problem, though. The problem is that we're now about "US (the community) and THEM (Mojang)". There's a rising tide of dissatisfaction with the current culture around Minecraft. There was never a formal legal standing for Bukkit, Spigot, or any of their predecessors, with respect to Mojang. That was never a problem, until Mojang started exercising it's legal rights, sometimes in a contemptuous way to members of the community. At this point, a lot of people start saying: "Well, I was doing this because it was fun, but now it's risky, so I'm just going to go do something else, now."

I don't begrudge Mojang their right to protect their property. But the _way_ they are doing it is destroying the community that sprang up around Minecraft. If they want the community to survive, they will need to get really clear about what they will, and will not accept. If they want to swing the big hammer every time someone violates their vision, they need to TELL people what that vision is, and make it CLEAR to them what is and is not allowed. Bukkit is still technically not on the allowed list, because it's never been included in any kind of license that the community can read. There are dozens of legal ways that Mojang could "go after" people that have contributed to Bukkit/Spigot, etc. Personally, I wouldn't contribute a single line of code to the Bukkit project, without some assurance that a) It was going to remain Free Software forever, and b) that I would never be legally at risk for that contribution.

I believe the real issue is not the technical or legal issues. It's the division of the community, because what was once somewhat Laissez-faire, is now having a lot of control exercised over it by one party, and it's unpredictable.

I wouldn't be surprised at all, if this was enough of a division to motivate a few people to start working on completely free games along the same vein as Minecraft (there are already a number of clones out there). Maybe, they'll even create something better? I suspect that the amount of code written as part of the core minecraft engine is dwarfed by the amount of code contributed by the community (not just server-side, but also client-side). Mojang would do well, I think, to keep in mind what's really at stake here.

-Sage

 

I agree that the ModAPI should be made by Mojang and that it will be well integrated to allow good integration with the game itself. I have also been keeping up with the ModAPI project since it's public announcement starting at 1.2-1.3 (I forget when I first heard about it). The problem is how Mojang treated the Bukkit community and it's developers with complete disrespect. The "We own you" attitude and Mojang's business model is conflicting with the original developer's wishes to contribute to an open (source) community. This is further escalated by the fact that Mojang hasn't supported Bukkit since it's initial "purchase" after it said it would.

I don't know if the DMCA is valid, and I really don't have the patience to do the research. I'm a software engineer, not a lawyer. However regarding the country's laws, DMCA has authority over any distribution in the US as long as there's a copyright claim. Mojang uses a lot of services in the US including Amazon as a CDN. Specifically to this case, Bukkit and Curse both are heavily based in the US, so there's really no escaping that. Wesley Wolfe resides in the US and his contributions (again if valid) is copyrighted by US law.

That's a negative, it's inception was in 2010.
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Plugin_API
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/772794270/server-scripting

We cannot know the reason that it was "acquired", weather to have a kill switch to switch to realms, or if it was truly to support MP.

Mojang didn't provide support or work with Bukkit anytime within those 2 years. Mojang increased their stance to an aggressive one for the EULA. This forum would still exist and CraftBukkit would still be up, it just wouldn't have been updated.

Sure, but there would be no motivation to.

Bicycles can be turned into motor bikes. Current technologies can change in the future. Mojang is a company at it's core and as with all businesses, it is to make money.

I can't be sure on this but I believe this was for 1-2 major releases and then Mojang stopped communicating with Bukkit the rest of the time. Please correct me if I'm wrong though.

We do not know if Mojang would have pulled a kill switch on Bukkit in the future. Their ModAPI is still in development and Bukkit is the next big thing driving sales for MP servers. Why would Mojang refuse free work?

Mojang reserves the right to pull the trigger on any Minecraft related content (especially if the money could have been in Mojang's pockets instead) and reserves the right to copy for free for it's own use.

They also have Cobalt. I believe all of Bukkit's contributors can pump more code out than Mojang's team of 5, without getting paid a single cent.

Look as much as this would ruin a lot of servers, this is what the contributors wanted their decision or at least their contribution should be respected. EvilSeph made a decision because he felt the risks were too high due to Mojang's changes.

Spigot relies on Bukkit commits.

I'd really like to see if the lawyers thing was a bluff. Affording lawyers, wanting to use them, and winning the case are all very different things.

 

Oh well, drama again.

 

Is spigot having the same problems as bukkit too? or are they doing ok?

 

Similar problems but they're holding up better than CraftBukkit.

 

krisdestruction I've never heard about this "ModAPI". Also, about when you said developers may have to recode their plugins, that would be very hard on people like md_5 & slipcore, because they make some intense plugins

 

krisdestruction
on 1.
The EULA hasn't changed yet and the announced changes have nothing to do with Bukkit itself.
Besides that, Bukkit is owned by Mojang, so it's can't really break the EULA.

About the last part and 4. I'm based on this tweet and assume, that it translates to Bukkit as well, but maybe this privilege got lost when EvilSeph left Mojang.

on 2.
And there is no motivation now for thaton Mojang's side.

on 3.
What Mojang might do with realms in the future is irrelevant, the current state is what counts, as the drama is happening now.
But to go with your motor bikes: even a motor bike have different use cases than cars.
Realms is intended to provide small servers for closed groups, while dedicated servers offer support for large open groups.
Even when Realms supports Plugins/Mods, they still won't hold many people.

on 5.
If we do not know, we have 2 options:
a) we stop making any assumtions or
b) use the data from the past.
And the data from the last 2 years show, that Mojang did no pull the kill switch for Bukkit or any Community project.

on 6.
While Mojang might have this right, they never made use of it (not that I know). It's a simple safe-guard to prevent people from block Minecrafts development, by saying "we made this as a mod, you can't add it".
The monetisation of Minecraft on Mojangs side has always been game sales and now Realms. But I don't think Mojang makes lots of money from Realms and they know, that popular servers can generate a lot of game sales.

on 8.
Cobalt is developed by Oxeye Game Studio and published by Mojang. (So yes, my statement was flawed, switch "distributed" by "developed and distributed")
Also you code statement has some flaws, as 2 Mojang devs ARE Bukkit contributors.

on 10.
I shall respect the decision of the former Bukkit Team to kill Bukkit, even though I'm dependant on Bukkit?
Fuck Godwins law, but that's like you ask me to accept Hitlers scorched-earth policy.
You can't simply say that Bukkit was owned by EvilSeph, the same you can't say Bukkit, or Minecraft itself, is belong to Mojang.
They belong to the people and what happens here is to take away, what is ours.

on you meme:
No need to feel pity. I fight for things I belive (or know) they're right.
And in the way over 3 years I play Minecraft and follow Mojang, I've learned that Mojang is a company unlike many others in this industry.
They sell the most popular game in the world for 20€, still make free updates almost 3 years after the "release" and activly recruite their devs out of the community. I don't have the feeling they to things for money, that they make tons of money is another topic.
I honestly think, that Mojang is one of the best companys in the world and deserves to be this successful and to be defended against haters.
(This doesn't mean Mojang is perfect. They could improve in some points - e.g. on some of those that may led to this situation.)

Edit:

As Spigot is a fork of CraftBukkit, they have the same problem.
However, they didn't shut down their downloads and also announced to take legal steps against it.
Based on md_5's statement, they're also in contact with Mojang.

 

You probably haven't been following it since it's inception then. However here are some links to it.

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Plugin_API
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/772794270/server-scripting
Developers like myself WILL have to recode everything for the ModAPI. I have around 25 private plugins and around 3 public ones that I will have to do myself. It won't be fun.

Syd My edits looks botched. Let me edit and reply.

Everyone please stop calling it DCMA. It's easier to type but it's DMCA.

Syd Any chance you can quote next time? It just makes it easier to reply to

I believe the EULA changed when Mojang "gave permission" in their blog post. Their EULA states the "give permission" part as part of binding amendments to the EULA. Bukkit is affected by the EULA as stated by EvilSeph
http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/bukkit-its-time-to-say.305106/

I agree with not now, but when the ModAPI is out and if Realms is made compatible with it, then there is motivation and power to shut down Bukkit and non-realm MC servers.

It is fully relevant because it adds to Mojang's business model and their decision of whether to continue supporting Bukkit. Again, intentions and designs can be changed without our control. Why do you say that Realms cannot hold many people? If functionality is changed (and it's very easy to do), then the blocking factor is resource usage, which is easily scalable with Realms.

Using data from the past, Mojang is taking a closed and aggressive stance on it's game. Decisions aren't made in tandem with the community's wishes.

They already threatened to use it on servers who had a business model they did not agree to, a move I really don't agree with. If they didn't make a lot of money with Realms, they wouldn't be making it. Have you seen the price of realms? It is ridiculously overpriced.

Thanks for clarifying who developed it Are or were? I'm having difficulty finding any commits made by dinnerbone to Bukkit recently, therefore supporting my "lack of support" argument here.

I am dependent on Bukkit as well. I can say EvilSeph, Wolverness, and a few others made many contributions in the past 2 years. You're taking something for granted here, it's not a right to have access to Bukkit. It is owned by the contributors. The contributors tried to shut it down peacefully by keeping CraftBukkit accessible and Mojang saying "We own Bukkit" without doing a single thing is just plain insulting to those contributing.

Fair enough, I just wanted to add a bit of humour to the discussion here.

Free updates is a business model that Mojang and many other companies are using (eg. Terraria). Perhaps they want to make more money with Realms, again I don't know their true intentions. My view on Mojang has recently been jaded by their recent actions. Communication and decision making can definitely be improved.

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

 

Syd saying "mojang owns Bukkit and so it is not effected by EULA" is not the problem here, as it does not cover the current Bukkit team. As it stood, it basically could still mean that bukkit team redistributing or modifying Bukkit would be viewed as illegal, and it also meant that mojang could take away Bukkit team's access to bukkit code at any time, as mojang did as of evilseph's announcement.

Announced EULA changes do not effect Bukkit - the enforcement of existing EULA guidelines do.

 

Dont post often, but Wolvereness doesn't have the legal right to make such a claim on the behalf of Mojang. His contributions to the Bukkit project (found here: https://github.com/Bukkit/Bukkit/graphs/contributors) shows that he was actively contributing to the project during which offense he is now claiming to be worthy of a DMCA takedown.

DMCA law requires all notices be made in good faith. This is bad faith in it's fullest, he will likely be sued and held liable for damages, as this appears to be nothing more than drama related.

 

urgh, quotes

https://account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula
This hasn't changed. The only other thing was a blog post, which is far from a legal document.
For the changed EULA or the commercial use guidelines we still have to wait.
In what extend the EULA is binding for Bukkit is kinda unclear IMO, as Bukkit seems to be owned by Mojang (a thing that might have been forgotten at the time the linked post was written).

I still don't see the motivation from Mojangs side to shut down Bukkit when they release their Plugin API.
As soon as the Plugin API is released most people will start to switch anyways, making Bukkit obsolete.
Everything else should be handled by the dynamics of a free market.

Realms is from my point of view an offer by Mojang to provide a safe and simple game server hosting for small groups of most likely underaged people.
I'd guess this is most likely another try to protect Mojangs customers against bad game server hosters, by offering an own solution.

Of course Mojang could change the way Realms work in order to allow bigger servers, but this requires a lot more infastructure on a global scale.
I don't see Mojang investing in this infastructure, as it wouldn't make much sense, so I can't share your fear that Mojang kills the dedicated server. (After all, they didn't even kill the offline-mode)

Can't confirm that.

Well, I'd agree that the P2W stuff wasn't handled that good. However, they tried to fix a mistake they made years ago by not going against those who add P2W elements into their servers.
Again, what Mojang did was for the good of their customers. Because while we may be 2 adults, the Minecraft playerbase consists out of mainly underaged children, who have to be protected.

Also, Pay2Win is bad and unethic.

The reason Realms is pretty expensive is most likely to don't start a price war with existing GSP's.
High prices do usually result in less sales, so I guess it's equaled out.

Well, I contribution does not void over time, so are. On the other hand, Dinnerbone announced to take over Bukkit, so maybe even this way are.
(Also, _grum and Dinnerbone were still listed as Members of Bukkit Github Account the whole time)

I have to disagree with you, but that's most likely because of my view of the world.
Bukkit, or Minecraft, isn't something that can be "owned" by a hand full of people. It's something that millions of people use to express their creativity, so how could come some people and tell me to never do it again?
Even if they developed it, it should be owned by the people.

On the other side, Bukkit is more than the Bukkit API and CraftBukkit, it's also the 14000+ plugins provided by far over 8000 developers.
And also the thousands of servers running CraftBukkit and these plugins to provide a (hopefully) unique world to the players.

Well, Minecraft came before Terraria.
I'd go as far as saying that Minecraft is the game, that made perpetual updates, early access and Indie "popular" or "mainstream".
About their intentions I trust in my sense for it. It hasn't dissappointed me so far, not only for Mojang but for other companys as well.
This view might be extremly subjective.

I don't know how the DMCA affects it, but you could do a Bukkit Implementation for the Plugin API, making Bukkit plugins able to run without porting.
As far as I remember the Spout Server did this, back in the time when Spout was still a thing.

On the other side, I also don't think that porting to Mojang's API would be that hard, but that depends on the actual design of the API.

 

Syd Bukkit team has not stated they would not accept new contributors - if this was handled gracefully, Bukkit team could have other people come in and join the contribution process. But since repo went locked from the bukkit team, this became impossible.

 

Does this whole mess really have to do with the EULA? If Bukkit is owned bu Mojang and they have this special relationship that their the acception to the EULA, then why the shutdown?

 

I disagree. On the one hand it wasn't postet on the "Mojang press output", on the other hand i don't read it as so arrogant, though it's probably a dangerously simplified formula, given that most people just didn't know. Still i would count as an excuse, that the Mojang people had to do "something about it quickly", thus i would not rate that as such a big thing for a "24-48 hours reply by a developer", Mojang still is an indie-gaming company.

This "shutting down business" is a slap in the face of the community of people who love Minecraft and by chance Bukkit, specifically Bukkit-plugin developers and Bukkit-server owners, even if some people are holding high the torch for "illegal from start project with open source and esteem in it and GPL somewhere". Can you guarantee that Curse is "better than Mojang", and not selling to highest bidding troll after "somehow losing interest in Minecraft"?

That's a strong point - i am sure this has to be solved by lawyers, also because any past contributor could try the same at some random point of time. The dmcia thing is probably even necessary. Still there are other ways to clarify, e.g, getting in touch with lawyers and/or Mojang before creating these kind of "facts". I know little what's behind, maybe there was third-party bullshit going on, maybe just some vendetta thing, who knows.

There are many other contributors with lots of contributions, you could as well argue that Mojang watched over Bukkit and tried to ensure it does not fall apart too easily. Thus i am tempted to write something like "peaceful the whole world", because as it stands, it's not peaceful at all. I don't think that "shutting down" Bukkit this early or Curse or whomever keeping that "ownership" does make those issues less problematic, it probably just shows how some people see or not see (?) the actual community of plugin developers and server owners. (Edit: i am very sure "the contributors" did not want to shut it down, seems just "some" try to.)

It think the pace gets too high and me to mean, might take some break...

 

grid21 EULA enforcement possible issues was only one of the reasons, see evilseph's post. The bukkit team could no longer keep up with updating Bukkit.

 

Was the speed of Minecraft updating faster then the speed of Bukkit updating? His post I got completely lost in. xD

 

It couldn't in the beginning either . Big refactoring and changes would happen for sure. For Bukkit there may be ways of more cooperative and including approaches to run things or to just make the problems public or to try to find a solution in general. As far as i remember, there used to be a good bit of "rather locking out things", when it came to the question of "how can more developers help with updating" "what's the updating process", "default PRs initiated by the project itself that guarantee some core feature inclusion somehow", "limited lifetime API" and similar approaches. But that's also somewhat easy to complain, Bukkit isn't a million-dollar company.

 

So really, from what I gather you stated, they basically need more Devs for the project to really keep up on it? Then why not ask more people to join the project then? Or, once again, is there more to it then that?

 

The legal situation is also slightly uncertain, given current events, it has merits clarifying these (though this way... idk).

Reasoning for not wanting more people used to be that it's not going to be faster or something like that - could also be that it proved to be too hard to integrate people (quickly) some time when they tried. I am sure that there was much more possible on mid-to-long-term, but it would have needed leading a mid-to-long-term discussion earlier on i guess. Still developers capable of directly helping don't grow on trees and there have been a few going to their own mods, be it after some fighting or drama, or just so.

It's easy for me to claim they didn't do it right then, but my point is they didn't seem to try to go beyond that updating process, despite it seemed to be gradually improving (somewhat scaled with the complexity of changes in Minecraft). Finding a way to do it significantly faster with more developers likely would have been another heavy task with no actual money to gain, so i understand them not pulling off something grand there, instead going on with rather small and potentially more certain improvements. There does remain some fog around why they didn't manage to distribute things more.

 

Wow, so much drama... and from what I understand it started with EvilSeph saying Bukkit was shutting down? Everything is speculation, for an open-source'd community it feels very closed. I believe if not Bukkit than something would of stepped up and created another API, but as all these issues are coming up maybe that means the ModAPI is just around the corner.

I for one am looking forward to rewriting my plugins, but I've always oddly enjoyed things like that. I am worried though, that it might not be as powerful as Bukkit or worse - it isn't around the corner and we'd have lost Bukkit and are left with nothing while waiting for it.

I understand that a project can become one's child but to watch it grow into this monster is just sad. If Mojang wanted to though, they could simply keep it alive; seeing as they're the original programmers of the game anyway. But that does raise the question, why would they?

I don't know what Wesley had done prior to this, as he seems to be very introverted and doesn't post anything. But I would of hoped he wouldn't ruin the future of all these kids wanting to learn how to program (or adults making a living off writing custom plugins), just to "get back" at Mojang or EvilSeph.

All that I got from the notice was that if the closed-source code was removed everything would be OK, but is he also wanting his code back? That's what I don't get, if me and a dozen other programmers wrote a plugin for example that teleported you to 0,0,0 - all of our code would be basically the same. How does one, "rewrite" what Wesley did any different that was already written?

Anyway, I guess Forge and/or Cauldron isn't effected by this? Well, either way I hope Spigot becomes the new Bukkit as they seem to have things under control and I haven't seen any drama on their front page as of late. Don't get me wrong though, I know it's just a fork of Bukkit but at least they didn't fork the drama along with it.

Thanks

P.S. Jadedcat & Sage905 I loved your posts, thanks.


[edit by JaguarJo: removed link to third party builds]

 

The legal issues arise around the the question what license applies to CraftBukkit, which is officially licensed as LGPL, but claims are that the GPL does in fact apply, due to contributors having contributed code that is GPL licensed (obvoiously a project setup mistkae or a bomb), thus CraftBukkit has to be GPL, but the GPL has to be invalid due to CraftBukkit building on incompatibly licensed closed source code (MC server ~ obfuscated), thus Wolverness has copyright on (most of) his contributed code and the project is violating his copyrights by using it without his consent (as of ~ now). That's roughly what i understand it to be.

Rewriting would work by ideentifying what lines are contributed and rewriting those in another way - this does not seem to be practical, as there are many contributors who could do the same. Maybe they can pull of a full recode of just CB or an autmatized thing (~lol), could be asking all other contributors for their consent etc. and rewriting just parts of disagreeing ones could work, but the amount of lines and derived lines (?) might be large, so identifying them is already some task.

Other mods are already or might be affected. At least one has received the same xyz-take-down-notice.

 

Spigot is affected as well, MD_5 posted about it yesterday; its on the front page...

 

jsalles spigot has been removed too.