Introducing BukkitDev, a new service by Bukkit and Curse!

Discussion in 'Bukkit News' started by EvilSeph, Aug 24, 2011.

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  1. Offline

    EvilSeph

    [​IMG]

    BukkitDev is the missing link in the project management chain prevalent in the Minecraft community. The popular solution of making use of forum software - something designed specifically for single-threaded discussion - leaves developers painfully scavenging through threads made up of hundreds of pages simply to get to that one bug report you finally addressed. It is all very tedious and time-consuming; time lost that could be better spent doing what you love - bringing to life those mad, awesome ideas you have running around in your head. With BukkitDev, each project has their own mini-community and tools that developers are free to moderate and make use of; per-project issue trackers and forums are just a few of the advantages BukkitDev has over using a traditional forum based solution.

    As detailed below, BukkitDev provides you with a complete project management solution that makes maintaining and updating your project a breeze. While many of the things BukkitDev has to offer were what we planned Fill to eventually be, there is no way we would be able to achieve the level of maturity and polish that BukkitDev currently has without the support and backing we now have from Curse. Moving forward, with the support of Curse, we are able to provide the community with some much-needed resources and support that we simply could not do alone. Thanks to Curse's support, we can now confidently provide stable, long lasting download hosting to every project within the community and since this takes advantage of the extensive and powerful Curse.com distribution platform, the reach and exposure your projects have will increase significantly. Since BukkitDev makes use of the Curse.com platform, your Bukkit community accounts won't work - you will have to use Curse accounts instead.

    The Bukkit Project has been about giving the community what they need from day one and with Curse backing the project, we're now provided with a unique opportunity to make that happen. With the help of Curse we've been in active discussion and working closely with Mojang to help them with testing and provide us with the ability to have updates ready shortly after a Minecraft update goes live, reducing the amount of downtime the community run servers face to virtually no time at all, allowing you to experience the full update in your own time and not ours.

    Looking toward the future, the Bukkit Project hopes to work with Mojang and Curse to continue to provide the Minecraft community with the tools they need to continue to make magic happen. As a first step, we're offering the BukkitDev service to client modders to help manage and promote their project just as efficiently as server modders can. We hope to expand this service in the future by exploring the possibility of providing a central client mod base with the cooperation and support of Mojang.

    Presentable project page:
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    Issue Tracker:
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    Per-project forums and pages:
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    [​IMG]

    Other improvements over our current implementation for plugin releases:
    • Multiple authors per project with permissions handling (for example, you can have a Project Manager, Project Owner, Documenter, Translator, etc).
    • Per-project subscriptions so people interested in your project can follow its progress.
    • Curse provided hosting for your downloads
    • Extra exposure through Curse.com, a high traffic content hub for Minecraft, as well as other games.
    While it is still a little rough on the edges, both Curse and Bukkit are committed to providing the Minecraft community with the best solution we can offer developers to make sharing, managing and supporting their projects as smooth as possible. Please feel free to get your project up and running on BukkitDev (http://dev.bukkit.org) and let us know what you think of the new system (please report issues you have with the site here: http://www.curseforge.com/projects/curseforge/tickets/)!

    If all goes well, we hope to have this new site up and running in place of the unwieldy forum solution we currently employ as soon as possible. Once the majority of the active projects within the community have moved over, we'll be pushing towards phasing out our temporary forum solution.
     
  2. Offline

    Gavjenks

    Okay, that's fine. Who made up the policies then?
     
  3. Offline

    SwearWord

    @Gavjenks
    Curse did, these are Curse's terms that we must agree to in exchange to use their service. Any complaints you have with the terms you have to figure out through them, if you feel the policies are being enforced by us badly, then you can complain to us.

    Also if you weren't aware, we decompile every file upload and look for malicious content before approving them. That's required of us by Curse, which is one of the reasons they require files to be distributed through them, otherwise they might be held liable for something they weren't aware of.
     
  4. Offline

    Gavjenks

    alright. Do you know whether curse's vendor terms also explain text links in the plugin description? Or is that bukkit policy originally?
     
  5. Offline

    SwearWord

    @Gavjenks
    Well since we can't download and verify every file you change at that URL, it was removed.

    @tweir
    I mispoke. Bukkit is GPL
     
  6. You do that for open sourced plugins too?
     
  7. Offline

    SwearWord

  8. Yeah I thought about that after I posted. It's a sad world when this is the case.
     
  9. Offline

    Jacek

    What about the huge project like Spout that has a 3MB + jar file, it can't be possible to go through all of that code ?
     
  10. It's possible, just time consuming.
     
  11. Offline

    Jacek

    A better word would have been practical.
     
  12. Impractical.
     
  13. Offline

    Celtic Minstrel

    If person A decompiles your code and documents exactly what it does (but probably not how it does it) and then gives that document to person B to write a plugin that does exactly the same thing, you can't sue person B.

    I don't really see why you can't just mirror your jars on BukkitDev?

    Your Harry Potter example is correct, but a false analogy. The logic you used there does not apply to software; making a software product that is identical to another software product, without directly referencing its code, is not illegal.
     
  14. Offline

    H4x3rS

    WHEEEEN??? Bukkit for 1.0.0 ? Love u
     
  15. Offline

    lukegb

    Let's step through what exactly you're giving over.
    The internet's global, so they need this.

    They get permission. You can still give permission to other people.

    "We're allowed to give this to a parent company if we get slurped up." (EDIT: see note below, this might be why this is required)

    They're not required to pay you to use these rights.

    Fairly straightforward; if they like it and want to run it, they should be able to. In addition, this is possibly what the transferrable above is referring to - they're allowing people who download the software from their site to use it too.

    They're displaying it on their website. That's reproduction.

    Again, displaying on their website and allowing others to download it is distribution.

    You might be uploading an image - reproducing that on their site would be "displaying" it.

    Then again, it might be an MP3 or other audio file. This again needs permission to perform.

    You're not giving them this right - note the "except with regard to Submitted Projects".

    Again, internet is transmission.

    ...this is exactly the same as using it.

    It's limited to Curse, and strictly online.

    Basically, none of this is claiming IP rights over your software. That would imply they were claiming ownership of it, which they're not - they're just being granted the right to have your software/images/audio on their website. I hope this has been a fun adventure through what the wording actually states.

    Note that I'm not a lawyer.
     
  16. Offline

    Gavjenks

    Those are ONE FORM of reproduction and distribution. But I have absolutely no guarantee that that is the only form. They could also simply plop my code up on some other website they run, and sell it to people. Which removes various legal rights (due to doctrines of first sale) and also is just plain robbing us, since we should be getting the money for the sale of our own code, and since Curse did absolutely nothing to deserve any such funds.

    All of your quotes are based on the assumption that Curse is full of super nice guys who are always doing exactly what you would assume they are doing as super nice guys.

    Get real, man. This is a company, which exists to make money by whatever means possible. If they decide that the public relations hit from doing sketchy stuff that is technically legal is less than the payoff, THEY WILL DO IT. And in fact, they already have done all kinds of sketchy things with WoW for exactly that reason.

    Thus, legal agreements must always be read with an eye toward what they could potentially get away with, NOT what they probably are talking about, if they are super nice guys.

    I don't much care about the submitted projects stuff. Even if they have to remove it when I take the project down, that doesn't stop them from making huge amounts of money off of my work before I ever hear about it in order to react, or more realistically, getting all of the credit for my work, before I have a chance to react.

    If Curse put up my plugin as theirs and sold it or gave it away for 2 weeks on their huge marketing and advertising machine, everybody would forever associate it with them, and thus I lose any recognition or return customers for future plugins, etc., even if I take down my project later.

    Actually, since software is defined as a literary work under U.S. copyright law, it is actually not even an analogy - they are literally the same exact category of work under the law.

    Yes, if somebody copies the general gist of my program, they might be alright - just like I would be okay if I wrote a generic book about wizards and magical schools and owls with slightly different characters and plotline.

    Anything much beyond that is infringing potentially (exactly what is decided on a case by case basis). And definitely ANY sort of copying of user interfaces is infringement, which VoxelSniper, for example, will have a lot of soon.
     
  17. Offline

    Celtic Minstrel

    You are an idiot if you truly believe that all corporations will do whatever they can while technically remaining legal.


    I suspect the courts would disagree with you; there is at least one precedent suggesting that the layout of your interface is not part of the copyright. Furthermore, at least one method of copying someone's software is possible without risk of copyright infringement, and for software where the code is the only component (eg, there's no art or story or anything like that), I'm fairly sure that this could produce a functionally identical piece of software.

    Suffice to say that I'm not just talking out of my hat when I make these claims. ;) I may however be misrepresenting the facts a little, and if so I apologize.
     
  18. Offline

    Gavjenks

    Agreed. Fortunately, neither one of us said anything even remotely close to that.

    Your example is about menu text. Sorry to have not been more clear before. I was alluding to the fact that images and audio, as in for example a graphic user interface, are copyrightable as audio visual works in their own right, unrelated to whatever underlying code may be used to create them. Just like a painting or a song.

    Worldedit, for example, has a GUI in-game. So does too many items. VoxelSniper will soon as well, probably. Many plugins use novel blocks (such as the original pistons mod) with very clear audiovisual components to them. This is a factor of importance to a wide variety of people using bukkitdev - any of those plugins have aspects to them that ARE well protected. Giving up those rights to Curse therefore constitutes a serious risk that goes well beyond the risk of public release, since just any old Joe copying them would indeed be liable, even more clearly than with regular aspects of code.

    http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Atari_v._North_American_Philips

    What does cleanroom development have to do with anything? Focus: this is a conversation about Curse terms of service for bukkit plugins. Not tomahawk missile engineering.

    If Curse feels like assembling a team of a dozen programmers for 3 months to rewrite voxelsniper from spec, they can have fun. It took out team of at least 6 programmers over a YEAR to make that plugin, from spec.

    Unless we start selling plugins for millions of dollars, There is zero % risk of this happening for bukkit plugins, because it would never be worth it to them, or anybody else, to go through cleanroom procedures. Not in the same way that it would be worth just copying the code without all those legal protections.

    This sort of outlandish scenario is irrelevant to the conversation
     
  19. Offline

    Celtic Minstrel

    Aha. I was thinking solely of server-side plugins without Spout, so I'd forgotten the idea of custom GUI interfaces. I don't think they'd necessarily cause a problem, but I can see how they have the potential to.
     
  20. Offline

    codename_B

    You seem to be really down on everything. I've been looking through your posts looking for where you posted asking for one of my plugins (that I let go inactive) to not go inactive, or even posted on any of my plugins - if devs don't know you're using a plugin and no-one seems to be using it and they have other ideas, chances are it'll go inactive.
     
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