If a project is licensed under All Rights Reserved, am I permitted to decompile it and check how it accomplishes a certain task? The project in question is this one, and I'd like to check how it manages to change the names of players. From what I understand, it uses scoreboards, but I'm not able to figure out how.
I believe it creates teams for every player or rank that has been given one, and it sets the prefixes and suffixes of such teams to the defined one in the configs.
Ah, that seems rather simple in retrospect. But, I'm still curious as to how this would work. Would I be allowed to check how ARR code does something?
It indicates that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works. If you don't violate Copyright, you don't violate ARR.
I'd say as long as you don't steal his idea and his coding (create and organize it in your own little way), then you're good. But I think there should be no violations if one simply requires to learn how to do something. Heck, who's going to know if you decompiled? You could very well have figured it out yourself. That's just my logic and argument, though. Anyone else, such as a BukkitDev Staff, care to give their opinion? mbaxter np98765
AngryNerd well the source is on Github: https://github.com/wacossusca34/nametagedit/tree/master/src/ca/wacos/nametagedit
I *HATE* Seeing all rights reserved plugins, and I refuse to ever download or install one... so this thread caught my attention, and while I was getting all worked up writing my opinions, I decided to check out the official source... as it turns out, *ALL* Bukkit plugins *MUST* abide by the terms of the GPL and release their source code. bukkit and craftbukkit are GPL'd, there for all plugins must use an equally permissive license... we should start enforcing that.
I don't agree with enforcing plugin to not be ARR. I don't personally care if plugin I made couldn't be ARR, but if people put hours upon hours of work into there plugins it should be up to them to decide the license for it. But unless bukkit says when you upload your plugin to our website it's ours know. It is still owned by the author and they can put whatever license they want on it.
Did you even read what I posted? It's not really a matter of preference or opinion.. it's more a matter of contract law. by publishing code that compiles against bukkit, the authors agreed to a legally binding contract in which they will release their source code, it's not optional.
how about if you're not interested, don't reply? I will not have had enough of these threads until this problem is solved.
metalhedd It will never be solved, it has been discussed in what feels like thousands of threads and all come to the same conclusion. Bukkit is illegal because it distributes the sourcode for the minecraft server, Mojang seems to let it slip by which is good and not something we want to endanger with taking plugin developers to court because they don't follow the GNUGPL-license that tells them to use the GNUGPL-license in their plugins. In the end, who the heck cares?
nobody said anything about taking anyone to court, all i'm asking for is to remove 1 option from a select box. dont give people the CHOICE of a licence that violates bukkit own. it's not that hard. if enough people 'report' a plugin for not providing a link to source code, then the mods can get involved. it wouldn't add any more than 30 seconds to the approval process to check if theres source code included or linked to anywhere, and once that's done, bukkit has no more responsibility in the matter, and I can feel free to demand source code from ignorant developers. and in the end *I* care, as does the other person who voted. so as of now that's 2 against 1 in our tiny little sample. there are more. Lets definitely not forget that *someone* chose the GPL for Bukkit too, that someone cared enough to choose it over some other license. EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
metalhedd I agree with you completely in principle - Bukkit is GPL'd, and therefore legally any plugin which uses it must be GPL'd, but LucasEmanuel has a point: the legality of CraftBukkit (as opposed to Bukkit) is dubious because it distributes code which is owned by Mojang (fortunately Mojang have a pretty sensible attitude to this - let's face it, modded servers are good for Minecraft and contribute significantly to its popularity). Enforcing licenses on plugins isn't really a practical option, and would only result in unnecessary profits for a few lawyers. Of course, the flipside of this is that any plugin author who releases a plugin under a closed-source license doesn't have a legal leg to stand on if someone decompiles his code and uses it in an open source plugin. It would be rather difficult to sue someone for using your released code when your code isn't even legally licensed in the first place.
So I would then instead vote for changing that to another license. I think giving the devs (the people who put their time and work into creating something) the freedom to decide by their own what they want to allow what happens with their work is a legitimate thing and outweighs the freedom of the greedy consumer. It's better that people publish their plugins here under certain restrictions (if they wish) than not publishing it at all instead, which would be a possible consequence of enforcing something like this.
This has nothing to do with greedy consumers, i'm looking at it from the upstream perspective, its disrespectful to every author who put work into bukkit. they licensed their work under certain terms and these greedy plugin devs think they can disregard that and do with it as they please.... I Personally have contributed code to bukkit in good faith that it would be used under the terms of the GPL. my license is being violated by greedy plugin developers who think their work is so special that nobody should be allowed to see it, but without the GPL code they built it on, they have nothing. I understand the grey area that comes with bukkit being legally questionable to begin with, but i'm not asking for anyone to involve a lawyer, I'm only asking that the OPTION to violate the license is removed. they can break the GPL all they want and I realize i can't do anything about it, but do we really have to give them a clearly defined button that says "slap all the bukkit developers in the face?" EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
Please explain to me how people releasing their plugin 'all rights reserved' harms the people who made bukkit in any way in another thread or via PM, because you're going off-topic on this one. On-topic: You would be allowed to do that, even if the plugin uses the 'all rights reserved' license, as long as you don't just copy their code.
