Bukkit is permanently dead- here's why

Bukkit is dead. I am sure that almost everyone here knows at least to some degree of what has happened. Both Bukkit and Spigot have been taken down by DMCAs by Wesly Wolfe, better known as Wolverness. To make a complicated topic simple, Wolverness is a major contributor to the Bukkit project. Making over 150 additions to the Bukkit GitHub, he is one of the reasons that Bukkit is what it is today.
What Wolverness did was COPYRIGHT his code. Every addition that he has made is copyrighted under his name, something that is not done by almost any other open source contributor. Wolverness decided that he was no longer allowing Bukkit the right to his code, and did so in a legal fashion called a DMCA. Any code that Wolverness has contributed to Bukkit is now unsusable. Unfortunetly, this is about a third of Bukkit...
Now Wolverness could give Bukkit the rights to his code back, but it is too late for that. Bukkit has never technically been legal. Decompiled code from Mojang's server jar is included, which is not open source. Unless mojang makes that file open source, Bukkit and Spigot (Spigot uses Bukkit's code) are over.
Developers, I would halt work on any Bukkit plugins for the moment. We'll have to see how this plays out.

If there are any inaccuracies with this, someone please tag me with what's wrong. I have gathered this through Bukkit forum posts, and not everything that is posted is necessarily correct.

 

Tecno_Wizard I don't think you could declare that, and spigot has it's own little secret tool that allows updates, they didn't give up and aren't giving up, instead of reading through the 10000000th thread about bukkit's status , I'd rather wait a year for an official response.

 

Tecno_Wizard And that message destroys my point how?

 

You forgot one thing, Bukkit is from mojang/microsoft so it isn't illegal.

 

This is not true.

Every contribution any programmer made to the Bukkit Project is the copyrighted work of that programmer. Having the copyright in your own work is automatic. By making the contribution freely, the programmer consents to the contribution being released under that project's open source license. The programmer is allowing his work to be shared, forever, under the terms of the license.

The only way Wolvereness could contribute to Bukkit was to agree to share it. He had no right to modify Bukkit code except under the terms of an open source license that covered the code.

So the code he contributed to CraftBukkit is subject to its LGPL license and the code he contributed to Bukkit is subject to its GPL license.

His position -- that he can remove all of his code today and prevent the other 137 CraftBukkit contributors from using it -- is an unusual interpretation of how copyright law applies to a joint work of authorship such as an open source project.

 

Thanks wizards for making another thread letting us know.

 

Adriani6, lol, I just wanted to sum it up because I had not seen a thread that described the ENTIRE situation yet.

 

Bukkit is not dead. Here's why. http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/bukkit-is-not-dead.313058/

Tecno_Wizard

 

No, acctually bukkit is a plugin, a plugin to minecraft it just uses MinecraftServer.jar as a reference library thats all its not Copyright at all. And it comes down to what the server owners what for their server. Minecraft is digital Law isent they shouldent be mixed now Law has wasted the past 4 years of dedicated developers and now we have no hope.

 

Keep dreaming

 

Lol, if you read the contents of that thread, I'm eventually convinced that this thread is correct. Although I do still have beliefs that Minecraft itself still has a chance. I think anything Minecraft-related is now at the mercy of Microsoft.

 

The only way anything will ever be of Bukkit again is if Microsoft rips out all code of contributors that no longer work on the project. Every single contributor can DMCA CraftBukkit. Since I don't see Microsoft doing that, Bukkit is dead.

 

Lolmewn Indeed, I don't think Microsoft is going to be restoring Bukkit anytime soon. However, they own the Minecraft Server stuff, and they have stacks of money to recruit people to create a new server mod. But I don't think they'll be doing that, either. The most likely way that I believe Microsoft is not going to waste their money on Minecraft is to make Minecraft Realms a very big thing, probably the only form of Minecraft multiplayer. If/when that happens, Minecraft will live on for at least a while longer, but it will just be really different--for the worse.