Bukkit: It's time to say ...

When we first set out to add our personal touch to what hMod offered the community 3 and a half years ago, none of us foresaw the success the Bukkit project would end up having. From a rocky start that wasn't of our own making (hMod suddenly disappeared without warning while we were just starting up the project, leaving us ill-prepared to fill the void left over), we stepped up to the challenge and managed to put together a usable, respectable alternative to other server mods. We even went so far as to improve on the Minecraft server itself. I can proudly and confidently say that Bukkit was and is a success: not only were we able to provide a platform for hundreds of thousands of Developers to build upon and make use of, we were also frequently providing our Server Admins with peace of mind knowing that the latest exploits and security holes were addressed in a timely and responsible manner.

From the get go we were plagued with issues and obstacles we needed to overcome, one of which we were sadly unable to tackle despite our best efforts: the legal barrier of licensing and permission. When starting the Bukkit project and even getting involved with hMod before that, we all knew that our work - no matter how well-intentioned - fell into a dangerous legal grey area. As such, my first priority at the start was to do things right: contact Mojang to try and get permission to continue on with the project and discuss our licensing. Unfortunately, while we did get into contact with Mojang and managed to have a chat with Notch and Jeb themselves (who have said that they don't like our methods but understand that there isn't any alternative and are thus fine with what we were and are doing), we never did get an official meeting with their business side to get legally sound permission to continue as we were and were unable to sort out our licensing issues. To this day we find our project in limbo with a half-applied license some could argue is invalid and little power on our end to do anything about the situation.

With that realisation came a nagging unease at the back of our minds that at any point in time Mojang could decide they didn't like what we were doing and shut us down - something we were all expecting for the first year or so of the project's life but, to our surprise, never occurred. Naturally, Mojang's conscious decision to not take action on our project gave us the confidence to continue on (something which I'm sure Server Admins out there can relate to given the recent, sudden and unexpected EULA enforcement) and we even later got further confirmation from Notch himself that we were and are allowed to keep proceeding as we always had.

Fast forward to more recent times and Mojang have made the abrupt and sudden decision to start enforcing their EULA in an effort to quell the outlook of Minecraft being pay to win. While I can completely understand where they are coming from and support their mission to shut down pay to win servers, it's difficult to be supportive of their abrupt turn-around with enforcing rules they consciously decided not to enforce since the start of Minecraft. On top of this, there are also clauses - which it would be irresponsible of us not to be aware of - within the now suddenly enforced EULA that directly affect the Bukkit project.

Most notably: "The one major rule is that you must not distribute anything we've made". While the EULA does go on to try and clarify what is meant by "anything we've made", I feel that it only serves to confuse the situation even more so. At the end of the day, it seems that Mojang can determine what is a "mod, plugin or hack" of their game on the fly and their recent abrupt turn-around on enforcing the EULA has us understandably worried. Couple this with the fact that it isn't legally viable or acceptable to enforce the EULA piecemeal and our future is clear.

At this point in time, I think it's safe to say that it's no longer worth it for us to put up a fight when it comes to keeping Bukkit and modding alive. With large and significant changes coming in Minecraft 1.8 that we'll be hard pressed to provide support for and the lack of support from Mojang with updates since acquiring our original core team (Mojang used to provide us with mappings to speed up the update process), there is little motivation for us to continue limping on across various aspects of the project. From a project management standpoint, it's become increasingly difficult to find willing and able individuals to help out the project on a purely voluntary basis due to people losing interest in Minecraft or people looking for something more. Simply put, this was ultimately the final nail in the coffin.

Nonetheless, no one can deny that we've had a fantastic run as a project. This is due in no small part to the support we received and continue to receive from both the Minecraft community and the many companies and organisations that have graciously chosen to support us with a ridiculous amount of resources, infrastructure and backing - far more than we could have ever asked for. No amount of words can adequately express the gratitude we have for all our sponsors who have supported us through our journey and ensured Bukkit had the infrastructure required to be the vast success it is today. To list all of what these sponsors have done for us would be a post equal in length to this one, so we will unfortunately need to keep it brief. We want to give huge shout-outs and thanks to: eXophase.com for getting us off our feet and hosting us at the start; Multiplay and Curse for swooping in and providing us with (emergency) hosting we continue to use to this day including dl.bukkit.org and our BukkitDev service; as well as AllGamer for providing us test servers whenever we needed a server to certify update and promoted builds or attempt to reproduce a bug report.

Last, but definitely not least, we'd like to thank the many staff, both past and present, that have volunteered countless hours over the years. I am at a loss for words to express just how much these people have meant to the project and to myself. The core team who have constantly worked hard to update to every new Minecraft version, while adding in new API and improving the server itself. The BukkitDev staff who spend countless hours checking over the fantastic plugins our community creates. Our moderation staff keeping our forums orderly and safe for all people seeking out a great community to be a part of. Additionally, the many unsung people who have helped in various ways despite having no official title, simply because there was work to do. Finally, my administrators, who have tirelessly helped me keep the project functioning as a whole. I would especially like to thank TnT and mbaxter for sticking through it with me to the end, always ready to discuss an issue and provide me with advice.

It's been a fantastic 3 and a half years of providing what we believe to be the absolute best modding platform for the wonderful Minecraft community to use. We really enjoyed seeing the amazing feats our many Developers and Server Admins achieved with the product we provided and continue to be amazed every day at the ingenuity our community shows. Thanks for everyone's continued support! It has and will continue to mean the world to us. Together we were able to provide a Minecraft server used by hundreds of thousands of servers out there (with our last Recommended Build having over 2.6 million downloads!), which is certainly something to be proud of and a great note to end on.

This is the end, it's time to say goodbye. It's been an amazing run and we achieved much more than anyone thought was possible, even ultimately culminating in Mojang hiring our original core team. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end and the Bukkit project has run its course, leaving me to make one final - incredibly difficult - decision to shut down the project I’ve poured 3 and a half years of my life into which means so much to me. We're no longer able to confidently distribute our modified versions of the Minecraft server and it is no longer smart for us to continue with our update process. Sadly, this means we will NOT be updating Bukkit nor CraftBukkit for Minecraft 1.8 and, since Minecraft 1.7.10 introduced the EULA enforcement, we will be placing the project under a code freeze for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, due to obvious legal reasons we will not be helping anyone else complete any updates nor sharing our methods despite any desire to the contrary. Although the project itself will essentially be no more, we'll continue to support our community, the forums, IRC and BukkitDev as long as we are able and as long as our partners support us with the resources and infrastructure to do so.

As for us? Well, who knows? Maybe we'll find another game, program or project to be passionate about and we'll be back with a vengeance? Only time will tell, but I hope that we'll see you around the next passion-project of ours when it happens


[lukegb]There's more to come on this. Please read this for more information about where we stand.[/lukegb]

 

Requiem for a Bukkit guys..., I read various posts..and..really, this is a very disappointment..no have light in the end of this dark tunnel..except the already commented .. pay to play.

 

From Dinnerbone's view the copyright infringing material is Wolvereness' contribution to the CraftBukkit repo. He contributed the 6th most commits to the CraftBukkit repo (IIRC), so it would still be a vast amount of work to reproduce that, yet a whole refactoring might be a better investment.

 

When I was reading some of the fist posts about the DMCA shutdown yesterday I would have signed your post.

You are right in one point: Wolvereness IS "responsible" for the DMCA takedown, but:
Rumours spread around -most people were only speculating- and nobody took the time to see the "whole" thing.
Is it soo easy to blame only Wolvereness?
If you are interested in the backgrounds just have a look at every persons goodby messages at:
http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/an-independent-goodbye.310086/
But why is no one interested into his reasons for this?
Why is everyone spectaculating and name him a misbehaving, whining little boy?

The following was taken from slipcor concerning Wolvereness decision(those DMCA thing):
http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/staff-member-resignation.310047/

When even bukkit-dev staff members sides with him.. there must be good reasons for him, dont you think?

I was (and still am) not happy with the situation. But I agree with Wolvereness.
Its not about money or fame like many people want to "believe".
It is about how Mojang and parts of the community ignored the hard work of the whole staff!

 

DHLF

Lot's of the people commenting are simply just children and they see Wolvereness as "stopping their fun", "hurting Mojang", "preventing their servers being updated" etc they don't appreciate all the hard work that he did for many years nor do they appreciate the other Bukkit staff contributions. Others you can tell just by reading their posts that they don't even understand the frustrations and exhaustion of the Bukkit staff and they just take little nibbles of stuff like "Mojang tried to save Bukkit when Jeb said he has a receipt".

These are probably the same ones that scream at Bukkit staff for not have zero hour releases of craftbukkit just as Mojang released the server themselves and demanded Bukkit staff fix stuff because "it's their job".

Ungrateful idiots most of them.

And posts by Mojang officials do not help by casting aspersions on the motivates of the said Bukkit staff, when if anyone's motives should be analysed it should be Mojang's.

 

What you say here has enormous validity. I'm trying very hard to make Bukkit people aware of their rights. I am a journalist and my husband is a lawyer; we can see this, but so many of you cannot, and it's very upsetting to see.
There is a solution if all were sensible enough to take it. But in a world of paranoia and power hunger, who is going to be sensible enough?
The fact is, developers do own the rights to their ideas, ie their proportion of the plugins and mods developed. It's as simple as that. There are many brands of corn breakfast cereal; Kelloggs does not own the right to them all.
But if Mojang becomes paranoid and fears claims of copyright of its coding, it is making a huge mistake.
These developers are now just like the mobs of hungry peasants facing off against the aristocracy in France; and the aristocracy didn't do too well from that one. But what the Bukkit people need and want, from what I can see in these posts, is simply:
* Acknowledgement of their great work;
* Some small financial reward, for which donations from players doesn't cut it, of course.
Ok so Mojang cannot afford to hire them. But that's not the solution anyway.
This is:
Today nobody thinks anything of paying a dollar for an app; it's little enough for what you get, and harmless to pay. But it adds up to being worthwhile for app developers. I believe most server owners would be happy to pay a dollar for each plugin, for example, and a bit more for a Craftbukkit update. So what's to stop Bukkit staff and plugin developers from being able to charge such small fees? Of course some are more popular than others; but that's the way it goes in the world of apps. For most, it would add up to a good sum, well worth getting.
What's to stop that? Why, Mojang of course.
Perhaps Mojang hopes to do this themselves. Look for signs of this, with the recent tightening up of servers and now what looks to be this wrangle here; the jury is out there, but who knows what Mojang is planning.
But Mojang should be seriously warned here:
The plugin developers DO own copyright to their ideas. There have been complaints in the past of alleged stealing of ideas for Minecraft updates from mods made by others. The truth is, Mojang is on very dangerous ground to do that; the developers also could sue for breach of copyright.
But if Mojang gets paranoid and begins to pack up its bat and ball and refuse to play at all, it will lose more than anyone else. Mojang has THE MOST to lose if this all falls apart. The big picture is FAR more important; and that is, that without plugins and mods, Minecraft is just a game for kiddies; digital lego with a few beasties. With the entire community working for it, Mojang enjoys the enormous popularity of its game thanks to the vast creation it has become, well beyond any update. I mean, I for one could not care less about a few added bunnies that look more like people dressed in rabbit suits; give me Towny, Factions, McMMO; and let's not even get started about Mindcrack and Technic...
So what Mojang ought to do, if Mojang is sensible and not going to kill the golden goose, would be to find a way to reward these voluntary, clever, overworked Bukkit people and use a small fee from the public to do it; I think we would pay. And if anyone out there is mean enough to say they would not, then you would be one of those who never thanked a developer in your life for the plugins you received.
But beware, Mojang; if you make these people angry enough, the far bigger loser will be Minecraft and Mojang. I mean, the new update is rather lame I feel, and nothing nearly as exciting as the plugins I find here at Bukkit. It's the plugins that keep us enthused while we wait for a new Minecraft update; and this last one is not worth my while losing my plugins to update my server, not nearly.
Mojang, you have a great deal to thank these people for, and a lot to fear from them if you treat them badly. Careful how you go....

To add: Mojang, as you own Bukkit, prepare an agreement with plugin developers to allow small charges through the Bukkit site for plugin downloads. Yes there will be piracy; but there might be a way round it.
This will not ruin Bukkit's popularity once people get used to it; I've always been astonished at the freely available work of others and donated when I could; I'd much prefer a dollar a download. And perhaps developers need then be more responsible for updates and the quality of their work, since they are getting money for it. I feel there needs to be a little more responsiblity anyway with various plugins; it can let server owners down badly when it's not there.
Maybe it will mean plugins will be expected to be more carefully prepared before they can be released; maybe it will mean less available than now. But if it also means the developers are being recognised and rewarded, then that's all to the good. Because the disenchantment has now become overwhelming and needs to be addressed.
And beware too Mojang; unless you paid the plugin developers as staff to develop their work, you do not own what they do...

Spigot is Bukkit, a fork of it. That's not possible.

For goodness sake, drop the P2Win stuff people! Win what?? Since when was Minecraft a competition? So you pay to get a bit of a fly in survival, or a bit more enchanting; who are you beating exactly? What do you win? You are just paying a donation to keep the darn server online is all! The only servers ever 'winnable' are the minigames, and what exactly do people win, real money? No! Nobody minded what was happening there but Mojang, and why? Because of Realms! Nobody wants Realms. Why? BECAUSE IT'S BORING! What was competing with Realm? Like, every public and private server out there is what! And what was helping those servers to exist and be so much much more fun than a Realms server?
Bukkit! That's what!
Join the dots people, and FAST! Mojang could not care less, I'm sure, if people get a bit more fun with a donation. The vast majority of servers are huge loss makers. Just look at the prices of server-list sponsorship! Hundreds of dollars for a month, just to be visible at all! Then there's the hosting costs. Not to mention the many hours of voluntary time. Server owners DESERVE all the financial help they can get!
So now what's happening? Mojang wants to do better, that's my view. Better financially. For goodness sake, do something! Stand up for your rights, tell Mojang what you think, support the Bukkit crew. Mojang might own Bukkit, but it does not own the work of non-staff.

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

 

They said on their website that they would keep going.

Just have to add this:



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

 

Right now you (as a server admin) won't receive any (old nor updated) builds for spigot, also the outcome of the legal conflict is not that predictable. Actually his statement just means that they'll try their best to save spigot's future.

 

With any luck Sponge will be the future of bukkit and the other similar projects

 

For some reason, the death of bukkit reminds me of this

Oh the humanity

 

robotnikthingy: The Hindenburg crash was an accident, so how is this related to the recent developments of the Bukkit project?

 

JWhy

Not sure, I guess its more of the crash and burn, rather than the cause.

 

because The Hindenburg was a preventable accident EG, all of the Engineers who designed it, for whatever reason they had, the dumbass(es) decided to fill a big balloon with a highly flammable gas instead of an inert gas that would do the same job just as well.

Bukkit/Mojang copyright code was also a preventable accident, for whatever reason they had, the dumbass(es) decided to fill a repo with "flammable code" (I coined this term, it's MINE! )

Moral of the story: smart people do dumb things, dumb people just get lucky.

 

By flammable code you mean wolf's code?...

 

by "Flammable Code" I mean, any (portion of) code that can set an entire project ablaze, uncontrollably burning it cinders and ash.

it's also why I don't like to team-dev on public repos, for the same reason you don't swim in public fountains... someone is likely to piss in it.

 

Spigot faces the same legal challenge that both Bukkit via Mojang and Mojang via Bukkkit does, not matter how positive they are about it, they do not have a leg to stand on, that much is clear, until something gives.

Spigot is derived form Bukkit code and Bukkit code is strictly speaking an illegal copyright infringement, now ironically both for and against Mojang.

 

No lucky need for that. It IS going to be the new API And in a very near future... Just look into Sponge IRC channel, over 750 connected people, and lots of developers has already started to work on it.

 

Sad that such a large so called community can fall apart at the hands of 1 person. Really shows the integrity of Bukkit...
Also shows how childish others can be. What the heck did I expect though.... after all Minecraft is a kids game. I shouldn't have expected any less....

The about us page should state:

Bukkit was an up and coming server mod that went to shit at the hands of some immaturity and selfishness.

 

If anyone from Mojang does read this, which I seriously doubt, then they need to put their Scandinavian ideal aside for one second, wake up and smell the coffee, young people play minecraft and sure Realms is a great place for the under 12's to hang out, it's "safe" and controlled, with the porting of Minecraft to other platforms, that's another sure fire winner, all is good in the world, but what do those under 12's do when they get a little older, when there imagination is sparked by what possibilities Minecraft holds, they grow up a little and move on, for most games that would be their undoing, but not for Minecraft, there was more to do, more to imagine and all that was made possible by Bukkit, Spigot or what ever API and most importantly by the Devs that made the plugins, this is the road map that made Minecraft the game it is, as the player grew, so did the game, you could slowly move from a player, to an owner, to a dev, spanning the generations, sure it all got complicated, sure it got out of hand, but creative things always almost do, it's in there very nature to do just that.

So what next ?

The backlash from the players, if left unchecked will be harsh, more so the owners and more so again the devs, no one likes to feel they have been taken advantage of, not the community, not the players, not the devs and lets not forget, not Mojang, that's how all this started.

There should be an official API for Minecraft, if Mojang wants to retain control of the 3rd party community, which has been a source of irritation and quite justly so in my opinion, selling stuff to children for many many dollars was only ever going to end in tears, but and its a big but, I don't think Mojang has the time or money to support and develop an official API of it's own, controlling it and coding it for a start and then all the work that the guys and gays at Bukkit did for free would cost an absolute fortune, that's one fire no company is going to step into any time soon.

The simple answer, some form of license agreement with Bullit, you pay a one off fee for a Minecraft server licence say $10, as part of that licence you agree to bide by the Eula, breaches of the EULA are monitored by complaints and the money from the licence agreement is split between Bukkit and Mojang to pay for the investigation of the ELUA breach, the licence key for the server could run alongside the current player authentication servers at minimal cost to Mojang and all of a sudden everyone is happy, Bukkit gets some financial help from Mojang, Mojang gets control of it's server code and all it good in the world again, everybody wins ?

If you are an server owner, then lets face it and few dollars for a server licence is not going to break the bank, after all just setting up a server for fun cost more like a few hundred dollars.

Like I said, pity no one from Bukkit or Mojang will read this, complicated things almost always have really simple answers, but only if the persona asking the question really wants to hear an answer, which they rarely do.

 

Well, all I can say is that I hope Mojang feels the burn. Selfish company, bought Bukkit 2 years ago and then took advantage of the staff by not paying them or even letting them know they were bought over. Free labor is illegal.

 

This could get into front of a court...

Mojang calculated the free work from all the community service the bukkit team did by not telling anyone they own Bukkit. I'm not a lawyer but that is for sure unethically...

In Germany you can get into jail for 3 years for unethically low wages. (called "Lohnwucher")

 

Children do what they see their peers doing, if their peers stop doing it, then in time so do they, this is the line that is being cut, maybe not on purpose but with the end of goodwill and hence Bukkit, it's being cut all the same, who did what, when and how is irrelevant, it's the people doing things they don't have to do, for free, for the fun of it that matters, that's the difference that the enforcement of the EULA has made, all of a sudden, it's not that much fun any more, trying to scape by to keep your much loved server open, writing that bit of extra code that might make your plugin the next big thing, that's what people do if for, for the fun it, when that has gone, then there is pretty much nothing anyone can do about it, because it's just not that much fun anymore.

 

This would cover any code. With the license they are using anyone could do what wolf did. Anyone that contributed to the project. The problem isn't "flammable code" its the licensing.

Wolf is basically claiming that his codes license is being violated by being included with Minecrafts non-GPL conforming license.

Hate to inform you as I know my opinion is not popular at the moment. But, Mojang didn't obtain Bukkit to get free labor. They were getting free labor from Bukkit long before they owned it anyhow. If anything owning it put them at an extended risk. They obtained Bukkit to keep Bukkit safe. When EvilSeth dropped the ball that Bukkit would no longer produce current CraftBukkit builds Mojang saw this as someone attempting to sabotage Bukkit and stepped in.

Who sold Bukkit to Mojang anyway? EvilSeph. He sold it to them without ever telling the community.

 

I hope so I might even help once it comes out of early stages (No one probably knows me here, I'm most known for being one of the new maintainers of the Nuclear Control addon).

 

Donny If you're going to slander someone, at least spell their username correctly. Mojang withdrew support it had been providing to its own project. Shutting down was a decision made by a number of Bukkit staff; between the lack of support from Mojang and not being able to find the people to keep up with the workload, what other choice was there?

Mojang has had plenty of opportunity to prevent this worst-case scenario, but all we've gotten from them so far is a few Twitter messages with negative undertones and a single, inaccurate statement from its COO. They must be pretty busy launching the same game on different platforms, but to be left in the dark this long, how can anyone read the whole situation as anything but exactly what they wanted?

 

I didn't slander anyone. Did EvilSeph not sell Bukkit to Mojang with out informing the community? Did he not deliver the news that Bukkit would no longer produce current builds of CraftBukkit? Your lame attempt to discredit my post by asserting a false pretense into my post does nothing but show your ignorance.

No one is talking about Minecraft on different platforms stop attempting to dislodge others positions by redirecting the conversations onto other malicious facts about Mojang.

What support did Mojang withdraw?

 

Donny Four of Bukkit's main developers were hired by Mojang, and handing over the rights to the Bukkit brand was a condition for their employment. They were hired thinking that they were going to write Bukkit's replacement, and that it wasn't going to be a task that would take years to accomplish.

Out of those four, EvilSeph is the only one continued development of Bukkit in his spare time, and even stuck with the project after leaving the company. If I had to hazard a guess as to why the two who have already left Mojang did so, it's probably because they were doing a lot of work for which they weren't hired to do. Certainly none of them were assigned to support Bukkit.

Mojang used to provide mappings to their obfuscated NMS code. I don't know if you're a programmer, but it makes a HUGE difference. Without it, it's like working with ciphered code without a key.

You're placing blame on a guy who kept Bukkit alive for over two years longer than Mojang would have liked it to.

 

Skye You're speaking purely off bias based assumptions. Even if EvilSeph was not monetarily compensated for Mojang's acquisition of Bukkit, which I believe he was#1, he was compensated with a job. So either way, he sold his rights to Bukkit to Mojang while keeping it hush hush from the community he so loved. This is a stab in the back to all of us.

I can't find any info on Mojang providing mappings anywhere and no information on them no longer providing them.
Can you show me where you found this out?


#1) Jeb stated he found the "receipt".

 

... They gave them to the dev team.

 

And they recently stopped?

 

Pretty much stopped soon after the original team joined Mojang