Taking over a plugin?

Do I need permission from the owner to update their plugin? If so, what if you can't contact the owner?

 

You should try contact the owner before you do, and if the owner hasn't been seen in a while, then you should be O.K.

Bear in mind you should try to re-write/change the code and not copy it, at least make a "fork" of it.

 

@DT_Rush @saul100 Normally you look into the Bukkit-Thread and check when the last message of the author was posted, check his github account and (if present) his bukkitdev page. Also checking last login date in forums is a good preliminary work.

If everything is older than three month (my personal feeling) then you can guess "its abandoned" or inactive.

But in any case you should try to contact the author first as saul100 said. Additionally you can simply Report the Thread and put in "Plugin is inactive". A forum moderator will look into that and move the thread to the inactive section. Dunno how its done in bukkitdev but i guess its nearly the same procedure.

Updating the Plugin by yourself for yourself is ok anytime but i've seen many times that some guys simply put their own fixes in the authors thread. Thats a really bad idea.

I guess they think "i just did it for good, so that others can use the plugin too" but this always results in drama because you do show the community "the author doesn't care about his plugin (currently)" But maybe he has real problems to fix .. in that case more stress is pushed to him... drama begins as soon as notified.

Plus its always a bad idea to do stuff on your own and publish your fixes in the authors thread cause if the author returns he would never know which version is used now after that "fix post" which makes it really hard to answer bug-reports.

If you can't contact the author:
You shouldn't post any fixes in his thread. Report the thread as inactive see what happens.
If you don't want to wait create a new Plugin based on his code. Its open-source but you shouldn't just copy the plugin and rename it. Technically you could but its kinda an unwritten rule to not do so.

That said if you want to publish your update to a plugin you should think about simply publishing another plugin named differently.

 

Look for a license as well.

 

Yes, agreed with CptSausage-- not all plugins are open source and licensed for derivatives. It's not 100% kosher to use a Jar decompiler, make a bug fix or new configuration parameter, and call the new version yours. (To be honest, all of Bukkit falls in this category, as Mojang has its own viewpoints on the matter.)

When I made HandyTorch, I did use a Jar decompiler on an old abandoned plugin, but only to find the key undocumented API call that they were using to send an artificial lighting update. I wrote my whole plugin from scratch except for the two lines that "do the magic." I didn't go posting in all the old author's threads, agreeing with lycano's advice. I have enough differences in functionality between the other plugins and my own code to feel like it's a derivative but not a fork.

It is a major gray area in Minecraft with few clear precedents.

 

Thanks for all the help, I have the information I needed