Bukkit no longer available for download. Hit with DMCA takedown.

This has wide ramifications for quite a lot of projects that have implemented parts of the Bukkit API that this guy has contributed code towards. CraftBukkit and Spigot are used on most servers but it also affects a lot of mods like Tekkit, MCP etc

I hope they sort it out.

Re: Bukkit no longer available for download. Hit with DMCA takedown.

#8

Post by kevingadd » Thu, Sep 04, 2014, 12:51 AM UTC

So, from reading the notice and looking at commits:

This guy, whoever he is, has been making fixes/adding features to his fork of Bukkit, and some (most?) of them have been getting merged to trunk. Bukkit's repo is apparently GPL.

Now he's pissed off for some reason so he issues a DMCA to take down software he participated in the development of because it violates the GPL by depending on the closed-source Minecraft server software? Super confusing. I don't understand how you would be a developer on this project without knowing that it depends on closed-source software to function (and yes, is basically incompatible with the GPL as a result).

The end result of this appears to be that nobody can use the software he works on other than developers able to do the build locally and violate the GPL by hand themselves. Bizarre.

Re: Bukkit no longer available for download. Hit with DMCA takedown.

#9

Post by apo » Thu, Sep 04, 2014, 12:52 AM UTC

http://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/2fd0rt/multiplay...

Re: Bukkit no longer available for download. Hit with DMCA takedown.

#10

Post by Macha » Thu, Sep 04, 2014, 1:08 AM UTC

8_hours_ago wrote: post #3

hartator wrote: post #2

What's bukkit?

It seems to be related to Minecraft servers. http://wiki.bukkit.org/Main_Page There's not a lot of context in the take-down notice... does anyone know the actual story? http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/notification.txt

Bukkit is a wrapper around the Minecraft server that is one of the two major modding APIs. It is used for a lot of server plugins for multiplayer gameplay.

It consists of two major projects. Bukkit itself is an API that plugin authors code against. In theory it could be implemented for e.g. Terraria too but in practice its completely tied to Minecraft. Bukkit (the api) is licensed under GPL with little issue.

CraftBukkit is the implementation of this API. It is licensed under LGPL.

This was originally started as a community project. However the issue is that CraftBukkit includes a decompiled Minecraft server, which mojang never officially allowed.

This meant that Bukkit (the server) contained the bukkit api (GPL), the craftbukkit implementation (LGPL) and the Minecraft server ( All rights reserved) and was being distributed as "GPL". While mojang looked the other way about their proprietary software being distributed as GPL, everyone was pretty much happy.

The issue gets muddier when Mojang hired the core Bukkit devs to work on Minecraft. They left the Bukkit project to run itself and everything continued as is for two years.

Then two years later the community team announce they're shutting down the project. At this point, Mojang reveals that when they hired the original team, they also acquired the Bukkit project (trademarks, infrastructure, the original core teams code, etc) and as such it didn't belong to the current community team to shut down.

Now one of the GPL contributors is demanding that Mojang take down the project because it contains his code under the GPL but isn't validly licensed under the GPL due to containing the all rights reserved mojang code.