Kicking the Bukkit: Anatomy of an open source meltdown

A bit OT but who are all these people making the mods? It seems really complicated and I'm impressed great developers choose to spend so much time on it. What's the incentive?

I'm confused what selling an open source project would even mean in this context?

Bukkit made a lot of mistakes (don't we all), but I think that this talk tries to pin them on the wrong thing. Bukkit was in a failure state the second they included the Minecraft binaries. You're beholden to a third party the minute you create a server for the service, but linking the binaries in an OS project dooms you to failure eventually. Mojang could have DCMA'd the project (and thankfully didn't).

The talk seems to focus on license as the resolution - and it's an important point. However important licenses are, they aren't as important as not linking third-party closed-source binaries in your "FOSS" project.

Meh. The GPL does very well for a lot of projects used around the world.

I've talked about this a few times, but I was there at the start of Bukkit, and though I haven't touched it for a few years I still think back to it now and then.

The motivation was many faceted, but the basic impetus for most people in the server mod world is that the vanilla server was so inadequate for running a server.

I got involved with a small server, and (quickly! that was a mistake haha) started to help sysadmin the box. I got us on to hMod, which was terrible in many ways but provided a vision for the future - a central, modded server, with plugin points that proffered server admins incredible flexibility configuring their servers.

hMod was run by a single (apparently inexperienced) dev, and the community grew too quickly for him so bukkit was formed.

By this point I had started contributing to hMod, but realised it was a sinking ship and switched my efforts to bukkit. It started as trying to build plugins for our server, but as I started getting commits into the core project it quickly ramped up into full on team participation.

The dev team was really really fun to be a part of. I was on mumble and irc all day talking to the other devs, and would often spend over 8 hours working on code or talking about plans. Upgrades were hectic, and everyone pulled long shifts when they happened.

As time went on and the community grew it became more like a real job, and momentum kept me going for a long time. Eventually I actually got a real job, and my participation waned.

I can't speak for others, but my motivation seemed to be a spectrum that started with scratching an itch end ended with the satisfaction of contributing to a community; the knowledge that your code is being used by thousands, if not millions, of people.