
Mojang and the Bukkit Project - bane
http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/mojang-and-the-bukkit-project.309715/
======
nightpool
EDIT2: I might have been a little harsh here. I was missing some context that
I've been avoiding over the past few weeks. On further reflection, I have
nothing but anger for the way Mojang has handled this situation. Even though
they claim that they "own Bukkit outright", completely devaluing the many,
many, many community contributions made, they continue to refuse to support
the project in even the most trivial ways, and I have nothing but respect for
many of the community leaders they've driven away, including @mbaxter,
@EvilSeph, @amaranth and many more. Mojang is absolutely to blame for this, no
matter how childish Wolverness' behavior may be. I've left my original comment
below, to give some context on the complexities of the situation, but I can
maybe understand where Wolverness is coming from at this point.

This is my perspective as someone who was once inside of the Bukkit community
as an outside developer (not one of the core team), but Wolverness has been a
very toxic maintainer of the project, especially as it regards to responding
to pull requests. Either your code complies 100% with the contributing
guidelines (including confusingly written and sometimes unwritten rules about
spacing, formatting, naming and pull request formatting) or it gets rejected
out of hand. Any mention of forks of the Bukkit project (such as Spigot,
Glowstone or SportBukkit) could get you banned from IRC, the forums and your
comments deleted on Github. This upon many, many instances of just caustic
behaviors and treatment of interested developers and contributors.

I'm still subscribed to the projects on Github, and I was never burned by
these rules personally (so these feelings are not out of spite--they're out of
sorrow for the developers who were turned away) but I don't think I'd ever
have a chance of getting any non-trivial PR integrated into the project. The
standards were just too insane. I'm no fan of how Mojang has been handling the
minecraft community recently, but anything that would drive this guy out is
just fine by me.

(This takedown is BS btw. CraftBukkit has ALWAYS linked against the minecraft
official server library--a release of CB made by a Mojang employee doesn't
change ANYTHING about the GPL status of Minecraft. Note that the proprietary
minecraft server DOESN'T link against in any way shape or form)

~~~
djur
I'm baffled by the claim that Mojang "obtained rights [to]" Bukkit. I'm not
involved in the community, but to me it looks like they hired some of the lead
devs, and maybe had those devs transfer their copyrights to Mojang?

But unless Bukkit/CraftBukkit had a copyright assignment policy, which it
doesn't appear to have had, the developers Mojang hired could not transfer the
entirety of Bukkit to Mojang's ownership, and thus the "obtained rights [to]"
language by the COO seems either inaccurate or meaningless.

Doesn't Mojang have lawyers? Their behavior seems baffling and their public
statements even more so.

~~~
onedognight
> Mojang obtained rights in the project over 2 years ago

To me this reads as "obtained [some] rights in" which seems correct.

~~~
djur
I see that, but that reading makes it a meaningless statement. Mojang owning
the rights to some subset of the Bukkit source doesn't give them any more
power to continue the project than anyone else. They're clearly suggesting
they have some kind of proprietary interest in Bukkit that allows them to
decide whether the project continues or not.

The context of that quote is:

> As Jeb announced on twitter, Mojang obtained rights in the project over 2
> years ago

The tweet from Jeb says that Mojang "bought" Bukkit, and a subsequent tweet
says that they "dug up the receipt to be sure".

The previously hired Bukkit devs have also said Mojang "acquired" and "owns"
Bukkit.

------
binarymax
Hard to tell what's going on here - but it looks like the developer of a mod
(Bukkit) has a large enough userbase, that he's using that as leverage and
trying to blackmail Mojang to open source the official Minecraft Server.

\--EDIT-- fixed spelling.

~~~
shawn-furyan
One piece I think you're missing in this description is that Mojang aqui-
hired[1] part of the Bukkit team but left Wolverness (the DMCA takedown
originator) out. Wolverness had contributed 10s of thousands of lines of code
to the project.

So Wolverness isn't just using the popularity of Bukkit as leverage. Rather,
Mojang is redistributing his code without having sought his permission.

Of course, Bukkit itself was a derivative work of the Minecraft Server (the
decompiled java bytecode) in violation of that piece of software's license, so
the whole matter seems to be a tangle of license violations.

In any case, Mojang is (or WAS, rather) distributing Wolverness's copyrighted
code without his permission, and so are apparently in violation of his copy
rights. I think that's where the leverage comes in. Wolverness seems to be
hoping that it will be easier for Mojang to relicense and release Minecraft
code to make it compatible with his bukkit code than to work around his code.

[1] Reportedly. I've seen various, partially contradictory characterizations
of how this happened, but there seems to have been at least some sort business
deal between Mojang, and a subset of the Bukkit team not including Wolverness

[edit: added footnote]

~~~
makomk
One of the missing bits of context here is that because of the licensing and
EULA issues, a few weeks ago all the then-active Bukkit developers decided to
shut down development and end the project. Mojang then announced that they
couldn't do that because it wasn't their project to close down since Mojang
had secretly acquired it several years back. (All of the current Mojang
employees who were formerly Bukkit devs had stopped participating in
development and weren't following the discussions.)

~~~
djur
Did they say what, exactly, they had "acquired"? Obviously they could continue
distributing and developing the GPL/LGPL source, and depending on whether the
name is trademarked they could keep calling it Bukkit.

Does Mojang own the issue tracker, the website, etc.? In that case, sure, they
can keep those going, although without any developers I don't see the point.

~~~
makomk
That is a very good question which I don't think they've ever really answered.
The domain seems to be registered to Curse, who formerly owned Bukkit and
presumably still provide hosting for it. They certainly don't own the copright
on most of the code, and probably have no more right to use much of it than
anyone else. Stuff like trademarks and the Github project? Who knows.

Plus Mojang keep contradicting themselves about the relationship between
Bukkit and them.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://games.slashdot.org/story/14/09/06/1323225/dmca-
claim-...](http://games.slashdot.org/story/14/09/06/1323225/dmca-claim-over-
gpl-non-compliance-shuts-off-minecraft-plug-
ins?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2FslashdotGames%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot%3Agames+%28rdf%29%29),
which points to this.

~~~
cwyers
I feel like the original Slashdot link has a lot more context for someone who
doesn't follow the Minecraft scene closely, even if the new link has more
content.

~~~
dang
That's true. I'd say the balance tips slightly in favor of HN's preference for
original stories [1], mainly because the thread here also fills in the
context. But yeah, this one is a borderline call. If people feel strongly
about it we can change the url back.

1\. HN already consists of pointers to stories, and pointers to pointers don't
work as well.

------
kevinpet
I think the game is the following:

1\. Bukkit is GPL, developed without help from Mojang, but with a questionable
use of the decompiled source.

2\. Mojang likes Bukkit, hires some of the devs and buys name. And I'll assume
the these core devs would be willing to assign copyright to Mojang.

3\. (Eventually) One of these core devs, now a Mojang employee, makes a new
release of CraftBukkit, including Bukkit and linked against the Mojang
official server blob.

Although the timing is different, this is exactly the situation with GPL
libraries like Readline. You can't use them in a proprietary product.

On the other hand, I suspect if this went to court, Mojang could argue that
since that's all bukkit ever did, and this dev contributed to it while that
was the case, the license should be interpreted as including something like
the classpath exemption, because it's absurd to assume that people wrote code
and distributed it but did not legally intend for it to be used in exactly
that way.

~~~
DannyBee
"Although the timing is different, this is exactly the situation with GPL
libraries like Readline. You can't use them in a proprietary product. "

Actually, this is disputed by a number of good open source lawyers. In
particular, it's not clear what the line for derivative works is, despite what
the FSF/etc claim.

"On the other hand, I suspect if this went to court, Mojang could argue that
since that's all bukkit ever did, and this dev contributed to it while that
was the case, the license should be interpreted as including something like
the classpath exemption, because it's absurd to assume that people wrote code
and distributed it but did not legally intend for it to be used in exactly
that way."

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Let me give you an official open
source lawyer view: There is a roughly 0% chance this guy could force Mojang
to open source anything.

He can sue for CraftBukkit for copyright infringement over previous versions.
He can stop them from distributing new versions with his code in it. That's
it.

This is because his rights are in _his_ code, not Mojang's. At least in the
US, he cannot sue for copyright infringement of someone else's source code, no
matter what license it's released under.

So once they removed his contributions, they would be fine, except for
whatever damages already exist. If CraftBukkit included decompiled source
without Mojang's authorization, the most likely outcome is that they would pay
some small amount of money damages, and maybe be enjoined from distributing
older versions.

~~~
pedrocr
_> There is a roughly 0% chance this guy could force Mojang to open source
anything._

 _> He can stop them from distributing new versions with his code in it.
That's it._

He seems to be effectively saying "license the whole thing as GPL" or
otherwise you can't use my contributions. That seems reasonable and could very
well lead Mojang to at least license as GPL the decompiled source of their
server, which they seem to have been happy to allow to continue to exist in
the repository.

He may instead be trying to get them to release the original code as GPL,
which is probably not needed to comply with the GPL in this case.

~~~
DannyBee
"He seems to be effectively saying "license the whole thing as GPL" or
otherwise you can't use my contributions." I think this is what he is saying,
and agree that this is reasonable to do :)

"He may instead be trying to get them to release the original code as GPL,
which is probably not needed to comply with the GPL in this case." It's a bit
of a grey area, depending on how it's linked, used, etc.

------
fencepost
A couple additional notes:

1\. Many (most?) of the servers running with Bukkit also had some form of
payment for items, skills, ranks, etc. that can affect game play, also known
as "pay-to-win." Mojang recently announced that they were going to be cracking
down on this since it's a violation of the license, though I don't know what
if any enforcement has actually happened. Enforcement was due to start August
1.

2\. Mojang has a couple of multiplayer options without Bukkit - the Minecraft
Server piece that is part of this discussion and Minecraft Realms. If Bukkit
is dead (which may be the case no matter what happens because W. is not the
only outside developer who could pull this kind of stunt), there are still
multiplayer options and Mojang could likely implement some of the features
currently in Bukkit but under their control - perhaps under a licensing model
that lets them sell the server software as well.

Basically this guy has managed to shut down something being used by folks with
business practices that Mojang was already having some issues with, while
leaving available some less feature-rich options fully approved (and
controlled by) Mojang. The odds of that resulting in their giving in and open-
sourcing something that's included in Minecraft as a whole are somewhere
around nil - worst case for Mojang is that the Minecraft server community that
they're not a direct part of takes a feature and popularity hit for some time
while they get to point at this guy as the reason why.

------
Shank
Here's the DMCA request that was sent to GitHub:
[https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-09-05-CraftB...](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-09-05-CraftBukkit.md)

------
Airhat
First, has HN really fallen so far as to link slashdot of all things?

Second, a quick explanation of the issue, as I have it: Bukkit is a server
made by the community to make up for the simplicity of the official server. It
uses deobfuscated, reverse engineered java code from the official server, and
has never been given the actual source from Mojang. While Bukkit was sort-of
folded into Mojang (They own the name, and a few of the developers went to
work for Mojang), no one at Mojang is paid to work on Bukkit and they still
don't get source access. Now, a disgruntled Bukkit Dev, Wolverness, has thrown
out this DCMA request in some sort of retaliation / blackmail attempt.

~~~
djur
I haven't been able to find any evidence that Mojang owns a trademark on
"Bukkit", or even that such a trademark exists. They apparently don't own the
domain name or the hosting accounts. And they don't own the entirety of the
source code.

Mojang is definitely claiming they "acquired" some kind of rights to Bukkit,
but I can't find any description of what those rights are -- and, for a
community project, I don't understand what they could possibly own that isn't
public knowledge. You can't own secret trademarks.

