The Future of Bukkit | Veterancraft Dedicated Server | Forum

I had hoped that by now saner heads would have prevailed in regards to Bukkit. Sadly, it continues to be a pissing match on top of a churning rumor mill that’s turning fact into fiction and fiction into fact.

No one to this day, has broken the issue down into its fundamental components; the first and foremost being who actually owns Bukkit; as this is the root of all other arguments. If you believed what the majority are saying, Bukkit is (or should I say, was) owned by Mojang.

The answer isn’t simple or clear cut. Bukkit has always been an open source project, which by its nature makes it a joint work when it comes to copyright issues*. Joint works with multiple derivatives have a traceable ownership pedigree and I would not doubt that somewhere in that lineage there is an entry for Mojang along with tons of others. But Mojang, is not or never will be an outright and sole owner of Bukkit; in the worst case they simply have co-ownership rights to a certain instantiation (approximately two years ago, if at all), but not in the derivatives that have been released since.

Rather than drilling down and resolving fundamental issues, most of the community is contented to continue the current bitch-fest, throwing more gasoline on the fire, and seeing it all burn down. I’ve tried talking sense into some privately, but to no avail. Thus, I am perfectly willing to see Bukkit burn itself to ashes.

Once in a while, we need a good fire to burn down the old and make room for new growth. For all the good that Bukkit did, it’s old! Conceptually, it brought forth a better implementation and better support for developing server-side mods than its predecessor hMod. However, Bukkit is showing its age as it is fraught with design problems and implementations that just don’t work well today. That’s not to say that the Bukkit Team – past and present – weren’t good at what they did. However, they had to ensure that each release remained as compatible as possible with older designs so as not to break the majority of plugins in the process. Unfortunately, Bukkit’s monolithic design made this an even tougher challenge time after time, resulting in some ineffective (and sometimes bad) design decisions.

I doubt that we will ever see CraftBukkit for version 1.8 unless Microsoft comes in and cleans up the purported legal mess, brushed egos lick their wounds, and someone steps up to champion CraftBukkit's cause. So let it burn down to the ground. Trust me, I would welcome being proven wrong; it would mean far less work for Veterancraft.

At this point, I see three options: First, roll our own implementation of a 1.8 version of CraftBukkit. That is a lot of work and the benefit-cost ratio isn’t that pretty either. Second, join up with others doing the same, such as Spigot. Blunt honesty, we were planning to switch to Spigot anyways to take advantage of multi-server instances and its optimized version of CraftBukkit. Third, throw out the old and bring in the new. While there were several attempts at coming up with a CraftBukkit replacement, most of them false started in a span of one month or weren't credible enough. The only viable candidate that shows promise is Sponge, given that it is supported by some heavy hitters in the Minecraft community.

I wish I had better news. Rest assured, we haven’t given up. Somehow and somewhere there is a solution to continue offering a Minecraft-based server that is better than the plain vanilla package.

* If you are interested in learning more about copyright details, take a stab that this two pinnacle papers: Copyright in Open Source Software – Understanding the Boundaries and Avoiding Joint Pain: Treatment of Joint Works of Authorship Conditions.  They are very dry and a good cure for insomnia for some, but distinctly explain how our copyright laws treat joint works, ownership therein, and derivative works thereof.