I have no idea what is going on, someone please explain.
I am completely confused about whatever is going on with Bukkit. I thought the project died with the whole DMCA fiasco. All the lead developers abandoned it and started Sponge to replace it and fix the licensing stupidity, hopefully once and for all.
Well, aside from the work of a certain Russian lone maverick genius who forked Cauldron and Shall Not Be Named, and who has kept 1.7 alive for far beyond what has seemed possible for a single person to achieve, it seemed like Bukkit was a dead end at 1.7.
So now out of nowhere I suddenly learn that there is some sort of continuation of Bukkit, with CraftBukkit 1.11? What?
If the project is dead then who has been updating it? And if it has been continued against all reason, isn’t this just going to lead to fragmentation of the server plugin ecosystem, having two entirely separate modernized APIs of CraftBukkit and Sponge for plugin developers to have to deal with?
Is it strictly illegal? I thought they were using loopholes and being all gray area and stuff… at one point I heard that their servers were hosted in some foreign country that didn’t follow the same laws, but that’s probably a rumor.
No, the gray area bit is that they don’t allow you to download a Spigot jar. Rather, they distribute a program, which downloads Minecraft, decompiles it, downloads the Spigot source, patches it appropriately, and compiles it. Thus, they are free from any copyright because they don’t distribute anything illegal to you; you are the one who compiles the thing. And you’re free from any copyright because you don’t distribute it.
Although the whole ‘we directly support paid plugins’ thing is a hell of a lot more of a gray area; their argument is that no mods for Minecraft are being sold, only mods for Spigot.
