So apparently wolverness is going to DMCA spigot again

I never said that, I said They were giving it away only that the tool patches the minecraft_server.jar with bukkit, then craftbukkit, then Spigot code.

I was thinking about that too…

Is what he is doing morally the right thing to do? It just seems cocky to me that he tweeted how he was going to do something again, and I might not have my head completely wrapped around the whole legal talk of licensing with GPL and all that. I guess I might be biased in not liking him because I was a bukkit user, but from an outside point of view, is he actually in the right? Is he the bad guy he appears to be (to the uneducated people like me?)

I honestly think Wolverness is a asshole, and I honestly think Sponge will fail, hate to say it, but I don’t think people will want to wait a crap ton of months till forge is out for the next Minecraft update

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Spigot is kind of dying when Sponge will be out, but now people can’t distribute Spigot jars because it contains Minecraft Server code.
The BuildTool downloads, decompiles and inject Bukkit and Spigot code into the Vanilla Minecraft server.
Forge will update faster when Sponge is out.

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https://twitter.com/SpongePowered/status/537737484491190273 - this would suggest that they won’t be waiting for Forge for 1.9 anyway. In fact, I’m fairly sure I read somewhere they have given up waiting for Forge 1.8 and just coding against FML anyway. The point of coding it against FML is that it’s a good base to start at, so they don’t start from scratch, meaning it is out quicker.

Also, I don’t think you should really be insulting Wolvereness like that - the community should leave the poor guy alone now, he’s had more than his fair share of flak for this. As I and others have said, I doubt he filed this DMCA for laughs - there has to be more to it. He’s DMCA’d it, yes, everyone is angry about it, but rather than just fire personal attacks at the cause of the problem, that energy is surely better spent helping find/create the solution. If I didn’t have so many personal commitments, I would be right up there trying to help the Sponge guys. I certainly would like to help myself. I might once it settles down anyway.

So, Optimism! I’m sure Sponge will be popular, it has quite a few big names behind it, including many of the previous Bukkit team. It’ll only fail if people think it will/want it to fail.


I just want to clarify I don’t necessarily support what has happened with Bukkit, indeed, I don’t really have an opinion on the DMCA itself as it’s clear we don’t have the whole story, but making personal attacks against someone for taking this action like this really isn’t fair. Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself comes to mind.

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I think, and maybe most people will share my opinion on Sponge v Spigot:
IF:

  • Sponge’s performance is not worse than Spigot,
  • Pore can support all plugins that server owner requires,
  • Sponge is not buggy,
  • Sponge is not too hard to use,
    THEN:
  • Use Sponge
    ELSE:
  • Use Spigot
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I honestly think Wolverness is ethically evil too.
: )

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That’s not very constructive nor is it a well founded opinion imo.
If you read the post from a few months back on Spigot Forums (Disconsented linked it before) he states his motivations. Admittedly they are hard to understand but perhaps try and stand in his shoes before posting inflammatory comments.

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If his new plan was safe, he wouldn’t be hosting his piracy servers in Romania. If we are talking seriously here, there would be no need to host his servers in Romania (since it’s more expensive to host there, as well as most of his traffic comes from the US) if his so called “workaround” was legally OK. Furthermore, I have yet to see any actual proof that he is complying with GPL and not violating Wolverness’ copyright (actual proof being referring to articles in GPL, or any other legal document applicable).

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Perhaps the idea behind the Romanian servers is he is attempting to maximize their connection speeds? Considering one of Romania’s cities has the fastest internet connection in the world? Source

I’m sorry, but I live in Canada and I get 150 down and 50 up. Furthermore, Google Fiber reaches up to 1 GB/s down and up; around where most data centers in the US can provide. The article is clearly outdated pulling statistics from 2013 so your whole point is invalid.

Soz bruv, no offence, but you’re statistics are skewed.

Romania Top City: RÂMNICU VÂLCEA, 106.4mbps Source
USA Top City:California, 41.8Mbps Source
Canada Top City: New Bruswick, 35.7Mbps Source

Just because google has “1GB/s up/down” doesn’t mean anyone is accessing it at anywhere near that speed. As for Canadian internet; you most likely do get that speed, but that doesn’t mean anyone else in Canada does.

FYI: Source on how these speeds are calculated.

My issue is, yes, GPL terms might not be in complete compliance, I’ll roll with that assumption for a minute here. But how can Wolvereness rightfully file a DMCA, if his contributions are removed? His code, that he contributed and (despite being an open source project) owns, is allegedly no longer in the files. Sure, someone else who finds their copyright was violated could roll right down the same path but who really wants to start a whole new shitstorm? I mean look at what all has happened already. I think most people here out can appreciate the code they willingly contributed to an open source project for the benefit of a community. But I’ve also been proven wrong by Wolvereness, so I’ll unplug the aux cord now.

So let’s look at the license for a minute. Sure, GPL may not allow for open and closed source code to sit next to each other (yes, I know its cause GPL requires all bits to be GPL and no other license, stop being nit picky technical discussion killers) and this is how Wolvereness was rightfully, from a legal perspective, able to file a DMCA request against CraftBukkit, which was admittedly handled well by Bukkit. But what I think is the key to remember is distribution. Is md_5 distributing closed source code, or Wolvereness’ code? Or is everything coming out of that repo open sourced, GPL licensed code that is not subject to DMCA? Wolvereness did say that he had express right to permit or deny any derivative works, which is true - if I took my local repo of CraftBukkit (I cloned it right before it went dark on GitHub and have been sitting on it) and distributed it, he has express rights to say “yay or nay”. But if I went through the pain of axing every line of code he put into it and it still magically worked, can he say anymore that it is a derivative of his work?

Some food for thought from a burnt out CS college kid at midnight whilst procrastinating on homework. :smiley:

edit: typo fix, for reasons given in the preceeding line.

Like I stated before, most of his traffic is coming from US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. You also stated just because Google has 1 GB/s up/down doesn’t mean other will access it at the same speed, I concur with that statement however it also applies in Romania’s case, where people around the world will not be accessing servers in Romania at their speed, rather it depends on the client’s connection to the server and vice versa. Now, I’m going to run a speed test to LA, and to Romania. Let’s see how the results turn out:

Test to LA: 31/5 http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3953165080
Test to Romania: 26/4.6 http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3953172495

Romania’s connection is still quite good holding up a pretty similar connection, however the ping is much higher and the speed builds over time. Since it does hold a good connection, this may be the reason he chose Romania specifically to host his piracy servers. In mine and many others cases (others being possible traffic to Spigot), California would be a much better option and still would be cheaper on md_5.

His contributions weren’t removed however.

GPL actually requires code rather to be GPL, or GPL-compatible; since the Minecraft server is proprietary, it is not GPL-compatible. LGPL would allow proprietary code and open source code to co-exist, however there are reasons why you shouldn’t use LGPL on gnu.org where the license is distributed.

You literally just did what I mentioned in my parenthetical… That you quoted…

I’ve seen a lot of back and fourth, thus why I am not outright saying they were removed. If I didn’t come across in a hypothetical sense, that is my bad.

I’m not correcting you, I was just adding more information for anybody who didn’t know.

His code is still there, I have no idea where people got the notion that it isn’t there.
Here is the thing if they had stable legal ground they would just counter the DMCA and call it a done deal. Instead they use some hacky patching method and move their servers to Romania(/?). They know this isn’t legal but IANAL so I may be wrong.

Edit: Upon talking with Wolvereness I was point towards [1] and [2] concerning his motivations

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Yeah, the servers are in Romania so he is out of reach of any DMCA request, which is a US specific law. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt though, I think it is less they know it’s not legal, more that that they don’t know if is. My first post in this thread talks about my view on the GPL in relation to Spigot and what they are doing.

I was searching the net last night on whether patches to proprietary software, like Soigot is doing, could be classed as GPL, and I couldn’t find anything. I’d be tempted to e-mail the FSF to ask them to clarify whether doing what Spigot is doing is in violation of the GPL or not, considering that the GPL essentially only puts restrictions on distribution.

One other thing on Wolvereness’s code in Spigot. Even if they did strip out code that is attributed to him from the git commits, that doesn’t mean that his code has been taken out. I can easily change history to make it look like I wrote it, or I can reuse it in a slightly different way when MC 1.9 comes out, or I can move it to a patch file, but while my name might be next to it, the code was still originally his. It’d take a lot more than removing his name so that it stops appearing anywhere in git blame to say his code has been stripped out.

Shame really. As I said, I hope this doesn’t descend into a legal battle. Spigot is a good project, but as I said before, Bukkit is just poison now…

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