BUKKIT IS DEAD

[Drakia]

That's quite the necro post there Inscrutable, but thanks for the update

With how the Bukkit project was run, I knew this would happen eventually. Though I disliked EvilSeph, the Bukkit project itself was a good piece of software with a great and huge community behind it, so seeing it completely dissipate like this makes me pretty sad.

I can see where Wolvereness is coming from with the DMCA takedown request, he provided a lot of code to Bukkit under the GPL, and now Mojang is claiming both that they own Bukkit, and Bukkit could never have been licensed under the GPL. That combination of facts means two things:
1) He committed code under a false pretence, that the code was and would always be GPL unless he agreed to a license change.
2) That at some point, money most likely changed hands for the ownership of Bukkit to Mojang, and yet he received no monetary compensation for his contributions.

It's an overall sad state of affairs, and hopefully this new project can take off, and can replace the hole that Bukkit will leave behind.


As for Stargate, I'm glad it's still working, there have been conflicting reports of it working and not working. I pride myself on my resilient code, and am happy to hear that it's still going strong Pretty sure it ranks among one of the longest-lived zero-contribution Bukkit plugins (That actually has some complexity to it)

[Jeyge]

I still check on the forums every once in a while. I've had plenty of stuff to rant about but have kept my word to EvilSeph that I would no longer post about it but instead send it directly to him. Not that I've ever received a response to any of it but at least he knew what I might have posted about here. As for what is currently happening, I'm a bit saddened by it all. I've had anywhere up to 4 servers running at once over the past few years. Most of them modded servers but from time to time just the basic Bukkit server was still fun to have around. I continue to help people thru skype and private messages and will still post a message or 2 on the forums. It will be hard to stop doing that if it all dies.

Now I can't just stop by here without leaving something I find funny and since Evil is now gone, I won't be breaking any agreement I had with him so here goes. I reported multiple messages earlier for advertising other server products and this is the response I received from the new Curse admins:

Also let me comment on this thread to avoid any more confusion. The "Advertising other server product" rule is not in the list nor is it agreed upon with the new staff. This is no longer an unspoken rule, nor a rule at all. HOWEVER that does not mean everyone and their brother can come in spamming threads about other servers. Keep it reasonable, and please no more reports about this thread.

My response was:

Rule #9 on the Terms and Rules page linked below says no advertising unless it is for your Bukkit server and is in the right forum. If those rules are no longer the rules appropriate for this forum, they probably should be updated.

And their response back:

That was not our interpretation of that rule, we will be sure to update it to clarify. Thank you.

Now here is rule #9. Please tell me if there is any ambiguity at all in this rule:

9. No advertising.

Advertising of any form is completely prohibited unless you are advertising your Bukkit powered server in the appropriate forum - the Show off your Bukkit server forum - or your plugins. Or in your signature, as specified above.

Edit - I started to think that if they were going to allow any and all advertising that I might just have to start posting links to porn but then I saw the modified rule:

9. No advertising.

Advertising of any form is completely prohibited unless you are advertising your Bukkit powered server in the appropriate forum - the Show off your Bukkit server forum - or your plugins. Or in your signature, as specified above. The exception to this rule would be offering other options that replace bukkit (Note: This does not include unofficial bukkit builds, but replacements). This does not allow you to go around spamming them however, other rules still apply.

Damn, just to options that replace Bukkit. But wait, porn can replace Bukkit any day. Time to go dig up some really nasty stuff.

[Jeyge]

Oh, and hey Drakia and Inscrutable. One rant before I log off. I came back just a little over a year ago. I noticed that the poor permissions questions weren't getting answered again and I had been finally pushed off of the post leader board. I was around 400 posts away from being back on the board so I figured I would quickly get back up there. I started answering any questions I could but quickly became pissed off because this young kid starts to follow every one of my posts and answers the same question with almost exactly the same response I gave. If I were to skip a thread and not answer it, they would skip that one too so I knew they were only responding to the same threads I was. I took a week long break just to see what happened and they were no where to be found. I started answering threads again and sure enough, there they were again. I finally gave up less than 200 shy of 4000 posts.

[Inscrutable]

Great Guglimugli, I expected nary a comment, yet I have awoken the Drake from his slumber!
I agree, despite managerial idiocy Bukkit was an inspiring and involving project with a great deal to offer, at no cost, to anyone who cared to use it.
I figure now as Dinnerbone can't update Craftbukkit as he wanted to, maybe he can help port Stargate to Sponge instead.

Jeyge, I'm sure your sympathy for inexperienced and confused admins was appreciated on the forums.

Who knows, it may yet live on in some form. Spigot is fighting back with new build methods (!), all hail md_5, Forge is still legal* and mutating to allow vanilla clients to log in (due in 1.8), and Sponge is now being developed as we speak, with Forge as a base and the (resurrected) Spout API on top (!!). Blood and sk89q are the head honchos, and #sponge is filled with, well, everyone (700+), including Zidane, TnT, md_5, Tahg and Grum.
[ * IANAL.]

If either of you are still interested and keen to help the MC community, it's a good place to start again. Hatchets are being buried.
I still play this daft game called Minecraft daily, so I can't resist the call myself.
Be seeing you, good folks.

[Drakia]

Jeyge, it's too bad someone was trying to steal all the credit for your answers, Permissions is one of those things that pretty much every new user ends up having issues with, your help was most likely much appreciated.

And Inscrutable, I tend to show up every once in a while Just as long as it's not for support stuff (I haven't touched Minecraft since before I stopped developing my plugins, so support is kind of off the table these days).
I'm hoping that this new project Sponge is more open about how things are done than Bukkit was. The fact a bunch of devs quit should never be enough to kill an open source project, but Bukkit was very secretive of their whole update process when I was around. EvilSeph was always worried about competition "stealing" their code, and now they're going to have nothing left to show due to that paranoia.
Competition is never a bad thing, and unless someone is directly ripping off your code and breaking its license, you really shouldn't try to stop it. If another project ends up ahead of you, using your own tools, then it shows that your own project is lacking in one way or another.

Currently I've got no interest in helping out on the development front (Not being a Minecraft player any more), though I'll try to keep tabs on what's happening in the scene, so atleast I know where Stargate may end up in the future

[Jeyge]

I don't know why but IRC has always scared me. I'm watching the chat on #sponge but only thru a log. When I do sign in, I usually use an alias instead of "Jeyge". Perhaps I will finally sign in using this alias and try to help out. I just haven't been impressed with what I've seen so far. They are already making the same mistakes as Bukkit and that is very disappointing.

[Drakia]

Haven't been following Sponge at all yet, what kind of mistakes do you think they're already making?

[Jeyge]

I need to post a disclaimer first. I don't want this to come off the wrong way without know why. Every time I've been involved in any community, I always request that rules be defined in advance or if they don't want to write the rules, I will be happy to do it myself. I then ask that those rules be enforced all the time/every time. I would ban my own kids from a community if they break the rules. It just leads to a more enjoyable experience all around if everyone knows where they stand but it has cost me admin/staff spots before because some think it is okay to just ignore the rules.

As for what Sponge is doing, they don't have the enforcement of the rules yet. I see them talk about rules, but with their 40+ staff on the chat channels, they just can't seem to keep people following the rules. Once you take a step in that direction, it just starts to spiral out of control and by the time they have their forums up, not a single one of them will know what is and isn't okay. Another thing I've seen is that they have invited just about anyone and their dogs to program for them. Sometimes more isn't better and with over 25 years of professional programming experience, I've had to deal with some real problem teams. I'm worried they will start with some bad programming practices and just continue from there.

[Drakia]

Rules within IRC are one of those things I've noticed are rarely fully enforced. I believe that once they move to a proper communication channel for community involvement (A forum) they'll most likely start actively enforcing their rules.

And I think that as long as they have a good merge process, they should be fine with an abundance of developers. The more people that know the base product, the better chance it will stay alive if/when developers leave. I think that so long as they keep the main commit/merge pool to 10-15 people, and everyone else has to make pull requests, it should be an okay setup.

[Jeyge]

I do hope they can get it working. I have people asking what they are going to be running next and it would be nice to give them a link to the next best thing.

I agree completely with the good merge process. I've worked on multi-million line projects before and it gets seriously fun when everyone is working in the same classes. I would also agree with the 10-15 people being about the max commit/merge pool.

[Inscrutable]

Jeyge, enforcing rules on IRC is like wrestling with a pig. You get dirty, and the pig enjoys it {IMHO}.
It's sporadic, intense 15 minute bouts of decent informed debate are balanced by an hour of spam and off topic.
I agree with Drakia, this will settle when they have a concrete forum. Who knows, I might volunteer as staff...
I know you're done with MC, Drake, you got burned by Bukkit, but figured a new coding community might give you a thrill.

I consider many of the folks on there good friends (Owexz and I go way back). I have a hell of a lot more trust in this new team, as they have the experience, the smarts, the will, and the resources to pull this off. The shine on this new ball will lose it's lustre in a week or two, and I'm hoping that enough critical mass remains as the drama ebbs to keep it steady, stable, and forward-looking.

[Jeyge]

I'm more than likely just too old to understand a fast moving chat platform like IRC. Hell, I was probably too old to start offering help on the Bukkit forums in the first place but I just hated seeing all of those people asking questions and rarely getting any answers.

As for the Microsoft stuff that was just talked about in the #sponge channel, I have a funny story to tell about C#. We were one of the first teams to adopt the new .NET framework. It meant we had to teach ourselves C#, ASP.NET and a bunch of other crap because it hadn't even been released to the world. It was quite confusing at first and seemed a bit of a stretch for use running both servers and websites but I was able to pick it up and make it work. Some of our teams first projects are still out there with minimal changes over the years since it was released. What was funny though was the conversations going on internally about rewriting everything including Windows in C#. It just made my head spin at how they could think something so slow at the time could replace all the custom assembly and C/C++ code that is used to create Windows.