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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

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]

XorNot 12y ago
The issue of license violation is that someone had to claim damages. Mojang could have, but didn't - and you could argue in a court benefited greatly from this state of affairs (selling Minecraft licenses). The fact that Mojang now wants to distribute GPL code without providing full source would, I suspect, stand badly against that since a claim of license violation has been made now. Generally, you can't ignore copyright by yelling "two wrongs make a right".
- shawn-furyan 12y ago
  Well, yeah, I agree. I'm not saying that Mojang hasn't likely been willfully ignoring the license violation, just that Bukkit seems to infringe on the letter of the official Minecraft Server license. And yeah, I don't think that that has any bearing on the copyright claim. Incidentally, the link has been changed since I began commenting. I find this assertion from the now-linked post to be odd: "Additionally, we believe that Wesley has no right to prevent the continued use of his contributions to the project – which he gave freely, knowing them to be subject to applicable open source licenses. We believe these licenses continue to bind all those who contributed to the Bukkit Project." This doesn't really address the primary charge from Wolverness, to paraphrase, that essentially the bukkit and related projects are distributing code incompatible with its license and therefore are not permitted to distribute the copyrighted code contained in the bukkit project without express permission. If the license for the code is not adhered to, then you don't have permission to distribute the copyrighted material... So one party is saying that the license was broken, and the other party responds by saying that there was a license. That's kind of a non sequitur.
makomk 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
- shawn-furyan 12y ago
  That's interesting. It seems strange to secretly acquire a public GPL project from a subset of its developers. It seems like perhaps all they bought was the option to carry over the name and a fraction of the code if a fork became necessary. Or perhaps to cripple the project in case of disputes.
gillianseed 12y ago
>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. Yes this is an interesting issue, I find it hard to believe that decompiling Java code would possibly count as a clean-room implementation, even if you later rewrote everything. Back when I did clean-room reverse engineering (which was admittedly long time ago), it was one guy (whom I never even spoke to) who disassembled code and wrote down what how it functioned, this was then sent to me and another programmer and we made an implementation based upon his descriptions (which of course contained no code whatsoever).
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  If I can ask a slightly off topic question: where on the clean-versus-not spectrum do you find coding based on information from a wiki, which may be derived from inspecting the code or using the item, but does not contain code itself?
  - gillianseed 12y ago
    Based upon my experience this would count as clean-room reverse-engineering as long as the person/persons who wrote the information in the wiki (if it was derived from inspecting code) is in no way involved in writing the actual code based upon said information. Granted it was like 7 years ago I did clean-room reverse engineering last, but AFAIK there's been nothing new in how this is applied.

XorNot 12y ago

The issue of license violation is that someone had to claim damages. Mojang could have, but didn't - and you could argue in a court benefited greatly from this state of affairs (selling Minecraft licenses). The fact that Mojang now wants to distribute GPL code without providing full source would, I suspect, stand badly against that since a claim of license violation has been made now. Generally, you can't ignore copyright by yelling "two wrongs make a right".

shawn-furyan 12y ago
Well, yeah, I agree. I'm not saying that Mojang hasn't likely been willfully ignoring the license violation, just that Bukkit seems to infringe on the letter of the official Minecraft Server license. And yeah, I don't think that that has any bearing on the copyright claim. Incidentally, the link has been changed since I began commenting. I find this assertion from the now-linked post to be odd: "Additionally, we believe that Wesley has no right to prevent the continued use of his contributions to the project – which he gave freely, knowing them to be subject to applicable open source licenses. We believe these licenses continue to bind all those who contributed to the Bukkit Project." This doesn't really address the primary charge from Wolverness, to paraphrase, that essentially the bukkit and related projects are distributing code incompatible with its license and therefore are not permitted to distribute the copyrighted code contained in the bukkit project without express permission. If the license for the code is not adhered to, then you don't have permission to distribute the copyrighted material... So one party is saying that the license was broken, and the other party responds by saying that there was a license. That's kind of a non sequitur.

makomk 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
shawn-furyan 12y ago
That's interesting. It seems strange to secretly acquire a public GPL project from a subset of its developers. It seems like perhaps all they bought was the option to carry over the name and a fraction of the code if a fork became necessary. Or perhaps to cripple the project in case of disputes.

gillianseed 12y ago

>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. Yes this is an interesting issue, I find it hard to believe that decompiling Java code would possibly count as a clean-room implementation, even if you later rewrote everything. Back when I did clean-room reverse engineering (which was admittedly long time ago), it was one guy (whom I never even spoke to) who disassembled code and wrote down what how it functioned, this was then sent to me and another programmer and we made an implementation based upon his descriptions (which of course contained no code whatsoever).

ObviousScience 12y ago
If I can ask a slightly off topic question: where on the clean-versus-not spectrum do you find coding based on information from a wiki, which may be derived from inspecting the code or using the item, but does not contain code itself?
- gillianseed 12y ago
  Based upon my experience this would count as clean-room reverse-engineering as long as the person/persons who wrote the information in the wiki (if it was derived from inspecting code) is in no way involved in writing the actual code based upon said information. Granted it was like 7 years ago I did clean-room reverse engineering last, but AFAIK there's been nothing new in how this is applied.