My honest opinion on the issues with bukkit and the minecraft community in general...

I’ve been pretty much sitting back and watching this whole issue fold out ever since the EULA took effect, and I have some stuff I think would be best talked about. I’m going to be going through the point of view of Mojang, Wolve, EvilSeph and the community itself in this post, but please remember what I say is not fact but just my opinion and personal view on the event that’s unfolding.

So, to start off with everything, This whole issue began when EvilSeph (the former project lead of bukkit) said he was going to close the bukkit project. To which mojang quickly replied that they owned bukkit and were going to keep it going, and everything seemed fine from there on out, until Wolve jumped into the picture and DMCA’d the project. Was Wolve’s take-down request legal? As much as I hate to say it, it is. However, was the take-down the right way to handle this? My opinion here is no. In filing the DMCA to take down the project Wolve pretty much crippled the community he helped build and drive for over 2 years, which even though its his legal right to file the request, it’s pretty scummy. There are other ways Wolve could have handled this, too.

Looking at this issue from Mojang’s point of view, Mojang bought the project 2 years ago in the case that if bukkit should ever have issues with the project dying, they could continue it themselves for however long needed. They tried to stay out of the project, despite the fact they owned it, because they wanted it to be able to make uninfluenced and independent decisions. And despite Mojang’s sub-par PR skills from time to time, I don’t feel they have any bad intentions here, yes there’s a lot of stuff that could have been done differently, the EULA issue, announcing Mojang owned bukkit for 2 years, etc.

Now on to Wolve’s point of view, he has been working on bukkit for upwards of 2 years and is one of the larger contributors of the project. That being said I can see why Wolve is mad that this was kept a secret from him and the rest of the community. Even though Mojang did own bukkit, the project was never a corporate one though, It was very much still a community project, and had this never happened people would have said it was a community project without a doubt.

Now on to the community, everything is quite a mess, people picking sides and fighting left and right, it’s kind of sad really… I can understand the sensitivity and gravity of this situation, and I know people within the community are upset, I get that, I as much as anyone else am not happy about the recent event’s either. What really bugs me about this is how the community has pretty much divided into factions over the recent bundle of issues. Can I blame the community for how it is right now? No, the community has been put in the center of these issues for over a month now, and it’s no wonder the community, as it is, has become a mess.

Now with EvilSeph, I understand why he left, the project throughout every update the game had, was long and hard to handle. Which is why he decided it was time to close down bukkit. EvilSeph never had any ill intentions against Mojang throughout all this, him, along with the dev team, we’re simply burned out from the long and hard work that came with 1.7 and many updates before. What bothers me here is that the community will bundle him with Wolve occasionally, which is far from the case, EvilSeph merely left because him and his team was worn out. Overall with the whole situation, the only people I can see trying to kill bukkit is one of its own developers.

Even if bukkit does die now, I’m excited to see what the future holds for the MC community, the news already popping up for future projects and improvements like forge supporting vanilla and the future bukkit replacement “sponge” being planned out excites me to see what the community does from here.

Even if Mojang has made some mistakes throughout all this, remember they gave us minecraft, and be thankful for that. Very few if not any games have aspired and gotten to this level as a community, it is safe to say minecraft itself is more than just another game we install on our computers, very few games get awesome API’s like bukkit that let people control the software in any way they like. Games don’t get highly intelligent people who are able to dig within the code and figure out how it all works. Games don’t get used in schools as tools for teaching. Games don’t get businesses built on them. And most of all games don’t get communities that are nearly the same level as minecraft’s.

Don’t forget where we came from either, a good portion of us before trying the game were totally against playing it for the longest time (I myself am one of these people). We are here because we saw potential in minecraft, we saw something here that wasn’t in any other game. Mojang was the one to give us this awesome game, but it was the community who got it as far as it is now. And because of that, I can only thank everyone for their contributions. Mojang, thank you for giving us this game that has delighted the community for 5 solid years, bukkit, thank you for giving us one of the best server API’s that has pushed this community further than ever before. And to the community, I can only thank all of you for the things you have discovered in the game, all the redstone inventions we have made, the plugins built on top of bukkit, the builds, survival worlds, communities, the list goes on. So to all of you, thank you.

Even if this is the end of bukkit, this won’t be the end of something great.