Around a month ago Mojang tightened up their enforcement of their EULA, coming down hard on servers who were offering what could be described as ‘pay-to-win’ services as well as those keeping parts of the vanilla game locked away for those who hadn’t paid for the privilege of having them. There was some uproar over it of course, but as Mojang better explained and outlined what they considered okay (donations and paying for cosmetic items for example) and not okay (anything that gave unfair advantage or took away from the core game) things died back down to normal. Or so we thought.

Earlier the lead on the Bukkit project, EvilSeph, made a lengthy post on the Bukkit forums announcing that they had decided not to continue developing the mod, which forms the backbone of many, many Minecraft servers out there. He cited concerns over Mojang’s “recent abrupt turn-around” on enforcing the EULA rules and was fearful that they might start deciding what category mods could fall into – mod, plugin or hack of the game; the last of which would violate the EULA rule of not distributing anything that Mojang have made.

He continued on to say that “it’s no longer worth it for us to put up a fight” to keep Bukkit alive, stating that the new 1.8 update was going to bring “large and significant changes” that the team was going to find hard to provided support for, stating that Mojang was giving them a “lack of support… with updates” to help them update Bukkit. He also stated that the team was having difficulties finding volunteers to work on the project now as well and the EULA and 1.8 update combined were the final nail in the coffin for Bukkit.

However, it seems Mojang had other plans and have now stepped in to make sure Bukkit continues, hoping to quash the fears that the EULA changes would greatly affect Bukkit and other similar big mods to the game. For now Minecraft developer and former Bukkit developer Dinnerbone is taking over the lead to make sure that Bukkit is developed to work with all 1.8’s new updates.

I started Bukkit, I’m going to personally see it through for 1.8. Updating it now 🙂

— Nathan Adams (@Dinnerbone) August 21, 2014

Minecraft lead Jeb publicly tweeted earlier that Bukkit was not EvilSeph’s to shut down as Mojang had owned them for two years; possibly to reassure fans that the mod was not going to become outdated and broken any time soon.    

Warren over at bukkit seems to have forgotten that the project was bought by Mojang over two years ago, and isn’t his to discontinue. — Jens Bergensten (@jeb_) August 21, 2014

EvilSeph has since confirmed on his Twitter that if Mojang wish to continue Bukkit he’s all for it. You have to wonder how it got to this point though…

Bukkit Forum “It’s time to say …”: [x]