Well, after the minor drama-hiccup of Bukkit’s abortive shutdown, in which it emerged that Mojang own Bukkit much to the surprise of many people; it seems that all is still not well between Mojang and all the people who made up the Bukkit project. One of the main coders has filed a DMCA notice that has resulted in CraftBukkit being taken down from the site it was available at.

The coder, who goes by the name of Wolvereness is responsible for a great many lines of code that make up the backbone of the Bukkit API that enables mods to work for clients and for servers. The DMCA, which has also been filed against fellow API client Spigot, alleges that the code that Wolvereness added to the project is being used without fair authorisation or credit under the terms of which the code is licenced. Also because of Mojang’s recent enforcement of the EULA, the DMCA also says that Bukkit itself is in violation of its own original GPL/LGPL licence. It’s actually somewhat more complicated (and confusing) than that, but this seems to be the basic gist of what is taking place.

As of the time of writing there has been no comment from Mojang, any of its prominent employees, or EvilSeph, the former lead of the Bukkit project on the situation publicly about what is happening behind the scenes or to reassure people that things can or will be resolved. The lead of Spigot has posted a news post about the DMCA and has since filed a counter notice.

We will be keeping an eye on events as they play out and will hopefully be able to update you as soon as something happens that will tell us whether or not this is indeed the end of Bukkit as we know it now.

Bukkit forum – “It’s time to say …”: [x]
Spigot Forum – “DMCA’d”: [x]
Reddit – “CraftBukkit, a hugely popular Minecraft server plugin, is taken down due to a DMCA claim. (xpost /r/minecraft)”: [x]