No more Bukkit? No more Spigot?
The Bukkit/Mojang Saga
We might as well start at the start.
A few weeks back one of the main contributors to the Bukkit project, EvilSeph, decided to shutdown the Bukkit project in reaction to Mojang’s recent enforcement of their EULA. Mojang (Jeb_) tweeted back stating that they actually owned Bukkit, and if necessary would continue the project in house. There is a great rundown of the tweets here.
This left the future of Bukkit development uncertain, however at least it meant Bukkit wasn’t dead, perhaps just on hiatus. EvilSeph even said he’d be ok with mojang continuing the development of Bukkit. So while the Bukkit project had lost all it’s developers, at least Mojang could continue supporting it. They had a number of Bukkit developers anyway, so surely it would be ok?
Nope. This isn’t minecraft, this.. is.. BUKKIT!
Wolverness (another Bukkit contributer) decided that the code he had written could not be taken by another company in this fashion, so he filed a DMCA notice against Bukkit. This meant all downloads of Bukkit (and it’s derivatives such as Spigot) had to be removed. This all boils down to the GPL licencing of Bukkit, and if you’d like more detail on this, there is a nice clear rundown here.
There now appears to be a general consencus in the community that Bukkit is most likely now dead. The good news is that this is the Minecraft community. A setback like this won’t stop the brilliant developers we all know and love from giving up. Already many prominent developers in the community have started a new a plugin system named Sponge. Obviously this will be a rather large project, so we can expect to wait a while before there is a release, but it’s still great to know that the community is already moving on.
Spigot, Bungeecord and Spigot 1.8
What is Spigot?
Spigot is the most popular alternative Bukkit version. Without going into too much detail regarding what Spigot is, I think you could probably call it “Bukkit+”. It supports nearly all Bukkit plugins, and is a bit more optimised than straight Bukkit as well. However since Spigot is based upon code from Bukkit, all that applies to Bukkit applies to Spigot as well.
Bungeecord
Spigot also makes software called “Bungeecord”, which allows you to connect multiple servers together. I.e. Instead of having 10 worlds, you can have 10 worlds spread across 3 actual server instances. Thus reducing lag quite significantly (as well as customising mods on each server… yeah, it’s pretty great). Fortunately Bungeecord does not use code from Bukkit, so this is still available and is unaffected by the recent Bukkit events.
Spigot 1.8
While there is a version of Spigot 1.8 available, please note that it’s actually just a version of Spigot 1.7.10 that has been updated to allow 1.8 clients to connect. You won’t be able to get the new 1.8 features using this version, but if you’d rather forgo the added features and play on your normal world without requiring users to chang client versions, this is the way to go.
So that’s really everything there is on this debacle at the moment. We’ll continue to monitor the development of Sponge and will post again as soon as we see working version. We need our plugins back!
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