Minecraft 1.8 News
Posted: Mon 08 Sep , 2014 11:28 pm
In early September, the newest Minecraft version 1.8 was officially released and some of you already asked when our server will be updated to the new version. Recently there have been some developments regarding the Minecraft server version we use.
As you know, we don’t use the official server version released by Mojang, the company that develops and sells Minecraft. The official server version from Mojang doesn’t offer any possibilities for plugins. That means that running such a vanilla server is very dangerous as it doesn’t even offer the slightest capabilities for protecting the server. Instead we use an open-source server version of Minecraft with a plugin API, allowing us to install and use plugins to expand the limited capabilities of the original server version. In particular, we are currently using a fork from the Bukkit server API, used by most multiplayer servers.
Roughly three weeks ago, the leader of the Bukkit dev team, EvilSeph, announced that he is going to resign and that further development on their server version won’t continue due to lack the of support it would require to update the server to the 1.8 version. Shortly after, Mojang released a statement that they were actually owning Bukkit for the last two years and that, therefore, EvilSeph was in no position to close down Bukkit. Mojang further ensured that the Bukkit server version would be updated to 1.8 under their charge.
Some days later, however, a former Bukkit developer filed a DMCA complaint against the Bukkit project, stating that it violates the GPL license it was released under by bundling it with the closed-source Minecraft server code and that, therefore, his contributed code must not be used anymore. As a result, all downloads of Bukkit had to be removed from their site. Since then, many members of the former Bukkit dev and admin staff resigned as well.
The same DMCA complaint was also filed against the Spigot server project (the Bukkit fork that we use), forcing them to remove their downloads as well. It is currently not possible to download any alternate server version which relies in the Bukkit API. If and when it will ever get updated is not clear at the moment. Mojang, so far, has not released any information on how they plan to proceed with this mess.
All we can do at the moment is to wait…
As you know, we don’t use the official server version released by Mojang, the company that develops and sells Minecraft. The official server version from Mojang doesn’t offer any possibilities for plugins. That means that running such a vanilla server is very dangerous as it doesn’t even offer the slightest capabilities for protecting the server. Instead we use an open-source server version of Minecraft with a plugin API, allowing us to install and use plugins to expand the limited capabilities of the original server version. In particular, we are currently using a fork from the Bukkit server API, used by most multiplayer servers.
Roughly three weeks ago, the leader of the Bukkit dev team, EvilSeph, announced that he is going to resign and that further development on their server version won’t continue due to lack the of support it would require to update the server to the 1.8 version. Shortly after, Mojang released a statement that they were actually owning Bukkit for the last two years and that, therefore, EvilSeph was in no position to close down Bukkit. Mojang further ensured that the Bukkit server version would be updated to 1.8 under their charge.
Some days later, however, a former Bukkit developer filed a DMCA complaint against the Bukkit project, stating that it violates the GPL license it was released under by bundling it with the closed-source Minecraft server code and that, therefore, his contributed code must not be used anymore. As a result, all downloads of Bukkit had to be removed from their site. Since then, many members of the former Bukkit dev and admin staff resigned as well.
The same DMCA complaint was also filed against the Spigot server project (the Bukkit fork that we use), forcing them to remove their downloads as well. It is currently not possible to download any alternate server version which relies in the Bukkit API. If and when it will ever get updated is not clear at the moment. Mojang, so far, has not released any information on how they plan to proceed with this mess.
All we can do at the moment is to wait…