Why you should avoid bukkit for minecraft.

I realize this is a bit of a rant post, but I feel that when a large community does something very wrong, it should be brought to the public attention. I'm going to explain to you some recent events that happened to me and my friends in the bukkit community.

First off, lets get it straight that Bukkit is licensed under the GPL and thus all plugins are too. The license they have chosen basically says that everyone is free to modify and distribute bukkit and bukkit plugins, so long as they share the source code, and use the GPL (Or another compatible license) too. However they won't enforce this (Meaning that if someone is evil and decides not to release the source code, they won't chase them) This is fair enough, and common in most open source communities.

With this in mind, my friend found a bug in the bukkit stargate plugin, and being the friendly guy that he is, he fixed that bug. He even posted it on the bukkit forum so that everyone else could use it, and the developer could incorperate the fix into his plugin. He got a few thank you posts in a matter of minutes, isn't my friend nice. :)

Apparently not according to the bukkit developers. within about 10 minutes a moderator came along, deleted my friends post, deleted all the thank you posts, deleted the entire thing as if it was never there.

Why did the moderator do this? The plugin author stated that his plugin was not GPL licensed and that we arn't allowed to submit bug fixes to his plugin.

At this point I simply thought it was a moderator who didn't know how the GPL worked, so I went to their IRC channel to try and talk about it. I was told that bukkit doesn't enforce the GPL and thus the thread deletion was valid. This is simply ridiculous, you can't say "You are free to modify and redistribute everything, but we won't enforce it" in public while behind the scenes making every attempt to censor such activity. It makes no sense, what they are saying publicly and what they are doing is completely contradictory.

Finally, after a lot of ranting, and a lot of people who clearly didn't understand the GPL, I got talking to EvilSeph. This is where things went even further downhill. He muted the entire channel, and then told the operators of the channel (IE: the people that contribute their free time to help him run the bukkit project)

EvilSeph: if anyone but myself talks, they will be banned

EvilSeph: apart from Azelphur.

I don't even know where to begin with how wrong this is, These people donate their time and effort to help support the bukkit project, and he threatens them with a ban simply for speaking? There are just no words to describe how wrong that is.

He then went on to state that they don't want any unofficial bugfixes or builds posted, as they don't want to support the users. There's a number of problems with this argument.

First off is the fact that if you don't want people to modify and redistribute, don't use the GPL license. You can't tell people that they are allowed to modify and redistribute publicly, and then behind the scenes make every attempt to censor people doing so.

The second problem is that the amount of support load this adds is in most cases slim to none. As most people know, I'm rather prominant in the SourceMod community, which bares a lot of similarities to the bukkit community. SourceMod is pretty much Bukkit for source engine based games (counter strike, team fortress, etc) and I maintain a pretty big plugin (SourceIRC) which is released under the GPL. Much like the GPL stipulates, I encourage modification and redistribution of my plugin. I've seen some very interesting stuff come from this, one person is working on a complete rewrite to make it behave differently (act as a server link) while I've seen a number of users using modified versions of it to provide different/new features than what I currently provide. Has this caused me an extra support load? No. Not once have I recieved a support query about any of these modifications, and even if I did, why would this be such a bad thing? these queries can either be redirected to the appropriate developer, or ignored. Nobody is forcing anyone to provide support for anything here (In fact, the GPL specifically states that there is no warranty at all)

The third is of course, rather obvious, censoring peoples attempts to post modifications (as long as they arn't malicious or somehow evil) as a modding community, is rather bad. In a modding community your supposed to post modifications, not being allowed to do this violates the entire point.

Me (and everyone that agree'd with me) ended up banned from the bukkit IRC channel in the end. The conclusion to this is that if you're thinking about contributing to bukkit, I'd think carefully about how you're contributing to ensure you don't push any buttons, and whether it's even worth bothering when the team there exhibits behaviour like this. Not just against users, but contributers and staff too.

Here's a full log of the IRC chat if anyone is interested, EvilSeph mutes the entire channel at 03:38:41

Edit: Also want to point out that I'm not against bukkit choosing a different license, I'm just against them saying they are GPL and enforcing the opposite.