So Bukkit wasn’t the first. It was hMod in 2010. Everyone came over from hMod because hey0 disappeared for a hot minute in late 2010. Everyone from Bukkit came from hMod, although there were also holdbacks who didn’t like someone stealing the hMod community, but a gathering of major plugin developers and devs from hMod forced everyone’s hand (but also, hey0 disappeared for a relatively long time with no explanation).
hMod also had a problem: it didn’t attempt to reverse any of the code obfuscation from Mojang, so working with it was extremely difficult. When hMod came about, it predated the MCP project as well by like 3 months, which started as a major community effort to deobfuscate the codebase. Bukkit came after MCP and could take from it inspiration.
We are still in year 2010.
Fast forward many years later… Microsoft had nothing to do with what happened actually. Bukkit was secretly owned by Curse, and much later Mojang secretly bought Bukkit.
This secret sale pissed off a lot of the community and one of the core but non-OG contributors (Wolverness — he joined Bukkit much later) issued a DMCA against the codebase as a form of protest. This was obviously controversial but he also had a lot of support.
Mojang actually never substantially interfered with the wholesale illegal distribution of its source code.
Anyway, because Mojang was officially hiring the Bukkit team, but only limited to some members from the OG 2010 team, and with the other core contributors not being included at all, and with the DMCA taking down the repos, Bukkit became dirty and there wasn’t a future for Bukkit anymore. Spigot, which was then a performance fork of Bukkit, became the de facto successor (not to say that there weren’t many other options and competing choices in play too).
Spigot didn’t create their distribution strategy though. MCP did things this way.
So Bukkit wasn’t the first. It was hMod in 2010. Everyone came over from hMod because hey0 disappeared for a hot minute in late 2010. Everyone from Bukkit came from hMod, although there were also holdbacks who didn’t like someone stealing the hMod community, but a gathering of major plugin developers and devs from hMod forced everyone’s hand (but also, hey0 disappeared for a relatively long time with no explanation).
hMod also had a problem: it didn’t attempt to reverse any of the code obfuscation from Mojang, so working with it was extremely difficult. When hMod came about, it predated the MCP project as well by like 3 months, which started as a major community effort to deobfuscate the codebase. Bukkit came after MCP and could take from it inspiration.
We are still in year 2010.
Fast forward many years later… Microsoft had nothing to do with what happened actually. Bukkit was secretly owned by Curse, and much later Mojang secretly bought Bukkit.
This secret sale pissed off a lot of the community and one of the core but non-OG contributors (Wolverness — he joined Bukkit much later) issued a DMCA against the codebase as a form of protest. This was obviously controversial but he also had a lot of support.
Mojang actually never substantially interfered with the wholesale illegal distribution of its source code.
Anyway, because Mojang was officially hiring the Bukkit team, but only limited to some members from the OG 2010 team, and with the other core contributors not being included at all, and with the DMCA taking down the repos, Bukkit became dirty and there wasn’t a future for Bukkit anymore. Spigot, which was then a performance fork of Bukkit, became the de facto successor (not to say that there weren’t many other options and competing choices in play too).
Spigot didn’t create their distribution strategy though. MCP did things this way.