Bukkit

Bukkit was a set of community built, open source tools envisioned and developed to ease the creation of mcw:multiplayer plugins. It was intended to replace hey0's mcw:Mod. Because some of the developers involved had already been involved in hey0's Mod, there are similarities between the two plugins. However, mods written for hey0 had to be ported to use the Bukkit Application Programming Interface (API). Bukkit was originally envisioned as two tools, CraftBukkit and Bukkit, respectively the Bukkit server executable and the Bukkit API. This division was intended to make code upkeep simpler. Later, ScrapBukkit was created to develop certain server commands as a plugin rather than within CraftBukkit, and several other tools have been developed. Bukkit will most likely remain the multiplayer tool of choice until Mojang releases its official API, which is currently not in development.

mcw:EvilSeph and mcw:Dinnerbone were the most prominent developers on the team. According to mcw:Jeb, they have worked alongside mcw:Mojang in developing Bukkit.

During mcw:MINECON 2011, Bukkit had a Q&A session, as well as a demonstration of their new panel.

On February 28, 2012, it was announced that the Bukkit team had joined Mojang to further develop the Minecraft server software and to aid with the creation of modding APIs. It was later uncovered that the project had been acquired from Curse by Mojang as an agreement to being hired.

As of September 3, 2014, all Bukkit download pages are currently unavailable as per a DMCA takedown request filed from one of the former Bukkit team members.

For the most part Bukkit has been succeeded by Spigot, an updated fork of Bukkit's code that is backwards-compatible with its plugins.

Bukkit
Bukkit was used by Plugin Developers as an API to create plugins

BukkitDev
BukkitDev was the Plugin repository for Bukkit plugins. In the interim, a plugin list is maintained here.

On October 11, 2011 it was announced that the Official transition to BukkitDev had started.

ChatBukkit
ChatBukkit was an official plugin by the Bukkit Dev. Team, that was discontinued due to other plugins such as HeroChat, and Essentials.

CraftBukkit
CraftBukkit was the Minecraft multiplayer Server mods. It was a variant of the official Minecraft server executable capable of understanding Bukkit API calls, i.e. capable of running Bukkit plugins. You must have CraftBukkit to run a Bukkit server.

HomeBukkit
HomeBukkit was an official plugin from the Bukkit team, but is now discontinued due to plugins like Essentials

ScrapBukkit
ScrapBukkit is a Bukkit plugin that contains server commands for give, take, teleport and time. ScrapBukkit was a general-purpose example plugin built and developed by the Bukkit Team.

Controversy Surrounding Creation
hey0 officially discontinued his work on hMod with a forum post on January 4, 2011. Without hey0, development on hMod, the predominant server mod at the time, was unable to continue. Because of the unofficial nature of both hMod and Bukkit and because hey0 was very inactive, miscommunication led to some anger within the community. Parts of the community believed The Bukkit Project was stealing hey0's work and others were angry at hey0 because they felt entitled to continued development. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Bukkit was not ready for release for a period of more than a week after hMod was discontinued. During that hiatus, Server Version 1.2 was released, with significant new content. This made it impossible to run a server with the newest official Minecraft content and any plugins for that time without switching to MCAdmin. (MCAdmin was a competing server mod that had been abandoned by the community after Doridian, its developer, aggravated privacy issues by writing a backdoor in his plugin because he was angry at certain members of his userbase. ) The situation continued as the Bukkit team did not create a simple Bukkit download link on their webpage because of licensing issues. The Bukkit team wanted to release Bukkit under the GPL, and CraftBukkit under the LGPL, a proposition that is legally questionable because of The Bukkit Project's inherent dependence upon Mojang AB's proprietary codebase. Members of the Bukkit team met with Mojang on January 19, 2011 with the intent of discussing licensing issues, but the topic was not sufficiently discussed. (As of June 2011, Bukkit and CraftBukkit still contain those GPL licenses in their GitHub repositories.) The situation was resolved with server owners building Bukkit on their own from preview builds on the GitHub repository, allowing the community to have working multiplayer Beta 1.2 servers.

Controversy on discontinuation
On August 21, 2014, mcw:EvilSeph announced he was discontinuing the Bukkit project, blaming poor support from mcw:Mojang, and the enforcement of Minecraft EULA as contributing factors. Shortly after this spread through the community, a Mojang employee interjected on the situation stating that Mojang had acquired Bukkit and therefore EvilSeph had no authority to discontinue it. mcw:Jens Bergensten shortly after verified that Mojang did indeed acquire the project for an undisclosed amount from Curse. This grew controversy over who owned the project especially as there was no public announcement made of the acquisition and that both parties agreed to not disclose information, even from non-employed Bukkit team members. mcw:Dinnerbone later put emphasis on that mcw:Mojang owns the project and as founder of the project, he will continue working on it along with mcw:Erik Broes, however he also confirmed that Bukkit will not be the official mcw:Plugin API.

In response to these statements by Mojang AB, EvilSeph stated:

"Yes, Mojang does own Bukkit. Them acquiring us was a condition to being hired. If Mojang want to continue Bukkit, I'm all for it :)"

- EvilSeph, Twitter

Bukkit's future is unclear. However, Erik Broes has stated that Mojang currently owns the project and GitHub repositories.

Bukkit Plugins
Bukkit Plugins are basically server mods written in Java. As a user, you can download them in the above stated BukkitDev repository. For developing bukkit plugins, there are a lot of tutorials for beginners. You will need programming knowledge in Java.

Links

 * http://bukkit.org - Official web-site
 * http://rubukkit.org - Russian Community
 * http://bukkit.fr - French Community
 * http://bukkit.pl - Polish Community
 * [//bukkit.gamepedia.com/ Bukkit Wiki]