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by scourge 4259 days ago
This. Lesson learned: the "over 150 developers" who literally threw away their time(i.e. money) working on this had the option to work on minetest instead. They didn't. Grow up, learn your lesson (I have in much more painful ways) and only use GPL.
2 comments

> only use GPL

It looks like the lesson from Bukkit is that if you use GPL and there's some problem, then a disgruntlend copyright holder (of GPL-licensed code) can get your entire project into trouble.

The project of course was wrong to include or link to proprietary code. But had they used a free license for their own stuff, Wolfe wouldn't have had a claim to make.

Actually I can't think of a single license that would have been valid here unless it came with Mojang's permission. The problem was the proprietary code. Had everything been GPL, not a single copyright holder could have affected the project in such a way.
No, the proprietary code was a problem. Another problem was a license that gave a single developer the power to take the project down. If the code were permissively licensed, he could've not done that. Yes, it would still infringe on Mojang's rights, but that could've been addressed separately.
Another problem was a license that gave a single developer the power to take the project down.

It gave a developer the power to take down a project violating the GPL. That's probably a quite good power for them to have. I don't see how that's a problem for anyone except if you currently are or wish you could violate the terms of the GPL.

Minetest is LGPL, btw.