History of Minecraft Server Development - nsporillo/GlobalWarming GitHub Wiki

Introduction

What is Spigot? CraftBukkit? Bukkit?

History

Minecraft Server Modding support was originally never supported by Mojang. The first major modding API support that I know of was created by hey0 and called hMod.

hMod and Bukkit

Support for hMod was discontinued around 2010, and the need for a new API which supported the new features of each Minecraft update was great. This led to the creation of Bukkit in early 2011 by the core Bukkit team (EvilSeph, lukegb, Tahg, and TnT) with many others supporting the cause.

The core development team for Bukkit had close working relationships with Mojang. By Febuary 2012, Bukkit had announced they were joining hangs with Mojang to officially support the modding API.

Licensing Issues

A copyright dispute cropped up in 2014 when a major contributor to the Bukkit project wanted to enforce his copyright. Finally the volunteer development team was dwindled to the point where they could no longer provide new releases. Licensing issues remain a issue to this day, due to the original license chosen by Notch.

The last known release of the Bukkit API was made in May 2014 for Minecraft 1.7.9 servers.

Spigot

Spigot built upon the success that the Bukkit API had with providing the modding community with a great API. Initially started in late 2012 as a fork of CraftBukkit, Spigot was optimized for servers with large concurrent player counts.

Licensing

Spigot is actively maintained to this day, but is not legally allowed to distribute jar files for use. If you ever go through the process of installing a spigot server, you'll notice the convoluted process that cannot be circumvented.

Patch Process

Spigot is built by first pulling the public repositories of Bukkit and CraftBukkit and applying many software diff patches to them.