Legality questions

[Mi@ow]

Hello everybody !

First I have to apologize for my bad english; Im a Swiss student and learn it at school ^^
I love the entire project and idea, but have some questions about the "legality side" of that;

1. Did you write the entire code of the minecraft server or did you "translate" the existing one and makes the adaptations that make it possible to work ?
   
2. Did you ask, and in this case did you get a kind of authorisation from Mojang to do this C++ adaptation ? (Or is there any legacy that tell that Mojang have nothing to tell you ?)
   
3. Can we legaly use MCServer to create Minecraft server (or do we have to ask Mojang first) ?
   
4. In the case where we run a MCServer server, are we ruled by the Minecraft's servers rules ?
   

I know this sounds like accusations but I can assure you it's not ! ^^
I juste had a Minecraft server with some friends of my school and we wanted to join the C++ side of the force (we all master the C++, and more than Java), but with all the EULA stuff, we don't know what we are allowed to do (we wants to stay legal all the time...).

A really huge thanks for all who will answer !
(And again sorry for my vocabulary x/ )

[xoft]

Hello, welcome to the forum.

The entire server has been written from scratch, there is no Mojang-owned code in the codebase. We are rather strict about this, so from this point of view, Mojang has nothing on us.

I am not a lawyer, but I believe that we don't need any kind of "permission" from Mojang to develop a server. It is an independent piece of software, it doesn't use any of Minecraft's code and doesn't use any graphics that could be copyrighted, either. The only thing that we could theoretically be sued for is the idea of the server, but that sounds far-fetched to me.

From this it follows that using this software to run a server doesn't bind you with Mojang EULA (note, however, that using their client to play on such a server does bind you with the EULA of the client). Of course you are bound by the license terms of the server, but those are really simply, since it's open-source. If you like the read, there's a license file for the server and for all the third-party libraries used, all in the binary distribution. Summing them up, you are free to use this server even for commercial purposes, you don't need to pay anything and if you develop your own mods or plugins, you don't need to share them back (although we would love it if you did).

[Mi@ow]

Thank you very much for responding so quickly !

So I think I'll become an actif member of mc-server community ! :-D