Why we are pulling out from FOSS and closing the sources on many of our repositories

[Vetpetmon]

We've been asked multiple times why we have pulled our Minecraft mod, Wyrms of Nyrus, off of public read & write access, which forces potential contributors away from our software. We have weighed the consequences of that action versus the benefits, and found that it is much easier to protect our rights as developers, artists, and composers, if we closed our work from the public eye.

To many times, have we had to wake up our legal team, and they are just as frustrated about this issue as much as we are. A trend is that, we often get these illegal redistributions taken down by DMCA takedown notices faster than it is to be nice and kindly message the violator themself, like this:

Today, management has drawn the line, setting a clear statement: We're done being nice.

How This Fight Started

It began with the 9Minecraft redistributions of Wyrms of Nyrus and Synapse Library, which were injected with malware, affecting over 400 users. These users have now associated our software with malware, hurting our revenue greatly; but that wasn't all, many also began associating the modded Minecraft development sphere as being full of malicious actors.

9Minecraft did not give us any way to contact or reach out to the person who illegally redistributed and modified our software, so we targeted the site itself in a DMCA claim. The site complied, and this is the straw that broke the camel's back and founded our legal team. It was also the same straw that lead to us closing the source of Wyrms of Nyrus. Because SynLib was a library, it was too detrimental to close the source of that repository at the time.

We closed the source to Wyrms of Nyrus to better enforce ARR-like licenses on our assets and code in the future.

Steevemods was the second site to bring out Legal, and after ~1 week, the illegal redistribution was removed from there. Finding the right people to contact there was more difficult, but we are now scrutinizing Wix for their failure to comply with the DMCA, and sending us automated emails instead of having a human read and respond. We can use this as evidence of noncompliance if we ever need to, in the future.

What's happening now

The illegal redistribution of SynapseLib that was uploaded to Curseforge is now the target of Legal. We put a lot of trust into Curseforge to catch the copyright violation, but it has been made clear that Curseforge didn't due any due diligence to check if the uploader was Vetpetmon, Vetpetmon Labs, or Modrome/Iké. We consider Curseforge to be partially at fault for this incident. The user, minecraftgamer3536, posed our work as their own, not crediting us.

What was our FOSS stance?

We originally opted into FOSS (and making our software FOSS (with some restrictions on the license) and open to contributions) under the idea of letting our fans & community contribute to development and speed things along faster, resulting in better software sooner, rather than later. We thought that opening the source of our code would increase trust between the users and the creators.

How to do feel about FOSS now?

It feels like FOSS was a lie to us.

We feel like giving the freedom to view and contribute to our repositories was too much freedom. Freedom is a privilege, not a right, and that privilege was lost when we lost trust in our community to respect our artists, our programmers, our composers, our writers, our translators, and our designers. The very people who made these works possible were disrespected and became the victims of plagiarism. We do not take this issue lightly, and never have. When this issue extends to user safety, that's when extreme measures must be taken.

Management wishes we could apologize, but this was something the very same community we wanted to apologize to caused in the first place. We are unapologetic about what will happen to the source code of SynapseLib and its Cloudsmith repositories after the Curseforge incident is taken care of.

You will now have to ask us if you can use SynapseLib in your projects, as the Maven repositories will be taken offline.

[Vetpetmon]

I want to make it clear that while we support FOSS, we, ourselves, are pulling our repositories out of it.

We continue to support and use the Linux OS, GIMP, Kritra, and Mozilla projects.