http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/417-bukkit-officially-joins-mojang/
After many months of providing an amazing plug-in service for the Minecraft community, Bukkit has officially joined the Mojang team! There are some immediately obvious benefits - official support for the game, better resources to develop Bukkit further - as well as the ability to develop tools, mod support and more which can be officially integrated into the game!
Bukkit developer EvilSeph stated numerous reasons for the move, including a desire to have better mod support for the game, that was more easily accessible to the community at large.
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EvilSeph said:
When news broke out about Mojang organising a Minecon, the entire community was alight with excitement and anticipation. Even today, I still find the sheer dedication from the fans unbelievable and overwhelming. Though we were also excited about Minecon, there was no way we would be able to go since Bukkit is an open source, free project. Much to our surprise, though, Curse had other plans in mind. They decided to fly us over, cover our tickets and accommodation, host us in their booth and setup a panel for us. I've never met a company that cares more about gaming than Curse: when the possibility of their supporting the Bukkit project first came up, we were all blown away. Curse wanted to throw themselves behind our project. They wanted to provide us with the support and resources we needed to continue functioning, no questions asked and their desire to send us to Minecon further reinforced this opinion we had of them. Thanks to their support, we were able to go to Minecon, have a great time and put together a panel filled with our fans, as well as sneak off to a secret meeting with Mojang.
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From that meeting, a partnership was born. We here at Curse are proud to have supported Bukkit, and to do whatever it took to help them continue doing what they did best - making an incredible set of tools for Minecraft players. We very much look forward to seeing a Bukkit-driven multiplayer experience in the coming days, and wish them the very best with their future at Mojang! You can read EvilSeph's full write-up right here, as well as Mojang's official statement on their home page - check it out!
Bukkit started in December of 2010, with the intent to develop tools to help run and extend SMP servers. Response to their project idea was massively overwhelming - so much so that their hosting server almost outright failed numerous times. Around this time, Curse & Multiplay's Steve Hartland offered their support, to make sure Bukkit was able to keep moving forward. While the Bukkit team had often dreamed of developing a proper Mod API (and certainly had the skill-set for it), they lacked the experience of handling something of that magnitude. Mojang, upon meeting with them at Minecon, discussed their ideas and the future of both Bukkit and Minecraft, and from there, the rest is history.
Once again, a HUGE "congratulations" to the Bukkit team from everyone here at Curse and the Minecraft Forum! Your hard work and perseverance definitely earned it!
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This means BIG THINGS for us in the future.
(1) We almost certainly WILL NEVER have to wait for a release of Bukkit again.
(2) Bukkit MAY be built-in to Minecraft automatically in the future. If not, then it'll at least be available when updates are released most likely.
(3) Bukkit will become more capable than ever before.
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