Links and info: https://gist.github.com/Zoey76/5328604

All of this was a joke – Todo fue una broma – все это была шутка – All dies war ein Scherz

Okay then, this year our migthy bird was far from the nest and we had to handle our little April fools’ prank ourselves.

There was an interesting brain-storm of ideas on what to do and what to avoid, we were limited on forum-side jokes, we are sorry about that.. not.

The idea was to make a harmless Datapack update to play the server admins and if they had some sense of humor they could pass the joke on the players!

This prank will be known as “The Year of the L33t” to honor DrHouse’s idea of using leetspeak to prank users.

Here is a video example of the “Translation system”:

The L2J Team, be social and share the damn joke while you have a laugh too!

Summary:

1. License updates.
2. Library updates.
3. Tickets and Bug reports.
4. Adv. Users.
5. Wiki and Wiki Editors.
6. L2J’s main page.

1. License updates:

Somewhere along the server updates we lost the proper file header for new files, anyway do not worry it has been fixed!
We have properly updated our license notice in every Java class in core and datapack.
It has been done in [Core changeset 5737] and [DP changeset 9372].

2. Library updates:

There were some minor issues with libraries and after some chat with the team, we have decided to keep libraries updated while they are tested and they respond well to this tests.
Alpha, beta, pre builds of libraries will be skipped since they do not contain an important bug/exploit fix.

3. Tickets and Bug reports:

Ticket report system has been disabled for anonymous users, this means that new tickets cannot be added to the trac.
We will keep working on existing tickets, checking reports and fixing bugs.
This change may be seen as step backwards, but within the team we decided that is much clear to work in forums, where discussions can be held and we can put a nickname to each report and contribution.
All bug reports must be placed in Bug Reports
Since there is a restriction (post count equal or greater than 50), the other place to post possible bugs is High Five Server Support
Threads posted in High Five Server Support will be kept there until they are either fixed or set as invalid.

 4. Adv. Users:

As many of you may have noticed already, we have been recruiting new Advanced Users.
You do not need to be a Java expert or a SysAdmin to become one, do not be afraid to post and share your experiences with other users.
Becoming and Adv. User is the first step to get closer to the team, this gives you a few unofficial perks:
You can talk directly to developers and they will find some time for you.
Your reports are trusted, which means they will have a little bit more priority than other reports.
You cannot become part of the team if you don’t become Adv. User first, so if your goal is to be a L2J developer, this is where all the magic starts.
You get a new nick name color and a forum badge, which many of you find really cool.
You get access to a new sub-forum where you can share your ideas or work on something supervised by a team member.

5. Wiki and Wiki Editors:

To get the  badge and become one you need to start for the basic:
Read the Wiki Editors F.A.Q.
You can send applications either to ThePhoenixBird or Zoey76.
Is really important that Wiki articles reflects the team guidelines provided in support forums.
If you want to write about an alternative way to do something, please make sure you note that it’s alternative and the suggested way is in other article.

6. L2J’s main page:

We will try to deliver most information about changes and L2J’s current status in this wordpress posts.

The L2J development team.

After discussing and talking for a while with people from almost every group in the L2j community, we figured out several key changes in the way this project development should continue from now on.

All this time the development have suffered some slowdown and we think that H5 release might be a perfect time to revert and sort some of the issues that caused such delay, and that -we are aware- have diminished developers+community interaction/flow of goods.

At this point team and community should be one and the same, collaborating towards a single ideal of perfecting our beloved free software piece, teh L2j. With the upcoming changes we’re going to reinforce our commitment with this perspective, and we’re counting on you to succeed.

Starting from H5, further development will take place in a public branch, named (surprise) unstable. Initiates and devs should work there at will, with the single premise of taking L2J to the next possible level of perfection and stability. Fine grain details such as naming/coding conventions will be derived from current ones, but may evolve as the group of persons working there see fit. This way all of us will be able to test ideas, contribute and provide consistent feedback, and see the talent of our teammates in action from the very beginning. Trunk will still contain CT2.5 ’till H5 reaches enough stability. At this time a 2.5 branch will be created and trunk will be stable H5. Unstable branch will remain in service for H5 and the upcoming expansions.

Nightlies, that are now fully functional again will be taken from stable/trunk only, and source code exports will be created from time to time for FS/OS reference directories such as freshmeat, SF.net, etc. BUT there will be no nightly from unstable. People interested in giving a try to it will have to catch it up on their own. This way we should keep newcomers apart from bugs and stability/installation issues the unstable branch may hold now and then.

In the next couple of days we’ll be informing you about more changes, and the ways you can join the team to make L2J roar again.

Oh, and the diff_view thing should be back one of these days.

Gotta say sorry for the delay too, but better late than never. Hoping to hear from you soon. Sincerely.

The L2J development team.

All of this was a joke – Todo fue una broma – все это была шутка – All dies war ein Scherz

That is why the L2j Team has decided to deprecate L2j Server software which is now on its state of the art moment and leaving the source code available for everyone on its SVN, please note that no more updates will be added to this repository, other teams may continue with the development in another fork projects.

Now, as you may have noticed the L2j Developers have started a New Project:

Which is now a really popular game and we already count with several thousands of eagerly developers interested into working together with us on this new projwiect, we also invite all the former L2j Community to take part and join us in the new jKitty Server!

Here are some screenshots of what we have done so far, some skills are missing but we have them almost done:

All the instances are working!!

Fishing is also supported with achievements!!

And also a download link for the early ALPHA Build:

DOWNLOAD jKITTY SERVER v0.1a

Enjoy! <3

Merry F**king X-MAS Edition

L2j Team wish for all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Server: Changeset 4426

Datapack: Changeset 7670

Diff Patch: Send some love to janiii for doing it

Anyway enjoy and discuss here. Over 800 changesets, reworks, addons, bug fixes, etc… Changelog for Update #2 will be posted HERE as soon as someone get sober.

Over the past 6 years L2j has been working openly and widely with the community as any Open Source Project, providing as many tools and information as possible for their users, community and other projects to use, distribute and modify L2j as they wish to.

We in L2j believe that:

• An Open Source Project is about people producing free and open software and contributing to something as a team for the benefit of others.
• Open Source Projects reflect the spirit of collaboration and fun while learning new abilities and gathering community feedback and providing good support for further development.
• Open Source Projects are open to the participation of anybody who can contribute value and is willing to work with the community.

A good thing about an Open Source Project is that when you cannot get the software to meet your needs, GNU GPL allows you to Fork this software and create your own version, and make the necessary changes to the code to meet your needs. There are other reasons of why to Fork a GNU GPL software, If they don’t accept your features or patches, If the core developers reject to go in a direction that community members want, If the core developers don’t agree between themselves on what direction to go in.

Not liking or not trusting the core developers of the project is not a good reason to fork the project. Also, being worried that the core developers, at some time in the future, will do something you won’t like is not a good reason to fork the project.

Forking divides efforts as the two projects often take slightly different turns. The result of the fork is that the two versions of the code diverge, even though they share the same interface and most of the background logic. This creates a series of problems, of a technical nature, that reflects on the non-technical attributes of a program.

(Note: to integrate the projects there must, once again, be a common base of code all projects use.

A forked project reuses a big part of the code from the original project. This causes code duplication, with its usual problems, and one in particular: security risks. A forked project is usually vulnerable to the problems the original project had, unless that part of the code has been rewritten or modified with time. As the forks evolve, authors often miss the security issues fixed by their ancestor, making it harder for developers to track the issues down.

Another common problem is the division of users’ contributions. Users usually just report issues to one project, the one they use. So either the developers of the two projects exchange information about the bugs they fix in the common code, or the problems will likely be ignored by one of the two projects, making the distance between the projects increase.

GNU GPL nature is about FREEDOM, you are free to fork if you want to, there’s nothing wrong with that, also forking provides more distribution ways for the project, making it widely spread over all the other child projects it ensure that the project will exists even if the father project cease to exist, the freedom not only to use and modify the sources, but also to distribute and resell our releases under another brand name.

We in L2j ARE NOT against the forking of our software, we are PROUD of it. There is no good open source project without a fork.

But something that concerns us is the lack of responsibility and respect toward the original L2j Project, their Community, their Developers and the lack of attribution to the work that the L2j Community does.

We have seen how some forks take the L2j source code and remove ALL the L2j copyright notices from any of the source files or documentation. They also remove the author credits from source code, comments, and documentation. We have seen some (worse) cases when *forks* rebrand L2j as their own *created* software claiming themselves as the original authors.

We have tried to contact them but the answers that we have commonly received are:

• F**K OFF!!! *you have been banned from this channel*
• You are S**T and L2J is S**T too
• GTFO!!!
• We don’t care…
• <no reply>

This believe it or not, is a common scenario in L2j relationships with their un-friendly Forks when we ask for the attribution that we DESERVE for all the work we do, for free, for all of you, and for *them* and *their* users, because those “groups” that we refuse to call Forks steal our code and rebrand it as their own, for their “perfect working” software with “all features enabled”.

They intentionally make false accusations against the original L2j Project, about the lack of updates, lack of features and terribly performance and coding, they claim that their own versions have over 50% better performance (witch they have shown no proof of) all exploits fixed and no bugs, badmouthing the original project in order to get more attention to their own one.

Then, when you look at their repositories trac/svn, you find, that most of the “features” and “fixes” that they have added are just leeched from L2j repositories, but they don’t mention it, they dont give credit back to the people who made it, just with a simple “sync to xxx l2j” they copy-paste code taken from our sources with previously removed credits, and then claim that they “fixed it!” They do not even credit the original authors of the software or code patches.

So, how would you feel good about this if it happened to you? Your work, that takes you weeks, months or years to complete is *stolen* by a group of thieves? Not only your work as a Developer, but also, the work of your Community that gives their biggest effort into making good contributions and publish them in our forums. Have you noticed how many their “features” and “fixes” have been taken straight from our forums and they don’t even give a “Thanks” for it; neither giving attribution to where they found it nor mention the author of that public contribution?

Bork, fork, bork, fork, bork, fork!

Whilst the people who work hard on creating the software really despise this attitude, it has to be very clearly stated this is in fact not violating the GNU GPL at all. For as long a third party offers the binaries and the sources and in compliance with the GNU GPL, it is legal.

This is, of course, not counting the people who remove the copyright and license sections. That IS illegal, violating the GNU license which we use.

GNU GPL Freedom let you modifiy the code as much as you want, and that includes any line of code even if those lines contain author attribution info. Its’ a common practice in OSF to retain the original author attribution info comments in the source untouched, only modified to ADD your own attribution info below the original one. The only exception would be if you have COMPLETELY rewritten the function or piece of code of such author, then you could ”update” the attribution info to yourself. However, whereas GPL implies this kind of freedom, it doesn’t allow to deny or violate associated copyrights.

All Free Software projects benefit from free distribution, and there’s no reason to be ashamed of it by hiding that with obscure brands and refusing to credit the makers.

Such practice can be found in L2j Source Code in many places, also in our Trac when some changeset is done, authors are mentioned and given proper attribution, if the code submited has @Author info, those arent removed, but that is not the case with some un-friendly forks, and as we in L2j dont have the time to put a fight with a group of underground punks, we have just ignored them for a long time.

But every new day comes and we receive mails and comments from users about this, and we can’t not just sit idle without feeling frustration about this; it even discourages us to keep working on this project. Maybe many of you can remember our past April Fools Joke, so many people believed it because it was so close to the reality, that it was almost a certain future for L2j.

In fact, we can just make L2j a Private Open Source Developement, and sell licences to get access to the binaries and source code, and this in compliance with the GNU GPL, it is legal.

But we in L2j don’t work for money, we have never asked for money for our work (donations are used to pay server rent fees). We work for the spirit of collaboration and fun, if gives us more satisfaction to know that a lot of people is using our software happily, meeting with people from all places around the earth and FOR TEH LULZ.

We also collaborate with friendly forks, working hand in hand responsibly. Some of them are members of the Team or participate on our forums actively.

We are sending this open letter to the whole community to understand our position, and maybe… the measures that we would have to take in order to confront this situation. There are several ways to make L2j “hard-to-fork” without violating the GNU GPL, we could close the Trac, disable the “View/Download Diff” function, we could also bump big changesets with over 9000 changes instead of several small patches but that would hurt the whole community of people who really cares and contribute. That’s not our goal.

With this letter we make a final call to our un-friendly forks to show some ethic and comply with L2j in a few things:

• Choose the same license type as the original L2j project, GNU GPL v3.
• On your project web site make it clear that you are a fork of L2j, explain why if you want to. Dont confuse the people about the nature your project.
• Do not remove the names of developers or copyright notices from any of the source files or documentation.
• If you Sync to our repository, make clear which version or revision was synced, hyperlink to it if possible.
• You cannot use any logo from L2j websites without permission of the (c) owners.

That’s it!

We are not asking nothing else, we are not asking to stop their development or activities, we are not asking to change the direction of their project or their ideals, we are just asking for the attribution that the whole L2j Community deserve.

Regards
The L2j Team

Norse mythology, Freyja

~ L2j Freya ~

The long wait has come to an end, finally L2j Freya comes out of its Closed Beta state and hits the public SVN, we would like to thank everyone for their patience, this is one of the biggest updates ever done in L2j during closed development.

Quick highlights:

• Some new Freya features where added, and also some older features where added too (not all of them)
• A new Packet Executor has been implemented and some changes where done to the configuration files both in login and gameserver.
• Also several exploits from Epilogue where fixed in the current Freya build.
• Hellbound was a planned feature to be released together with Freya, but it has been delayed, dont worry its a PRIORITY feature and its currently under heavy development, you can expect it to hit the svn soon.
• Several other changes and addons where done, refer to the full changelog to read it.

Please remember to BACKUP FIRST before doing the upgrade to Freya.

You can download the sources from our SVN repositories:

Server: https://svn.l2jserver.com/trunk/L2_GameServer/

Datapack: https://svn.l2jdp.com/trunk/datapack_development/

And compiled binaries are already running in the Nightly folder: http://www.l2jserver.com/nightly/

Also, if you are receiving this error message while trying to download/view the diff from a changeset:

Error: Forbidden
FILE_VIEW privileges are required to perform this operation

Is not a bug, it’s a feature.

It’s directly related to a sensitive topic that is going to have a public announcement in the next hours.

The names that appear are from the developers who have made changes to the source code. The stars/highlights represent file commits made to the subversion repository. The histogram to the bottom left displays activity. Look out for the date displayed in the right bottom corner. Remember to Watch in HD!

Optional: Core only video and Datapack only video.

The long void during 2006 correspond to our server switch from OpenSVN to l2jserver.com and the rest are from the code freeze period that we take before a new release launch. We have even found some lost scrolls containing our old CVS repositories.

Code Swarm is an experiment for organic software visualization, you can find more information and download its source code to create your own swarm from their Google Code Project

All of this was a joke – Todo fue una broma – все это была шутка – All dies war ein Scherz

Well, well, well… i hope you all had fun like we did we laughed our asses off really hard, this was our April Fools Joke, all the licences stuff is just a small “white lie” that we prepared minuciously to shock you all.

We were going to reveal the truth on 2nd but since the huge impact that it caused and the large amount of rage/funny/emo/suicide comments both on website and forums we held up the joke for a couple of extra days to see you all freaking out for the sake of pure evilness.

Just like someone already said, all the jokes have a bit of truth on them, think about it for a while and then forget it, dont get too serious, but think that all our work we do here is for FREE and it will be FREE FOREVER, and for ALL OF YOU, not for us, since many of the current developers working on the official L2j staff dont run a server, many of them do it just for “fun” and/or “learning” purposes like me.

The entire team thank you all for the comments!

Notes: Just for the curious ones ranting and claiming that selling a paid L2j version violates the GPL, please read. As long we distribute the source code with the compiled binaries, you dont violate the GPL, the issue is that the same GPL let you distribute, modify, and sell the copy that you just bought, so you can’t effectively sell a “license” under the GPL.

IF YOU RAGE YOU LOSE!

The wonderful idea came when it was suggested to create a “paid” L2j version, with proper priority support and addons, also nBd aggred to share his private custom events for this new version.

Of couse, for the rest of the users they still can get the vanilla L2j version, but future OpenSource Development will be stoped starting on Rev.4100, there will be only security patches from now on for the”free” branch, no new development or features will be added to the vanilla version wich will stay opensource for the rest of you to keep using it or developing it.

From now on the current L2j DevTeam will focus on developing for the ”paid” version of L2j with the new features and addons (we have prepared some awesome ones), you then should consider to buy a L2j License:

Standard License
Price: USD$ 149,99/year

• Limited to 1 server with 100 users capacity.
• Priority Support via email/irc.
• Priority Beta-Releases.
• 0-Day Bug Fixes.
• Free Upgrades

Gold License
Price: USD$ 349,99/year

• Limited to 2 servers with 300 users capacity per server.
• Priority Support via email/irc.
• Priority Beta-Releases.
• 0-Day Bug Fixes.
• Free Upgrades
• Builds with Custom MODs.
• Priority Support for Custom MODs.

Extreme License
Price: USD$ 749,99/year

• Limited to 3 servers with 1000 users capacity per server.
• Priority Support via email/irc.
• Priority Beta-Releases.
• 0-Day Bug Fixes.
• Free Upgrades
• Builds with Custom MODs.
• Priority Support for Custom MODs.
• nBd’s Premium Custom MODs.
• DrHouse’s Admin/GameMaster Custom Panel MOD.
• ThePhoenixBird’s Designed 125×125 Banner in L2jServer Homepage.

We consider that those prices are cheap in echange for the amount of work and development that its required to stay competitive on this business.

The money from the licences will be used completely for our new L2j Developer Motivation Program wich will ensure quality work from our group of L2j Developers and for future development of new features.

Regards
L2j Team