Originally Posted by Silenia
I have never been charged a dime to use WoWMatrix and cannot find anywhere on the site where they force anyone to give them cash.
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Monetary profit doesn't have to come directly from the end user paying a fee to use the service. Look at all of the sites you use on a daily basis. How many of them charge you money to use them? How many of them do you think don't make any money, and operate at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts?
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As for them not answering your emails, lets go back to how much advertising and site hits they get. I can only imagine they get hundreds if not thousands of emails regarding their product, so it doesn't surprise me if they have not answered your emails. Keep trying though and you'll get through eventually.
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My first message, inquiring how their site and service worked, was answered within a few hours. My second message, requesting that they not distribute my addons through their service, was never answered. However, I know it was read, as my addons are no longer listed on their site. In the time it took them to copy and paste my addon names into whatever filtering system they have in place, do you think they couldn't have spared another 30 seconds to type a brief reply to me? I think it's rather telling that they didn't.
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Anyone can get the addon authors contact info from right inside of the addon folder, or by checking the About feature in game for whatever addon they are checking on.
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The in-game About feature is provided by the Ace2 and Ace3 frameworks, which are not used by all addons. Many users don't even know where addons are installed, let alone that they can find information about the author by looking in the .toc file or a readme file.
How many users do you think will encounter a problem in a beta-test addon that they don't know is a beta-test addon, and go looking in the .toc file for contact information to report the problem to the author? I'd guess that very, very few users would do this, or even think about this. Most users will just delete the addon, and tell their friends that it's broken and shouldn't be used.
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Personally, I don't need to see the authors name. I am only interested in the version numbers, the name of the addon, and a short description of what it does. Anything other info on the GUI is a waste of time for me, the average user. If I really need the info, it's far too easy to come by.
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Let's say you're a photographer. One day you take some portraits of your cat, and post them on a photography forum for critique. A few months later you're in a bookstore flipping through a book of cat photography. You turn to page 42, and there, lo and behold, is your cat portrait! Your name is mentioned nowhere in the entire book. I'm sure most people reading the book wouldn't ever wonder who took the picture of the cat, but I'm equally sure you would feel some sense of injustice to see your work distributed without your consent and without any credit to you.
Opening WoWMatrix right now and comparing the first 5 or 6 addon descriptions from that window and what is on the Ace file site, the addon descriptions are a dead on match word for word. I use almost 100 addons, I'm not gonna compare em all 
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WoWMatrix uses the addon's .toc description. This is all well and good for a stable, finished addon. But if my addon is brand new, undergoing public beta testing, and not yet suitable for daily use by the average user, seeing that my addon provides "Easy hunter pet care" isn't very helpful. The .toc description is meant to be a brief phrase or sentence describing the addon's purpose, not a detailed document explaining the addon's current development status or explaining how to use the addon.
Beyond all of those things, the license I release my addons under explicitly forbids any redistribution. That means you can't release MyAwesomeUI if it includes my addon, you can't upload my addon to UI.WorldOfWar, and you can't distribute my addon through a third-party leech site.