Originally Posted by Pyrophoric
While I believe WoWM's side of the story, I also believe that most of the animosity has stemmed from Curse and their greed.
|
13-08-08 Originally posted by Nevcairiel @ WoWAce
relevant thread.
WoWAce will in no way change to a business website. All addons hosted here will still be freely available to anyone, you just will not get a mass updater due to bandwidth concerns.
All we actually have to do with Curse it the possibility to directly push releases from WoWAce to Curse. Me and Kaelten even discussed the possibility to add more release pages to that list later on - but all in due time.
No-one will have to pay to get his addons, and no-one will have to pay to host addons here. Any Dev will still be free to do whatever he wants - as long as the principles we established for our community are kept in mind. The only "real" change is that WAU will cease to exist, because it was no longer maintainable with its excessive use of bandwidth, and i perfectly understand that Curse was no longer willing to pay those bandwidth bills.
We tried running Ads, we tried accepting donations, but as it is with Open-Source, people go insane if you add ads to fund yourself, and donating is a word not in their dictionary. We even considered running a "Premium" version of WAU ourselves, but that was out of our scope at the time. So now, after 2 years of trying, we shut down WAU - or rather, Curse shut-down WAU, because they payed for it.
Curse will still be paying the hosting bills for WoWAce, and we should be thankful for it.
Now we can offer a lot new and awesome features to the addon developers, and its all still for free. WoWAce always was and always will be a community from the developers for the developers - and I'm pretty sure Kaelten will make sure it stays that way, and so will I.
Personally, i won't miss WAU and its excessive updating of Alpha versions. It caused more harm then good, if you ask me. Authors now just need to learn to push their releases to Curse, to WoWI, or to whatever page they prefer - like it should've always been.
Obviously we cannot stop you from leaving, but we're trying to do all we can to resolve the issues that might arise. If you have any specific concerns at all, don't hesitate to bring them up with us.
|
Premium is also mentioned in the aforementioned thread and has been known to most avid addon users for months. That was aprox. 9 months ago and you may notice, Curse was paying for WoWAce for 2 years before that with 0 gains and mostly (if not only) loses, so that people can get their free bacon. Yes, you guessed it, it's the same people that call "Greed ! Greed !" now. Thankfully there are still some of us in the community with a good memory. I won't judge how Curse has elected to run their business (because at the end of the day the reality is, IT IS a business that needs a sustainable model to continue providing the things it provides and all can enjoy), but I cannot deny facts. Yes, the free version of CC may be too restrictive in certain cases, yes some parts of their website could be very much improved (or revamped even), fact remains. It still costs nothing to update an addon. Not a thing, either through the free version of CC or manually. On the other hand, you always have a choice to support the people that are busting their collective...behinds for this community for years, by providing (and paying for) much needed services so that authors can get their stuff out, whatever the name of the website they represent is.