My addons are the product of a
hobby, and I develop and support them
in my free time at what is effectively a
monetary loss -- I neither solicit nor accept donations, so theoretically the time I spend on my addons is "wasted" because I could be spending that time doing something more "productive" instead -- beacuse it's something I enjoy doing.
As such, I feel entirely justified in reserving some of the rights I have under copyright law. The custom license under which I publish my addons does not qualify as an "open source" license, but it is very permissive. I do not care if someone wants to use my ideas or my code -- under my addon license, they are free to use any or all of my code for any purpose. They don't have to credit me anywhere. They aren't required to use the same license I used for my addon. The only requirement is that they cannot use my name or my addon's name. This ensures that:
(1) I am not burdened with bug reports for code I didn't write because some user confused "CoolMod Plus" with my addon "CoolMod".
(2) I am not deluged with questions about whether "CoolMod" is abandoned and users should use "CoolMod Plus" instead.
For a perfect example of why I include this clause, consider Grid vs Grid2:
Several years ago, someone who was not really involved with the Grid project decided to fork the codebase, rewrite parts of it, and called their addon Grid2. At the time, even the authors of Grid thought that this new addon would be the future, and that once it was done, it would become Grid's successor, so nobody commentedon the name.
Now, years later, the Grid2 project has stagnated in a state of perpetual beta, gone through a half-dozen developers with long gabs in between them, and has gone off in a very different direction that goes against many of the design philosphies that shaped the development of the original Grid.
As a result, Grid is still maintained (by me), and I am indeed deluged with a neverending stream of questions from users about the difference between Grid and Grid2, whether Grid is abandoned, if they should switch to Grid2, when Grid2 will be finished, why I'm still updating Grid, why Grid doesn't include X feature from Grid2, and innumerable other questions that would never come up if Grid2 was named anything else.
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My license also allows anyone to include my addon in a compilation -- as long as they don't modify it. Again, the primary purpose of this restriction is to avoid wasting my time dealing with bug reports for code I didn't write or release, and wasting users' time going back and forth with me until I realize why their bug is so elusive.
Basically, I view publishing your first addon like getting your first puppy as a kid -- if you're big enough to have a puppy to play with, you're also grown up enough to feed it, walk it, and clean up its poop. The people you got the puppy from aren't going to come to your house and take care of it for you.
Likewise, if you publish an addon, it's your responsibility to fix its bugs and support its users -- don't try to push that work off on me by confusing your addon with mine. If you're not willing or able to maintain and support an addon, you probably aren't ready to publish an addon. If you really feel the need to share your copy-pasta modifications with the world, post about it on the forums.
Originally Posted by Amarande
... In part, I suspect that the reason such an addon developer hasn't been found may lie in ARR: it certainly isn't a pleasant thought for the developer of a potential replacement that they will have to do everything for a fairly complex addon all over again from the beginning, without (just to be safe on a copyright side) even being able to look at how the current addon is coded as a reference.
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I don't buy it. "All rights reserved" is
not the reason huge addons fall into disrepair and aren't picked up.
Time -- specifically, the lack of it -- is the reason.
(1) Huge addons take huge amounts of time to maintain and support. If you stop playing WoW, or even if you just stop using the addon yourself, it's really hard to maintain even a relatively small addon well. For large addons like Cartographer or XPerl, it's even harder. You also have to consider that addon authors are just people like yourself. We have jobs, school, relationships, families, friends, other hobbies, and basic needs just like you. Life changes, and the amount of free time we have -- and are willing to spend writing and supporting addons -- changes too.
(2) Huge addons take even huger amounts of time to pick up once someone else has let them fall -- do you have any idea how long it takes to go through thousands of lines of someone else's code and reach a real understanding of how it all works?
It would probably take me less time to write a new raid frame addon from scratch than it would to reach what I'd consider to be a complete understanding of Grid's code -- even now, when I've been Grid's main developer for over 2 years, and was poking around in its code for years before that.
I had several addons that I hadn't personally used in 2-4 years, that I finally had to step back and say "okay, I'm not going to do this anymore". None of them were very large or complicated, but it was just too much time to spend on something that didn't benefit me at all, hadn't benefitted me in years, and would never benefit me again. At some point you just have to prioritize yourself and your life over your contributions to the lives of others. I don't think that's selfish; I think it's realistic.
All of the aforementioned addons had big bold notices on their download pages for years, saying that anyone was welcome to take them over. There is clearly no licensing barrier. Why do you think nobody volunteered to adopt these addons and keep them updated?
Originally Posted by Amarande
Of course, coming up with some kind of extra on-site reward perk as thanks for choosing to use an OS licence that you don't get if you upload as ARR could be a compromise, though I'm not quite sure what such a perk should entail. Maybe some kind of reduced or eliminated site ads just for authors who pledge to upload their addons under OS licences?
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This is a terrible idea. WoWI is a community centered around
World of Warcraft addons. If you're looking for a community centered around
open source principles, there are plenty of those out there, but this isn't one of them. WoWI is about functionality, not ideology. WoWI offers premium subscriptions because those generate revenue, and generating revenue makes good business sense. Pushing an ideology that alienates some of the people who drive traffic to your site does not make any business sense.
Plus, the official definition of "open source" is -- I feel -- pretty restrictive. My license boils down to "
DO WHAT THE F**K YOU WANT TO, as long as you do it under your own name", which I think is very permissive, but it doesn't qualify as an "open source" license. I've put in thousands of hours writing and maintaining over 30 addons, including some extremely popular ones, and I put in even more time contributing to the WoW addon community on the forums here and on WowAce -- to the point where other people have dedicated an entire thread to thanking me. I don't ask for donations, and I don't accept them when they're offered. I don't ask for thanks or credits, and frankly would rather not get them most of the time. If you think I should be penalized, shamed, or excluded because I don't share your
software licensing ideology, you can stick it where the sun don't shine. I suspect many other addon authors here will feel the same way.
Anyway, rather than futilely campaigning for WoWI to go out of its way to push an ideology that addon authors -- most of whom are not programmers by trade, many of whom don't even know what a license is --
don't all share, why don't you do something more constructive?
If you see an addon falling into disrepair, and are concerned that licensing issues may be a barrier to someone else picking up the addon, contact the addon's author and ask them to use a more permissive license, or even dedicate their addon to the public domain.
Better yet, if you think an addon is invaulable and that its demise would be a great loss to the WoW community, learn Lua and pick it up yourself.