Originally Posted by Meldas
The re-distribution part is a little bit tricky. I'm pretty sure the Addon authors didn't allow my Firefox-Browser to download (aka re-distribute?) their Addon. The only difference is that by pressing the 'Download'-Button in WoWInterface you are making a deal with WoWInterface, whilst in WoWMatrix when you press the 'Update All' Button you don't (of course you can argue you implicitly do agree to the policies of all involved Addon-Download-Sites at once).
So, you are saying we won't have any more Addons then? The end of the world?
That's an unlikely assumption.
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Point 1 - not a re-distribution issue. They are circumventing the download process of the hosting site. It is within the hosting site's rights to prevent that.
Point 2 - Probably won't kill all addons. But it will kill addon hosting sites. The community and tools provided by these sites greatly enhance the quality and quantity of available addons. These sites are almost entirely ad supported. (And most aren't really profitable)
I don't think you realize the insane amount of bandwidth and server resources we're talking about here. I don't have permission to publish numbers, but recall that both Curse and Wowui were offline for the sunwell patch. Ace and wowinterface survived, but the traffic was huge.
If authors of popular addons had to pay for their own hosting, I suspect we'd lose quite a few of them.
I am a Mac user and an addon author, and I update manually.
I certainly don't update every day! Why would I risk breaking my interface every time I play? I understand the convenience of auto-updaters. But none of them have met my standards for useful/trustworthy yet.