Originally Posted by Ketho
All of my addons are "Public Domain", both on WoWI and Curse .. but that's probably because I was naive and they don't have a large userbase anyway
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Some of my smaller addons (eg. ConfirmLeaveParty, Broker LFG) are public domain because it seems wrong to claim copyright over 5 lines of code that can't really be written any differently, or because they are 90% adaptation and beautification of Blizzard's ugly code. For anything with actual code, I like to have a stick to wave when people are doing stupid things like modifying the addon and including it in a compilation without changing the name, thus wasting my time with pointless bug reports. In a perfect world, "do what you want, and don't be a d**k" would be good enough for everyone, but in reality, some people are malicious, and others are just ignorant, and I have neither the time nor the desire to educate everyone.
On a semi-related note, something WoWI
could do would be to add a license metadata field to addon pages. The approach taken by Curse is pretty good -- you can either pick from a list of popular licenses like the GPL and MIT, or you can enter your own, and if you don't pick or enter anything, it defaults to "all rights reserved".
In the end, though, rather than trying to get WoWI to push open source ideology on hobbyists -- many of whom don't know or care about the differences between copyrights, licenses, trademarks, patents, etc -- simply contacting individual authors if there is a question or concern about the status of their addon is probably the best course of action.
Explain what you want to do, and explain how your ability to do it is affected by their license (or lack thereof). Unless the author no longer uses the email address they registered on the site with, they will probably be happy to give you permission to do whatever it is you want to do.
If you don't have anything specific in mind, and are just assuming that the reason nobody is actively maintaining an addon is because it's not "open source", you're probably wrong. Chances are, it's simply because nobody has the skills, time,
and desire to take on someone else's project and support it.