Originally Posted by TheWafflian
Blizzard, not the addon developers, decides how addons are managed monetarily. Not by court, lawyer-based means, but because they can disable it if they don't like what you are doing.
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A few replies ago you said this wasn't the real topic of the thread, and you're correct about that. Scott allows free access to the add-on and Blizzard and WOWI were a bit hasty in their draconic response. First and foremost, that should be rectified.
On the larger topic of a company being able to dictate if third parties can charge for their time and effort on extending the company's software, I'd love to see that argument in court. Heck, I'd like to see it go all the way up to the SCOTUS if necessary. Once you strip away the corporate entity and monetary component of the argument, this argument ultimately boils down to the civil liberties and rights of the individual.
The desire by Blizzard should really be about the integrity of the gaming experience. That can be accomplished by providing APIs for their extensible interface, which they currently do, and enforcing those APIs. If they find that a add-on is affecting the stability and playability of the game, then sure, they are well within their rights to require that a developer brings their add-on inline with those requirements to ensure a stable and playable software environment.
Those requirements are realistic
*technical* considerations.
The choice to charge for add-ons is not even close to being a
*technical* consideration, and does not affect the integrity of the gaming experience from either a stability or playability standpoint.
As I said earlier, the only real right Blizzard has is to remove the ability to extend the interface at all, if they really want to prevent people from choosing to charge for the add-ons they develop.
Paying a fee for an add-on is based on an agreement between the consumer and the provider.
As has been noted previously, none of us are lawyers. But we all should understand what constitutes civil liberties and rights, and we should acknowledge those and expect that they be respected by ourselves and others. And we should most certainly champion those arguments in court when a party attempts to enforce a legal agreement that violates them.