Originally Posted by Greenman
I find the arguments against WM to be a wee bit two-faced.
On the one hand you say
"ZOMG they were stealing our content and hosting it themselves"
and then you say
"but we made them stop and now their stealing our bandwidth instead."
I'd written a mod or two in my day, and had them hosted on one or both sites. I don't recall giving over sole ownership of the programs, much less rights to make revenue off them, when I did so. Perhaps I should read your fine print more carefully in the future?
I'd much rather see a CPAN-ish model for these things... make a library of mods with a good index, and then mirror it to any and all that want to spare the bandwidth, so no single site is stuck paying the bill. But, I guess that's against the real issue here: your making a profit off the code of others.
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So far as i recall the staff at WoWI did not claim WM was stealing their content. They dont own the addons hosted here. It was the authors who started the discussion and those that did not want their addons redistributed without permission went after WM and told them to stop hosting their work. Which it appears after a fashion they did.
The stance of the admins here has been stated clearly. People need to stop confusing the authors that choose to only host here with the admins of the site.
As for making a profit off others. Hosting a site takes money to cover costs. This is a fact. People should stop assuming that the need to cover costs is the same as making a profit.
prof⋅it
/ˈprɒfɪt/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [prof-it]
–noun
1. Often, profits.
a. pecuniary gain resulting from the employment of capital in any transaction. Compare gross profit, net profit.
b. the ratio of such pecuniary gain to the amount of capital invested.
c. returns, proceeds, or revenue, as from property or investments.
2. the monetary surplus left to a producer or employer after deducting wages, rent, cost of raw materials, etc.: The company works on a small margin of profit.
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Number 2 seems to come up often. Im not sure if people believe that or think its something that will rile other folks up.
No author is under contract or obligation to host here. The ones that do choose to do so for their own reasons which i will not guess at. People are hung up on it being about making a profit. Its simple. If the sites cant cover costs (and the increased bandwidth cause by WM) then they shut down. End of story. Full stop. All gone, BYE BYE! and the program ceases to work. Its basic logic. If your costs far exceed your gains long enough you are out of business. And anyone or anything trying to piggyback on it is SoL.