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07-25-12, 07:32 PM   #1
Amarande
A Defias Bandit
Join Date: Oct 2008
Posts: 2
Lightbulb A Suggestion to Authors/WoWI on Future-Directed Licencing

There is one thing I've noticed about addons over the years that is, really, fairly distressing.

This is the fact that most addon authors neglect to include a specific licence in their addons (or simply put the standard "all rights reserved" line, which however at least in the USA is redundant as all creative works originating in the USA default to that level of copyright protection).

As a result, most addons are licenced on an all rights reserved basis - which has a huge downside. It means that no one other than the addon's author or specific designated successors may incorporate that addon's code into further addons, or take up the torch when an addon is abandoned.

This in turn ultimately hurts the player base as a whole, whether we write addons or merely use them. Addons become unmaintained, either the maintainer just stops working on that particular addon or they suddenly or gradually drop out of the WoW community altogether. For a while it doesn't matter, because the addon still works or needs only minor tweaks (e.g. I once made an experience bar substitute survive a new expansion - I forget if it was LK or Cata - before an updated version was put out by simply finding the line of code in my installed copy that designated a certain level as maximum and changed it to the new cap and it just kept chugging along).

However, invariably, all but the simplest addons are eventually broken by the passage of time, as eventually a Blizzard patch changes the addon API so that a critical portion of the addon fails to work (an example being when 4.0.1 made right-clicking off buffs a protected function - at this point addons could still display buffs, the appearance of EBB for instance being unaffected, but lost an important function compared to Blizzard's, making the addon unviable for many users). Thus, the addon finally really does need an update - not always a trivial one (I understand that EBB for instance needs fairly complex updates in order to adapt to the fact that clickoff-enabled buffs have to use secure frames).

And then it hits us in the pants: the addon is usually All Rights Reserved - despite the fact that WoW addons are inherently open-source after a fashion (as the form of Lua accepted by WoW is solely a text based scripting language with no human-unreadable bytecode) and that the use of addons for profit is frowned upon to put it mildly (thus giving little if any upside at all to ARR, which tends to be of most value when the work under copyright is one which monetary profit is desired from, or may be desired from in the future. Admittedly it also provides protection from plagiarism and unattribution, but so do e.g. CC licences that require attribution, and they do so without the heavy restrictions imposed by ARR), this cannot be taken to advantage because we don't have permission to. Only the original author can release an updated version of the addon, unless they delegate that permission explicitly to another person or people or to the community. Sometimes the original author can be reached and permission obtained, but a lot of times for whatever reason it's not possible to secure permission - in many such cases, because the original author moved on from the addon community or from WoW altogether and can't be found.

The result of this, in turn, is that an addon is obsolete and cannot legally be updated. It is lost forever. Meanwhile there is often not a suitable substitute available among other addons. The result is that a new addon is needed to do the same thing the old one did, and it's not always something that can be done easily (especially keeping in mind that ripping code from an ARR addon is also a no-no, so pretty much you're going to be forced to code that "Son of" addon "blind", preferably without even having the original on your hard drive at all in order not to provoke accusations of copying if your code does - as isn't too unlikely, since there's often only a limited number of reasonably efficient ways to achieve a given goal in computer code, particularly if that goal is complex - happen to be similar to the original's). It's a sad day, especially for those of us whose UI is particularly addon heavy (many players use few if any of the original Blizzard addons).


Mists of Pandaria is coming up. It will doubtless involve a lot of addon breakage, as every expansion does. In fact, I'm sure it will - I've noticed quite a lot of addons that were commonly used in Wrath haven't even quite made it to 4.3, or even at this late date Cata at all. Most of the unit frame addons have stalled out (X-Perl and Pitbull are falling further and further behind; only Shadowed Unit Frames seems currently to really deliver the functionality people were getting out of unit frame addons pre-Cata without significant outdatedness issues). There is still no BuffBar addon for Cata's secure frames (although I hope Elkano is able to update EBB for MoP at last). Of most note perhaps is that Cartographer, a very nice map addon (I always loved its ability to get the best of both worlds by showing the whole map but darkening unexplored regions to let you know they're unexplored), died out altogether during the LK-Cata mass addon extinction, and it still has yet to have a suitable substitute turn up to my knowledge.

However, because of the All Rights Reserved default (I almost called it a debuff ... heh), we'll probably find ourselves unable to do at least some things via addon for a period of time after MoP comes out - if the original authors of some popular addons aren't around anymore (and with subscriber numbers having been on the downs since Cata and the end-of-expansion-ennui factor seeming to be one of the worst ever to afflict WoW's zeitgeist, this is possibly even more likely than it ever was), it could be weeks or even months before a similarly functional addon gets built.

Thus, I ask of authors to go that extra mile for the community to think further of the future. It's not a difficult mile to do, as it doesn't require any special coding skill or complex additional stuff. In fact, it will ultimately be less taxing on your own time over time, since others will be able to contribute much more readily to your addons and thus make them all the better for the player base. I suggest that you take the time to review Open Source and Creative Commons licencing, and that you apply such a licence to your addon. That way, too, if you ever feel you don't have the time to put into it anymore, if you ever even feel like leaving Azeroth altogether is your best bet, instead of the community needing to start all over from scratch with a brand new addon to achieve the same goals as yours - we can rebuild him, so to speak!

My personal feeling on the topic, perhaps a bit heavy handed, is even that WoWI should require this licencing to be included in all new addon releases (and I can't see how this can especially hurt, seeing as there's nothing secret in an addon language that is wholly text (and for which obfuscation is disallowed without special permission from Blizzard), and you aren't supposed to sell addons for money so there's no profit motivation either), but this may be reaching a little too far at the present (perhaps in a future time when enough authors have voluntarily made the switch to FOSS licencing for addons it might be a ripe time to push the author community to this leap).
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