I apologize, but unlike Haleth, I didn't read through the entire OP.
(I is tired and ADD atm. But I tried!)
But I did want to point out that while someone is well within their rights to update/modify an addon that has a license allowing such, the authors themselves are also *well within their rights* to not include any such license at all. Be it out of ignorance or on purpose, there is absolutely nothing that says that they cannot do this. As you already pointed out, at least in the US, addons are automatically ARR unless specifically licensed differently. Why should authors be forced to license their creative works as something else? If I don't want 3 different variations of PocketPlot floating around the interwebs (either modified or old, redistributed versions) then that is my right to limit such a thing.
Some users say that authors *should* make their addons open source. The usual argument for this is "What will
I do when they move on with their life and stop updating the addons that
I want to use? Why do they have to make
my life hard?" (emphasis mine, of course) This, however, is a selfish argument. If an author didn't release their creative works to the public domain upon leaving the game/authoring or arrange for someone to take over the project then either A) they didn't want to or B) they didn't think it was important. In either case, users can put forth a small fraction of the effort that the author expended in writing and upkeeping the addons and find themselves something new to use.
This is also a misunderstanding by you:
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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
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Just because you can read the text in a book does not mean that it cannot/should not be ARR. The same applies to code. Just because you can read my Lua script does not mean that it cannot/should not be ARR. And just because the addon has to be offered for free does not mean that you should also be free to do whatever you please with it. Have you heard the phrase in software,
"Free as in free beer, not as in free speech"?
I do not include a license with any of my addons. Is this because I hate users, want them to become attached to my addons, and then will laugh incessantly when they cry after I let the addons die a fiery death? No. Do I sit at home staring at my addon code in Notepad++ repeating "My preciousssssss"? No. I put my addons up for download because I'm nice like that. But they are still mine. I do still have the option of saying "No" to a feature request and I do take enough pride in my work to hate to see it copied or years old versions stolen off WoWI and redistributed elsewhere. Hell, even current versions. WoWI is where I want my addons to be so that they get the traffic, I keep comments and bug reports in one place, and users know how/where to contact me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could probably find a license to suit all my needs or write something up myself. But instead of me going through all of that additional effort and wading through legal jargon, would it kill you to ask me how to change something or to take over the addon when/if I'm gone? I'm usually known to be pretty amiable. And if I instead say "Bugger off!", well, I'm within my rights to do so.
