[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Meldas WoWMatrix is currently the only working Addon Updater for a Mac. For me this is an absolutely free application and it is essential. I challenge you to point me to a Mac application which does the same. There are NO other updaters of this kind - at least I haven't found them after weeks of searching and hours of trying out.

Your Google-fu is weak. See http://fambagge.dk/jwu/

Originally Posted by Meldas I'm using less than 70 Addons but there were times I got more than 10 updates every day. Locating them (they aren't all on the same Addon site), downloading them and unzipping them costs a tremendous amount of time. It costs that much time that I, as a user, value the benefits of WoWMatrix more than any benefits from any single WoW addon.

What kind of addons are you using that you see ten actual updates every day? If you're using addons from wowace.com, try reading the changelog files that come with the addons sometimes. You'll find that the vast majority of "updates" are triggered by changes to translations for languages you don't speak.

Fortunately, the integration of WowAce and Curse means that you will no longer be burdened by an "update" every time an author commits a change to his or her addon's development repository. You will now only see updates when the author feels there are actual changes that deserve being posted as a release.

This "problem" is only a problem due to lack of user understanding, and poor planning on the part of WowAce, but it won't be a problem in the future.

Originally Posted by Meldas If you want to remove your addons from the WoWMatrix list, please go ahead (well, you have the right to do so). However, for me this means I'm not going to use your addon any longer.

I'm sorry you feel it's too much of a burden on you to spend 90 seconds a few times a month updating an addon without the assistance of a computer program.

Other than the aforementioned wowace.com "problem", most addons really aren't updated all that frequently. I use about 150 addons, plus around 100 libraries. About half of those are available here on WoWInterface. I have them marked as favorites, and have enabled email notification for updates. On average, I see 0 to 2 updates each day, and I'd estimate that 2/3 of those are only applicable to WotLK.

Originally Posted by Meldas However, I also know that as soon as I put something as 'free to use' into the internet I'm also loosing the control over this.

As others have already pointed out, this is not how the law works.

Originally Posted by Meldas The re-distribution part is a little bit tricky. I'm pretty sure the Addon authors didn't allow my Firefox-Browser to download (aka re-distribute?) their Addon. The only difference is that by pressing the 'Download'-Button in WoWInterface you are making a deal with WoWInterface, whilst in WoWMatrix when you press the 'Update All' Button you don't (of course you can argue you implicitly do agree to the policies of all involved Addon-Download-Sites at once).

It's not tricky at all. Let's move out of the virtual world and into the real world. Let's say you're a painter, and you paint a lovely forest scene. You choose a local art gallery, and display your painting there, and sell prints through them. When someone in a distant location orders a print of your painting, they can choose to have the painting shipped via either FedEx or UPS. Would you, the artist, object to this and say you did not grant FedEx or UPS permission to distribute your painting? Of course not; that's absurd. In this scenario, the painting is an addon, the gallery is WoWInterface, and FedEx and UPS are the browsers users visit and download with.

Now let's say you go visit a relative in another city. While you're there, you decide to stop by an art gallery there and see what's popular in that area. To your surprise, you discover that the gallery there is also selling your painting! But instead of using FedEx and UPS, they deliver each print themselves. You did not grant this gallery permission to display and distribute your painting. Would you say that their role in this is the same as the role of FedEx or UPS in delivering prints from your local art gallery? Of course not; they are actively displaying (hosting) your painting (addon), soliciting buyers (users), and selling (distributing) your painting (addon), without involving the gallery you actually contracted with to promote your work.

Now let's go a step further and say that the second gallery, which is showing and selling your painting without your consent or even knowledge, is sneakily avoiding paying postage on deliveries of prints of your painting that they sell, by dropping their outgoing deliveries in the shipping bin of the first gallery. Now you have a relationship between the second gallery and the first gallery that is fairly similar to the relationship between WoWMatrix and WoWInterface.

Hopefully taking the "virtual" out of the situation will better illustrate the problem.

Originally Posted by twhiting9275 Why should someone have to debug someone else's pathetic mod? They shouldn't!

Most addons are written by a single author, in his or her spare time, for a game that is played for personal entertainment. These authors simply do not have the time and resources (one of every class, at each of many levels, on different regional servers under different client locales, running with every possible combination of available addons, through every possible situation in the entire game) to ensure that their addons are absolutely bug-free. If you think this makes these authors and the addons they write "pathetic", I hope you limit yourself to using only addons you wrote yourself.

Originally Posted by twhiting9275 If the author says "do not redistribute", yet the site does so, then that is between the author, and the site, however it is NOT illegal to do, unless the author has SPECIFICALLY obtained copyrights and patents for each mod they have designed. The "If you design it, it is copyrighted" excuse is lame, and has been ruled against so many times it's not funny. If you WANT your work to be known only as your work, then COPYRIGHT it, legally.

The resources to educate yourself about US and international copyright law are readily available for free on the Internet. If you can't even be bothered to learn the laws you're breaking, please, don't bother expending the energy to type this garbage.

Originally Posted by Kaomie Then for instance for WowInt if we have a look at paragraph 11.III under ZAM Network ToS tell me how this will hold against a third-party distribution of said addons? This has nothing to do with intellectual property or copyright (unless otherwise explicitly mentioned), just distribution path with UI sites acting as a "proxy" between authors and end-users.

Assuming you are referring to this (edited for brevity):

YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT ZAM ... SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY ... DAMAGES ... RESULTING FROM: ... (iii) UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OR ALTERATION OF YOUR TRANSMISSIONS OR DATA ...

It clearly states that you are agreeing that WoWInterface (or any other part of its parent company, the Zam network) is not responsible for the actions of third parties who access and/or modify:

- data you store on Zam servers,
- data being sent from you to Zam servers, and/or
- data being sent from Zam servers to you,

without your knowledge or consent ("unauthorized"). The "access to data you store on Zam servers" part does apply to WoWMatrix, but only to the effect that Zam/WoWInterface isn't responsible for WoWMatrix doing that.