[Torhal]

Originally Posted by Amarande Seerah, there is the selfishness argument, but on the flip side, the benefit from FOSS vs. ARR arises chiefly at that point down the line when the addon breaks due to an API change and the author isn't updating it anymore; at that point, yeah, it lets others continue to take advantage of your work - but, in fact they can't do this without (sometimes substantial) effort of their own, since they'll have to put in the time it takes to fix the addon so it works with the new version of WoW. What it really does is just spare the community the extra time it takes to do the same thing from scratch.

What it really does in most cases is cause numerous users (who have no idea how code works) to "fix" the AddOns by commenting out the lines that are throwing errors and then posting those "fixes" as a "continued" version.

Originally Posted by Amarande And yeah, sometimes we do have the opportunity to use something else. X-Perl <snip>, Pitbull's configuration options <snip>. The community is simply very lucky that Shadowed Unit Frames has been still maintained.

Nothing on oUF?

Originally Posted by Amarande On the other hand, sometimes we don't have that opportunity. No Cataclysm equivalent to Cartographer has surfaced. Neither is there a Cataclysm capable equivalent to Elkano Buff Bars <snip>.

Cartographer can be replaced by: Mapster, HandyNotes, Routes, Cromulent. Kitchen-sink AddOns have a long history of being doomed to fail because their tightly-interwoven nature means that when one thing breaks, the whole thing breaks - when the original author does not have time to fix it, or has stopped playing, you suddenly have several "continued" versions pop up which merely comment out the lines which are "broken", resulting in a fragmented distribution of an AddOn which is still broken but merely doesn't throw errors.

EBB can be replaced by Raven, for the most part, and I'm sure there are other buff AddOns.

Originally Posted by Amarande The community has not found an addon developer with the time and skill to code equivalents for them during the present expansion, so those addons became "extinct" with Cata, that functionality lost to us for the time being.

I'd say time OR skill OR interest. That can be indicative of an AddOn that has outlived its usefulness, since there's actually no shortage of developers.

Originally Posted by Amarande In part, I suspect that the reason such an addon developer hasn't been found may lie in ARR: it certainly isn't a pleasant thought for the developer of a potential replacement that they will have to do everything for a fairly complex addon all over again from the beginning, without (just to be safe on a copyright side) even being able to look at how the current addon is coded as a reference.

There is no harm in cloning and/or extending an AddOn if you are not using the exact code it uses. Using techniques is not the same as blatantly copying. There are only a certain number of ways to do things with the Blizzard API, and nobody can lock that down.

Originally Posted by Amarande Instead of being able to build on the resources that the community has accumulated over the years, ARR copyright acts as a barrier, forcing the same work to be performed repeatedly in order to bring old tricks into the new world (of Warcraft).

This has always been going on, even before many authors switched to ARR. How many "automated quest" AddOns are there? Auto-sell-grey-items AddOns? Those are just two examples of types of AddOns I can think of from the top of my head that are insanely prolific, for no other reason than "Not Invented Here" or "Because I want to learn and thought it would be fun".

Originally Posted by Amarande Yeah, I've heard a bit about other addon sites "harvesting" addons and posting them themselves for ad revenue, though I didn't really think all that much about it at the time. And that's definitely a no-no in the case of ARR addons. But why change your open source licence over to ARR in response? When you sign up for an open source licence, you generally do so with the knowledge that anyone can distribute your software, whether you really like them or not.

Because in the FOSS world, people generally indicate that they've forked a project, don't host it on the same site as the original with the same name, and don't host it elsewhere with the same name (and no indication that this wasn't done by the original author) with local modifications or outdated versions which cause users to come to the actual author complaining about issues.

This is a completely different community from the Linux/BSD/name-your-favorite-software communities. There is a very valid and real reason why things operate differently here. The experiences many authors have had in this community from using such licenses has been bad. We are not going to change our minds due to wall-of-text impassioned pleas from someone who hasn't been there and doesn't understand.