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11-09-14, 10:25 PM   #13
Phanx
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Posts: 5,617
Your actions have shown quite clearly that do not actually care about the wishes of addon authors, so whether or not hobbyists chose the "best" software license for their free MMO UI mod doesn't seem particularly relevant. Most addon authors are neither professional programmers nor lawyers, but you're nitpicking over legal terms rather than considering what the creators of the content you're aiming to monetize actually want done with their content.

You keep trying to brush off your mistakes with "that's in the past, can't we just forget about it and be friends?" but I've never seen any post that sounded like you were genuinely sorry for your mistakes, or really understood why addon authors were upset, only sorry to have been called out on it and sorry that it's tarnished your site's reputation, and puzzled as to why we all just couldn't see how you were really doing us a big favor. Your public response to every request to remove addons from your site that I've seen has had more of a "well fine, if you reeeeeeally mean it, but please change your mind" vibe, and the responses from your co-siterunner Tiny are flat-out rude and insulting.

Originally Posted by ronburgundyy View Post
I really don't understand the "this license go against my wishes, but i'm going to use it anyways". My question still stands on why you would use a license with terms that don't represent your wishes. A chosen license should represent your wishes.
People who choose open-source licenses for software generally do so not because they specifically want to encourage everyone under the sun to redistribute their software, but because they want to encourage other developers to tinker and reuse their code.

I'd guess that many, if not most, addon authors who chose an open-source license dedicated absolutely zero thought to whether they wanted (arguably) unethical sites redistributing their work without asking first or even letting them know, and just thought "hey, I benefitted a lot from looking at other people's code, and maybe even used some of it in my addon, I want other people to be able to benefit from my code the same way".

Personally, I did research and wrote my own license, but not everyone has the time or ability to do that, or is even aware they can do that.

Originally Posted by ronburgundyy View Post
Can you give me some insight Phanx on why you would use a open source license but also prefer restrictions on hosting? I know alot of your addons are ARR and this might not apply to you, but do you have any opensource addons, if so, do those licenses not represent your wishes?
My license does not qualify as "open source" according to the OSI definition. I'm very happy for my code to be in the public domain, for anyone to do whatever they want with, but I don't want my addons in the public domain. Dealing with bug reports that turn out to be caused by some random guy's modded version of a release from 3 years ago is a waste of my time and a waste of the user's time, and restricting redistribution conveniently also locks out leech sites. However, anyone is free to do whatever they want with my code -- including copy and paste all of it into a new addon -- as long as my name and my addon's name are not associated with it. Since I wrote it myself, I feel it is a reasonably accurate representation of my wishes.

Unfortunately, that accuracy did not stop you from leeching my addons even after I asked you to stop, because you continued to use a flawed "opt out" model (all licenses are okay except this one) rather than a more robust "opt in" model (only these licenses are okay) and it's been my experience in dealing with other sites and other addon authors that very few people even know what words like "redistribution" mean, so I've really come to view the whole thing as largely pointless, and am just going with a straight-up "all rights reserved" for my newer addons since it's much more widely known that "all rights reserved" means "no".
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