Addons free from now on, per Blizzard: KeyClone okay?

[AtroxCasus]

Guys, don't be so alarmist. First of all, how many addons besides Carbonite come to mind that actually require payment? Right, maybe one or two. So do you really think people who aren't already charging for their addons are going to stop making them? It doesn't make sense.

As for the donation angle, what it specifically states is that it can NOT ask for donations while running in your game. They are not forbidding anyone to solicit donations.

As for their "right" to do this, or the "big bad corporation" not wanting people to make money off their game...well, yeah, of course they don't. When was the last time anyone in this forum started a business hoping someone else could make money off your idea? The bottom line is this- they own WoW, and even without the various patent/copyright/intellectual property laws, they would still be within their rights to say "you can't make money by selling something to be used inside our game". To give you an example, let's say JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, and had no right to her intellectual property. 40 other people write Harry Potter books, and all of them get money. How is that different than someone stealing a car from a dealership, and then selling it across the street from the dealer?

Trying to use Microsoft as an example is just bad. An operating system by design runs your computer, what programs it will run have nothing to do with it beyond that. And Microsoft already has a mechanism in place for progams like Office, where you can buy a single copy, or get 'licenses" for X number of copies to be run by you, your company or whatever, but they don't want you buying one copy, and loading it on to 300 machines. They would lose money, and that is not the goal of any business. Addons and WoW are completely different than Vista and WoW running on it.

You're running around screaming "the sky is falling". Blizzard is saying "These people already pay to play WoW, and you can not charge them for addons that will run on our game, which they already pay for." Why are you freaking out? Telling someone "You can't make money off my work" isn't evil, it's practical.

[Bigfish]

Guys, don't be so alarmist. First of all, how many addons besides Carbonite come to mind that actually require payment? Right, maybe one or two. So do you really think people who aren't already charging for their addons are going to stop making them? It doesn't make sense.

As for the donation angle, what it specifically states is that it can NOT ask for donations while running in your game. They are not forbidding anyone to solicit donations.

As for their "right" to do this, or the "big bad corporation" not wanting people to make money off their game...well, yeah, of course they don't. When was the last time anyone in this forum started a business hoping someone else could make money off your idea? The bottom line is this- they own WoW, and even without the various patent/copyright/intellectual property laws, they would still be within their rights to say "you can't make money by selling something to be used inside our game". To give you an example, let's say JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, and had no right to her intellectual property. 40 other people write Harry Potter books, and all of them get money. How is that different than someone stealing a car from a dealership, and then selling it across the street from the dealer?

Trying to use Microsoft as an example is just bad. An operating system by design runs your computer, what programs it will run have nothing to do with it beyond that. And Microsoft already has a mechanism in place for progams like Office, where you can buy a single copy, or get 'licenses" for X number of copies to be run by you, your company or whatever, but they don't want you buying one copy, and loading it on to 300 machines. They would lose money, and that is not the goal of any business. Addons and WoW are completely different than Vista and WoW running on it.

You're running around screaming "the sky is falling". Blizzard is saying "These people already pay to play WoW, and you can not charge them for addons that will run on our game, which they already pay for." Why are you freaking out? Telling someone "You can't make money off my work" isn't evil, it's practical.

Its not quite that simple. Its not a matter of anyone trying to sell hijacked copies of WoW. Its more akin to who owns what, and what rights you have to that creation. Blizzard allows WoW to use custom UI. Now they're just adding the caveat that you can't make money off an add-on that you code, despite the fact that you put time and labor in to it, and that it is your code.

But then, its not a question of what Blizzard wants, but what the courts and the legislature decide concerning property rights of such things.

[BW~Merlin]

No I see them as trying to stop wow costing more then $15 a month. As for keyclone and other tools I guess it's possible that they may come after them but it would be more difficult as many are not built just for wow (like hotkeynet which can be used for other games/programs besides wow). Shall have to wait and see.

[AtroxCasus]

Guys, don't be so alarmist. First of all, how many addons besides Carbonite come to mind that actually require payment? Right, maybe one or two. So do you really think people who aren't already charging for their addons are going to stop making them? It doesn't make sense.

As for the donation angle, what it specifically states is that it can NOT ask for donations while running in your game. They are not forbidding anyone to solicit donations.

As for their "right" to do this, or the "big bad corporation" not wanting people to make money off their game...well, yeah, of course they don't. When was the last time anyone in this forum started a business hoping someone else could make money off your idea? The bottom line is this- they own WoW, and even without the various patent/copyright/intellectual property laws, they would still be within their rights to say "you can't make money by selling something to be used inside our game". To give you an example, let's say JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, and had no right to her intellectual property. 40 other people write Harry Potter books, and all of them get money. How is that different than someone stealing a car from a dealership, and then selling it across the street from the dealer?

Trying to use Microsoft as an example is just bad. An operating system by design runs your computer, what programs it will run have nothing to do with it beyond that. And Microsoft already has a mechanism in place for progams like Office, where you can buy a single copy, or get 'licenses" for X number of copies to be run by you, your company or whatever, but they don't want you buying one copy, and loading it on to 300 machines. They would lose money, and that is not the goal of any business. Addons and WoW are completely different than Vista and WoW running on it.

You're running around screaming "the sky is falling". Blizzard is saying "These people already pay to play WoW, and you can not charge them for addons that will run on our game, which they already pay for." Why are you freaking out? Telling someone "You can't make money off my work" isn't evil, it's practical.

Its not quite that simple. Its not a matter of anyone trying to sell hijacked copies of WoW. Its more akin to who owns what, and what rights you have to that creation. Blizzard allows WoW to use custom UI. Now they're just adding the caveat that you can't make money off an add-on that you code, despite the fact that you put time and labor in to it, and that it is your code.

But then, its not a question of what Blizzard wants, but what the courts and the legislature decide concerning property rights of such things.

People code addons because they want to, and share them because they want to. If Blizzard mandated that any addon be publicly available, there might be an argument for charging for them. It doesn't change that the addon is useless without WoW. It's the same reason you can't market anything with "Star Wars" on it without paying Lucas. If it weren't for the name brand recognition, you wouldn't have a market. Blizzard owns WoW, and if they don't want someone to make money off a product that uses their name/code/company why isn't it their right to prevent it? By that logic, if you could code your own full service server, you could then charge people only 5 bucks a month to play and Blizzard couldn't say anything to you.

[Bigfish]

It's the same reason you can't market anything with "Star Wars" on it without paying Lucas.

Unless it falls under Fair Use.

[Catamer]

carbonite probably did this to themselves with the i'll fated 2.03 release ( the free versions )
the 2.02 release can sometimes locks up my PC for several seconds, 2.03 solved this but had a pop up on the screen saying it was no longer valid.
this means this addon connected the internet and auto-validated itself, it was WAY beyond an addon if you ask me.

I love carbonite but I was REALLY pissed when I had to demote to a lower buggy version.

[zanthor]

carbonite probably did this to themselves with the i'll fated 2.03 release ( the free versions )
the 2.02 release can sometimes locks up my PC for several seconds, 2.03 solved this but had a pop up on the screen saying it was no longer valid.
this means this addon connected the internet and auto-validated itself, it was WAY beyond an addon if you ask me.

I love carbonite but I was REALLY pissed when I had to demote to a lower buggy version.

Bold is utter crap and cannot be done within the UI interface.

[Talamarr]

I'm kinda thinking they're just shoring up some legal policies. After all, Blizzard just had a big court case with [application that shall not be mentioned]; maybe some legal issues on Blizzard's side came up and now they are trying to tie loose ends.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more "clarifications" like this in the near future.

[Bigfish]

I'm kinda thinking they're just shoring up some legal policies. After all, Blizzard just had a big court case with [application that shall not be mentioned]; maybe some legal issues on Blizzard's side came up and now they are trying to tie loose ends.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more "clarifications" like this in the near future.

If you mean by "legal issues", they won their case and are now pushing to see how far they can extend the ruling. Not surprising, but at the same time, a bit disconcerting.

[BW~Merlin]

this means this addon connected the internet and auto-validated itself, it was WAY beyond an addon if you ask me.

Addons can not access anything outside of wow ie. the internet. What was happening was people were updating to a new version of carbonite which was then sending out "hey there is a new version out" to all the users of carbonite (many addons will tell you that there is a latter version available if someone you have come in contact with (pary/raid/guild) has it installed) but built into that carbonite "new version out" message was a stop working command that stopped carbonite working if you had the old version.