Originally Posted by Silenia
You're assuming that they're all children who have nothing better to do with their time than to play with code. Just because addon authors aren't freely handing out their resume` with each addon they create doesn't mean they don't get a regular paycheck from elsewhere for programming that supports their families or themselves. As for creating addons and getting paid to make them or getting donations... apparently you've never heard of supplemental income.
There is not a single addon author out there that needs, or should have to, prove anything to you or anyone else.
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You are right. It doesn't mean they make a professional living elsewhere. That point was more of a pet peeve where some people scream they are a professional coder but if asked to write a program from scratch would panic.
And they don't have to prove themselves to me. I am grateful for the work they do and love the mods and addons they make. But the ability to make addons for use in WoW is a right only in so far as blizzard says it is. They do not own blizzard nor the game, so they do not have the right to tell blizzard how their policy should be.
Originally Posted by spiel2001
Strictly because I get some kind of really weird kick out of playing devil's advocate... if you take a hard look at the economy around you, there are few places where that risk is not present these days.
Aside from that, whether or not it is a good business model is not relevant to the conversation really... if it's a bad model, he gets punished for it, if not rewarded... unless you're AIG in which case you can have a horrid model and receive multi-million dollar bonuses for it at taxpayer expense.
Maybe that's what we mod authors need to do... go to Congress and get our own piece of the pie.
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Admittedly, I laughed with this. Well, at least the last part.
You're right, but the risk has always been there, there's just more shark pools and less nets to work with.
And seeing that the act of generating income from an idea is a business model, it is relevant. Let's look at carbonite for example, seeing as they seem to be the focus of this. They had an idea which generated into the addon (simplified explanation, I know, but I'm not a business major) and decided to charge people for it. Now this addon, and as such their business of charging for it, is solely dependent on blizzard allowing this business model to exist with their program. They are in a business model that is dependent on another company that they have no relationship with. That spells B-A-D in the business world. So when Blizz said no more, they got punished.