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I keep hearing the term "customer" over and over again. According to wikipedia :
"A customer, also client, buyer or purchaser is the buyer or user of the paid products of an individual or organization, mostly called the supplier or seller. This is typically through purchasing or renting goods or services."
So, can anyone here tell me how much they have payed for a single addon (and I do NOT mean an OPTIONAL donation but a mandatory payment) they've downloaded themselves, either from here or anywhere else for that matter, especially after Blizzard's refined policy in the matter ? Reality check. Customer ~= User. A user that is not being charged to use something offered for free cannot be treated in any way as a paid customer, nor can he invoke any special rights. Keep that sense of entitlement buried. It holds no water whatsoever and no sensible person is going to take it seriously. All I'm reading in these posts is "QQ we want our updater back, you are the source of all evil on this Earth." This is what it has come down to, then. WAU created a monster. A boss one that cannot be killed too.
Back in the day, WoWAce, the site that most of you claim to support and love so much was operating simply because Kaelten and WOWI were covering its hilarious bandwidth expenses (hello 14 TB traffic simply because of WAU). You may not consider this a problem but bandwidth does not grow on trees and neither does cash.
And to address some more posts in here :
WM is technically not re-distributing anything, since they are not hosting anything (that they don't have permission for) in their own servers. Had that been the case, it would be easy to send them a DMCA takedown notice. Instead, at first, they cleverly chose to ignore addon authors and without asking anyone, hotlink to their files on release sites, via their application. Back in that day, they never even mentioned author names or displayed the link to their actual support pages. I could go on, on how cleverly (by monitoring our discussions) they changed things in their updater so that they seemingly comply with authors wishes but it would be moot. Seems people just won't listen and will opt to vent their frustration here, without even having the slightest idea on what they are talking about. Sad, simply sad.
"Who are the authors writing addons for? Users."
Really now ? You speak for all the authors ? I was under the impression that a lot of us were simply writing addons, primarily for ourselves and maybe a couple of friends that found them semi-useful. The fact that we choose to release them publicly and for free does not imply that users have a *right* to dictate where we want them hosted or from where we want them to be distributed. Feels arrogant aye ? Well, so does an assumption with no basis.
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