[Landrell]

If they're planning to "monetize" add ons against the open community that is basically driven by the imagination and creativity and willingness to share, they are going to be losing a lot of "paid" support. By that, I mean subscribers. I can see why they would want or even think this, but the concept in and of itself is a very dangerous line they are about to tread. I can only think of a couple of ways to handle this situation and I fear it's going to go down hill from here:

1) Leave the open and free community alone and the API/LUA free license to the authors and people who have new and innovative mods to write. Have Blizzard continue to do the things they're doing by implementing and blending in existing mods/add ons into their own default UI.

2) Completely close the LUA/API coding capabilities to the community, preventing people from loading their own add ons and using only default; forcing subscribers to basically fork over even more money to use their brand of add ons since this seems to be a money issue and it's slowly becoming the case.

3) Let Add on Authors buy a 6m/1yr author license key to have full access to the ability to code mods and etc. Provided that their mods follow the guidelines stipulated by Blizzard, they are still able to share their work. Now one of two things happen here: Either they can only post their mods on a Blizzard dedicated site, or they still allow them to post on sites such as WoWI and etc. They would have to submit the code first to Blizzard and have it reviewed though before it can be posted anywhere, and if not, they won't let it go through.

These are just some ideas that kind of popped into my head after reading this a little bit. I've not kept up entirely on this situation and don't know what you can and cannot do with a free license API/LUA base of coding and what the deal is with all this. All I know is that if they do follow suit with their intentions of "monetizing" the add on industry, it's going to get ugly real fast real quick.

My main concern out of all of this is that they are basically alienating their driving community by even considering this option as a norm. I could be jumping the gun, but again, I'm trying to see what kind of outcome that can happen should they follow this.