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Not that I'd want to reveal my identity, but it's fair to say I created a fair few addons for WoW, and many of those ended up being improved upon and recreated for other MMOs without ever asking for permission. In fact, some of them have been recreated for ESO. I just shrugged it off.
I made the addons for myself. I didn't share them for glory, recognition, power, praise, or position. I understnad that that's different from person to person, but I shared them because I thought others might want them. That they may even deserve them if a problem I was fixing was also a problem I was having. I got out of the game because it's largely a thankless job, but there are always others to pick up the slack.
I think that losing sleep over someone borrowing your code, though, is silly. Even on ESOUI right now there are 'Revived' and 'Extended' addons all over the place. I don't feel like many of those actually ever got permission to do those continuations, and yet there they are.
And it's not something you can really pursue legally, either. ZOS owns everything you make, which is true for every MMO with an addon system -- the publisher owns it. There's almost always a clause for that. So you don't retain proper ownership of what you make, and they can shut you down at any point. You go into it knowing that.
You can't even attach legal disclaimers/licenses because that's a misnomer, the only people who truly have a say are ZOS in the first place. This is why I didn't include them with the libraries in my mod, because I didn't want to be misleading. It's not something I want to argue about (I'm not going to hang around), but I'm making the point for it to be seen.
The moment you stop playing the game you stop coding, anyway. Your mod falls to antiquity, it'll be picked up by someone else if it's popular and it'll be developed regardless of how you feel about it.
It's been that way since Vanilla WoW. Which was... what... over a decade ago? I can't see it changing any time soon. This is a hobbyist thing. Yet I think that when addon/library authors get too popular, it can go to their head, and they'll absolutely want to attach something of worth to it, like a sense of legality to give it weight. It's not going to mean anything. No license ever will. It's a bit of code scribbled down as an addon for a game. It's ethereal.
If someone had stolen your code from your open source game for their open source game, that's different, then you'd have cause for legal proceedings. In this case? You'd have to get ZOS involved, and they'd just dismiss it because it's silly. It's better for them when we share, because it means more addons for their consumers.
So I think we should stop worrying about licenses, legality, ownership, and all that rot. I think we should just make fun addons for ourselves and share them with people that want them. If we want to share.
I don't think we should have any lofty goals or pretensions beyond that.
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