Mikk, I'm now very, very negative, but these terms coud also be interpreted as:
"You understand that whether or not such User Submissions are published, Curse does not guarantee any confidentiality with respect to any submissions."
If we decide to publish your name and email address, we can do so. And if the CEO of XY calls and offers us $10.000 if we disclose all SVN submits and forum postings from email addresses with the domain XY.com (as he'd like to fire a few people who code addons while at work), then we can pass along that information too.
"In connection with User Submissions, you affirm, represent, and/or warrant that: (i) you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize Curse to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website and these Terms of Service"
If we change the "manner contemplated by the website", we can use your proprietary rights in any way. All we need to do is shift the focus of the website.
"In connection with User Submissions, you further agree that you will not: (i) submit material that is copyrighted, protected by trade secret or otherwise subject to third party proprietary rights, including privacy and publicity rights, unless you are the owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner to post the material and to grant Curse all of the license rights granted herein;"
We're reminding you again: we can do whatever we want with the addon, in case we decide to do so. We can sell it, we can alter the code, we can remove your name from the code, we can restrict its availability to paying users or IP addresses with the US as origin (you'll have to understand that, our ad's don't sell well if you live outside the US, and we'd waste the bandwidth), and we can also add a splash screen containing an ad ingame (in case we can come up with a deal with Blizzard/Vivendi, but as both Vivendi (owning Blizzard) and AGF (the VC company that funded Curse) are french, we might find a solution). Oh, and we can also alter the 'donate' button you added to your addon, so that we get the money and not you. After all, you should be happy with free hosting.
Yes, this is an extreme interpretation, and obviously Curse would be stupid to do the above. But the problem with your interpretation is: it won't 'stick'. It's as good as mine. That's what I'm trying to show.
All that counts is the legal text.
PS: I'm still wondering how we'll deal with addons that use a license which does not grant commercial usage. I can only assume that displaying an ad next to its overview on the website or inside the new addon downloader can be a problem.
Well obviously you need to grant curse the right to redistribute your work, or them hosting your addons would be illegal? :)
I agree, but then all you'd need to grant is a non-exclusive right to display and redistribute the user submission as is. Without being familiar with US laws (only with European law), I see little reason to authorize them to use all proprietary rights, which would include selling, altering the code, copying the code, merging addons, releasing them with a new name (or a different license), etc. - and I'm slightly unsure how this complies with the various licenses addons use (GPL,...).
Any addon that's e.g. using a "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works" license (e.g. from CreativeCommons) can not be uploaded to Curse under these Terms of Usage.
The second i realize that Curse will be doing something "bad" to the Community, i'll leave with my addons, and i won't be alone. But personally, i do not see that happen.
"You understand that whether or not such User Submissions are published, Curse does not guarantee any confidentiality with respect to any submissions."
...
"In connection with User Submissions, you affirm, represent, and/or warrant that: (i) you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize Curse to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website and these Terms of Service"
...
"In connection with User Submissions, you further agree that you will not: (i) submit material that is copyrighted, protected by trade secret or otherwise subject to third party proprietary rights, including privacy and publicity rights, unless you are the owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner to post the material and to grant Curse all of the license rights granted herein;"
If you have any specific concerns at all, don't hesitate to bring them up with us.
Nev, if someone is putting venture capital to work, then they aren't doing it because they enjoy using wow addons, but for a very specific interest: money. Even while I don't yet know what the business plan for curse looks like, there has to be a business plan (otherwise there wouldn't be any VC) - in other words, someone has thought of ways of profiteering from this community within the next 18 months.
As long as this is left in the dark, I'm very uncomfortable with it.
EDIT: from the Curse Inc press release from 7/2007:
----
Curse Inc., the premier gaming portal
dedicated to massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and their fan communities,
announced today that it has received $5 million in Series-A funding from leading French
venture capital firm AGF Private Equity and angel investors. The deal helps to further
secure Curse’s position as the leading MMOG destination, giving advertisers access to an
in-demand and difficult to target demographic.
(...)
“Curse’s vision is to build a full-featured, community-driven portal devoted to online
gaming, providing players with invaluable resources and delivering the gaming
demographic to advertisers, as well as partners in the game development and publishing
industries,” said Curse’s founder and CEO, Hubert Thieblot.
----
Curse is owned by Curse Inc. We get funding through VC.
Okay, and what's the goal of VC? An IPO within 18 months if all goes well. That's the big difference the future will bring: someone (at least the VC company) has the goal of making a lot of money. Out of a community which was created by addon developers - who have/had a different spirit in mind.
um you do realize that curse is in no way owned by ign?
Kaelten, curse.com makes it pretty difficult to find out who it's owned by. Yeah, "Curse Inc." and Hubert Thieblot (who seems to have moved from Neuilly sur Seine to Huntsville recently). But who is Curse Inc. owned by? As I live in Europe I know how to find out who european companies are owned by, but I don't know how to get this information for US companies.
In any case, it's a company with business interests (which is nothing bad), but the problem is that wowace.com is/was a very open community with the spirit of an open source project lots of people were contributing too. And changing wowace from a non profit community to a business website is a major change. I'm fine with you now being an employee of curse (so I heard, and ckk seems to have been hired as well), but I'm really unhappy to see the upcoming changes to wowace.com - as I have no interest in contributing any kind of content (via community support or addons) to a company that's making their money with this content.
I'm fearing that many developers will be gone soon, for one reason or the other. And that's the end of wowace as we know it.
Finally Curse have been silently funding the wowace servers and bandwidth for months now. So your accusation of them "selling out" is invalid . You have been getting a free service for years for a service that costs thousands in bandwith costs per month. Now it's time to give a little.
honem, I've not primarily had a free service for years, but I've contributed to this community like many other addon developers (and if you'd take a look at my >1000 postings, you'll see that I've been doing free support for years).
I guess it's our right to express our concerns with the decision Kaelten has made (and the fact that he's been hired by curse obviously explains why). Personally, I have a serious problem with IGN (google a bit and you might find out why), and I'm still strongly considering if any of the addons I originally developed (and now are maintained by others) shall in future be hosted by IGN (with them making money providing access to my intellectual property).
Currently I'm strongly convinced moving to github or any other website that's not owned by IGN is the way to go. Even if that might drastically reduce the number of users of these addons. And the fact that in the future we'll only have one proprietary addon downloader that does not disclose its source code does not make things better.
If your a premium user, and auto install premium updates is checked, then addons will get auto installed if you are away from your computer etc. What the update all addons button does is check to see if there is a new version. If your not premium youll get the green arrows on the addon indicating it needs an update.
In other words, if we're not premium users, there's no auto-update? Kaelten, I really hope curse paid a lot for wowace, if they are now trying to make money out of it by selling premium accounts.
You're asking for trouble, right? Go install the core only, and then one by one. What you did was like going into a restaurant and ordering *everything*. And then complaining that the pizza doesn't work with the strawberries.
As Jerry stated, the biggest problem Grid has is to find a decent way of configuring it. And while many, many people have feature suggestions, hardly anyone has come up with suggestions on how a configuration UI could be structured. A simple example: it's easy to name 4 corner icons. But what if you'd have a slider that lets you enable 0..12 corner icons, how would you name them, and how would a user know where corner icon #7 will appear?
Quote from Phanx »
Perhaps a "blacklist" feature is in order...
Actually Grid has a feature that's not obvious, which is why I think it's necessary to think about a way to improve it in Grid2: you can disable certain debuffs by adding them to the debuff list, and then simply not assigning them to any indicator. I e.g. do that for Frostbolt and other trivial pvp related debuffs, as when PvPing I only want to dispel those nasty warlock debuffs :)
Quote from Toadkiller »
For me I like to fade out people that are out of range instead. This lets me heal all the bright people near me, or move so I am in range of assigned people.
Toadkiller, I do fade out players out of range too. And the main reason why I came up with the inverted health bar colored by class is that this allows you to always know which unit class someone belongs to. If I see a bright light blue area, I know I need to shield/PoM/flash heal, and if it's brown/orange/pink, I'll Greater Heal instead. Plus, when units don't need any (healing) attention, they don't scream at me - they only do if they are taking damage.
PS: I could imagine having an optional module named Grid2AdditionalCoreOptions which adds some config options (well, it rather keeps them in a seperate pane). Examples are: disabling the inverting of the health bar, making unit frames non-squared but changing width and height separately,... basically like TweakUI or whatever the program was called for Windows 98/2000/XP (unsure about Vista, I've converted to OSX many years ago). This way we can keep the core options clean and close to the intentions of the authors, and people who have the urgent need to change a specific setting can still do so.
Toadkiller, the core will be very flexible. A module that e.g. adds 0..n additional icons will probably be written in only a few lines of code. But nevertheless the core will have a predefined set of options. Grid1 became unconfigurable because about 100 people asked for one highly important function each. Which is why we have tons of options. You'll have to look for such functionality in optional modules in the future.
Please keep in mind that an addon is what the authors want it to be. It doesn't matter if ten, hundred or thousand raiders don't like the inverse health bar. If the authors think that an inverse health bar is a feature and not a bug, this is how it's going to be in the core. And if the addon authors think that one icon is sufficient, you'll only find one icon in the core too. It's basically a 80/20 rule (look up pareto law of power distribution if you're interested).
PS: your buff-icon example doesn't convince me: I don't care about missing buffs when I'm in combat, I have the center icon for raid debuffs, and the border for non-raidboss-debuffs that I can cure. Plus, you could put everything into the center icon with different priorities: boss debuff > trivial debuff > missing buff.
i know, but i really don't think having side indicators complicates things at all. Grid would still be very minimalistic compared to other party/raid frames side indicators or no. i think it just makes sense to be in the core, but I have no problems using a plugin if needed. mana bars made it in? that's great and all if it's true, just did not expect it. if mana bars are not overkill, how are side indicators?
While not having been in touch with Jerry lately, keep in mind that Grid2 is in heavy development. Nothing you might see in a build or two is set in stone. You might see many things pop up and disappear again, I suppose Jerry is just making sure that optional modules will work correctly. The decision on the final default configuration has not been made, and it won't be made in the next days either.
0
If we decide to publish your name and email address, we can do so. And if the CEO of XY calls and offers us $10.000 if we disclose all SVN submits and forum postings from email addresses with the domain XY.com (as he'd like to fire a few people who code addons while at work), then we can pass along that information too.
If we change the "manner contemplated by the website", we can use your proprietary rights in any way. All we need to do is shift the focus of the website.
We're reminding you again: we can do whatever we want with the addon, in case we decide to do so. We can sell it, we can alter the code, we can remove your name from the code, we can restrict its availability to paying users or IP addresses with the US as origin (you'll have to understand that, our ad's don't sell well if you live outside the US, and we'd waste the bandwidth), and we can also add a splash screen containing an ad ingame (in case we can come up with a deal with Blizzard/Vivendi, but as both Vivendi (owning Blizzard) and AGF (the VC company that funded Curse) are french, we might find a solution). Oh, and we can also alter the 'donate' button you added to your addon, so that we get the money and not you. After all, you should be happy with free hosting.
Yes, this is an extreme interpretation, and obviously Curse would be stupid to do the above. But the problem with your interpretation is: it won't 'stick'. It's as good as mine. That's what I'm trying to show.
All that counts is the legal text.
PS: I'm still wondering how we'll deal with addons that use a license which does not grant commercial usage. I can only assume that displaying an ad next to its overview on the website or inside the new addon downloader can be a problem.
0
I agree, but then all you'd need to grant is a non-exclusive right to display and redistribute the user submission as is. Without being familiar with US laws (only with European law), I see little reason to authorize them to use all proprietary rights, which would include selling, altering the code, copying the code, merging addons, releasing them with a new name (or a different license), etc. - and I'm slightly unsure how this complies with the various licenses addons use (GPL,...).
Any addon that's e.g. using a "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works" license (e.g. from CreativeCommons) can not be uploaded to Curse under these Terms of Usage.
0
Maybe you can help me understanding the Terms of Use from http://about.curse.com/terms-of-use/:
"You understand that whether or not such User Submissions are published, Curse does not guarantee any confidentiality with respect to any submissions."
...
"In connection with User Submissions, you affirm, represent, and/or warrant that: (i) you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize Curse to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website and these Terms of Service"
...
"In connection with User Submissions, you further agree that you will not: (i) submit material that is copyrighted, protected by trade secret or otherwise subject to third party proprietary rights, including privacy and publicity rights, unless you are the owner of such rights or have permission from their rightful owner to post the material and to grant Curse all of the license rights granted herein;"
Thoughts?
0
Nev, if someone is putting venture capital to work, then they aren't doing it because they enjoy using wow addons, but for a very specific interest: money. Even while I don't yet know what the business plan for curse looks like, there has to be a business plan (otherwise there wouldn't be any VC) - in other words, someone has thought of ways of profiteering from this community within the next 18 months.
As long as this is left in the dark, I'm very uncomfortable with it.
EDIT: from the Curse Inc press release from 7/2007:
----
Curse Inc., the premier gaming portal
dedicated to massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and their fan communities,
announced today that it has received $5 million in Series-A funding from leading French
venture capital firm AGF Private Equity and angel investors. The deal helps to further
secure Curse’s position as the leading MMOG destination, giving advertisers access to an
in-demand and difficult to target demographic.
(...)
“Curse’s vision is to build a full-featured, community-driven portal devoted to online
gaming, providing players with invaluable resources and delivering the gaming
demographic to advertisers, as well as partners in the game development and publishing
industries,” said Curse’s founder and CEO, Hubert Thieblot.
----
0
Okay, and what's the goal of VC? An IPO within 18 months if all goes well. That's the big difference the future will bring: someone (at least the VC company) has the goal of making a lot of money. Out of a community which was created by addon developers - who have/had a different spirit in mind.
0
Kaelten, curse.com makes it pretty difficult to find out who it's owned by. Yeah, "Curse Inc." and Hubert Thieblot (who seems to have moved from Neuilly sur Seine to Huntsville recently). But who is Curse Inc. owned by? As I live in Europe I know how to find out who european companies are owned by, but I don't know how to get this information for US companies.
In any case, it's a company with business interests (which is nothing bad), but the problem is that wowace.com is/was a very open community with the spirit of an open source project lots of people were contributing too. And changing wowace from a non profit community to a business website is a major change. I'm fine with you now being an employee of curse (so I heard, and ckk seems to have been hired as well), but I'm really unhappy to see the upcoming changes to wowace.com - as I have no interest in contributing any kind of content (via community support or addons) to a company that's making their money with this content.
I'm fearing that many developers will be gone soon, for one reason or the other. And that's the end of wowace as we know it.
0
honem, I've not primarily had a free service for years, but I've contributed to this community like many other addon developers (and if you'd take a look at my >1000 postings, you'll see that I've been doing free support for years).
I guess it's our right to express our concerns with the decision Kaelten has made (and the fact that he's been hired by curse obviously explains why). Personally, I have a serious problem with IGN (google a bit and you might find out why), and I'm still strongly considering if any of the addons I originally developed (and now are maintained by others) shall in future be hosted by IGN (with them making money providing access to my intellectual property).
Currently I'm strongly convinced moving to github or any other website that's not owned by IGN is the way to go. Even if that might drastically reduce the number of users of these addons. And the fact that in the future we'll only have one proprietary addon downloader that does not disclose its source code does not make things better.
0
In other words, if we're not premium users, there's no auto-update? Kaelten, I really hope curse paid a lot for wowace, if they are now trying to make money out of it by selling premium accounts.
0
0
You're asking for trouble, right? Go install the core only, and then one by one. What you did was like going into a restaurant and ordering *everything*. And then complaining that the pizza doesn't work with the strawberries.
0
0
Actually Grid has a feature that's not obvious, which is why I think it's necessary to think about a way to improve it in Grid2: you can disable certain debuffs by adding them to the debuff list, and then simply not assigning them to any indicator. I e.g. do that for Frostbolt and other trivial pvp related debuffs, as when PvPing I only want to dispel those nasty warlock debuffs :)
Toadkiller, I do fade out players out of range too. And the main reason why I came up with the inverted health bar colored by class is that this allows you to always know which unit class someone belongs to. If I see a bright light blue area, I know I need to shield/PoM/flash heal, and if it's brown/orange/pink, I'll Greater Heal instead. Plus, when units don't need any (healing) attention, they don't scream at me - they only do if they are taking damage.
PS: I could imagine having an optional module named Grid2AdditionalCoreOptions which adds some config options (well, it rather keeps them in a seperate pane). Examples are: disabling the inverting of the health bar, making unit frames non-squared but changing width and height separately,... basically like TweakUI or whatever the program was called for Windows 98/2000/XP (unsure about Vista, I've converted to OSX many years ago). This way we can keep the core options clean and close to the intentions of the authors, and people who have the urgent need to change a specific setting can still do so.
0
0
Please keep in mind that an addon is what the authors want it to be. It doesn't matter if ten, hundred or thousand raiders don't like the inverse health bar. If the authors think that an inverse health bar is a feature and not a bug, this is how it's going to be in the core. And if the addon authors think that one icon is sufficient, you'll only find one icon in the core too. It's basically a 80/20 rule (look up pareto law of power distribution if you're interested).
PS: your buff-icon example doesn't convince me: I don't care about missing buffs when I'm in combat, I have the center icon for raid debuffs, and the border for non-raidboss-debuffs that I can cure. Plus, you could put everything into the center icon with different priorities: boss debuff > trivial debuff > missing buff.
0
While not having been in touch with Jerry lately, keep in mind that Grid2 is in heavy development. Nothing you might see in a build or two is set in stone. You might see many things pop up and disappear again, I suppose Jerry is just making sure that optional modules will work correctly. The decision on the final default configuration has not been made, and it won't be made in the next days either.