As you have said you are a software engineer, I would highly recommend getting a better understanding of what licenses do (not necessarily the minutia, but what they're for more generally). You might run into trouble with this understanding. The license you package software with does
not affect whether it is a derivative work. Derivative work is a concept related to copyright law:
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What the MIT license does is it states that any changes made to the original source - that is, any derivative works made - are the copyright of the individual who made the changes. It essentially ensures that you own your own work and can do with it as you please. However, and this is important, works that are built on top of other works that are licensed under MIT are still derivative works.
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Moving back to APIs, APIs do not always constitute derivative work. When used as a data source, for instance, while you might be violating someone's copyright by using the data (
such as the case of Canada Post, which for a time claimed the copyright to Canadian postal codes, and using this data violated their copyright), the work which you have done is independent of the API. In the case of WoW's API, this is really just a set of libraries which is provided to extend the functionality of Lua to enable compatibility (i.e.: it provides hooks which your code can call to actually make in-game changes). I would argue that it would likely be seen as being similar to the APIs provided by something like the Pandas API for Python, which you typically wouldn't call work done with the API derivative of it.
That said, while I don't think it would constitute a derivative work, it
can be argued that WoW addons are a derivative work.
In cases where the application developed is an extension and requires the game to run (i.e.: it relies on the base code to work), works may be deemed as being derivative; however, in that interpretation, the addons would very likely be classified under fair use. Fair use in software is very strong, and the
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. case has shown us how powerful fair use is where Google essentially copied over 11,000 lines of copyrighted source code from Oracle and was still deemed as fair use (as it was insubstantial relative to Android or Java's codebases, among other reasons).
Getting back to this understanding of derivative work, any extension which requires the original code to work is derivative, regardless of whether it is relying on a game client or a local framework. An unfortunate byproduct of this interpretation is that it extends the definition to derived work to other frameworks in which the software written cannot run without the core work. Take the previously mentioned React example: applications written in React would be derivative of the React framework, as the code is non-functional without the core React framework (i.e.: JSX is meaningless without React). This interpretation essentially causes long chains of derived works, which need to then be defended under fair use (i.e.: instead of proactively defending what should be considered unique or novel work, it forces you to need to reactively defend it when a claim is made).
Which is a fair argument to make, and I agree that injecting advertisements into your addons, which is essentially what begging for donations via your addon is, should be frowned upon. This is something that's frowned upon more generally in open source. Imagine if you created your own HashiCorp Vault server and every time you opened the CLI to configure it, you were spammed with donation links. It would be an awful experience.
Sure, and I would agree with this. If the only problem is that you think people shouldn't feel entitled for compensation, that's understandable. People developing the addons are not entitled to being paid, same as anyone who does open source work is not entitled. I would recommend staying on that base and not using hyperbole, as the more extreme position stood out and changed the context of the post.
I agree that a community that has a spirit which embraces open source and collective development of tools would be great, as it would ensure that as addon developers are unable to continue development would be able to pass their work on to someone else and there would be minimal disruption in addon maintenance; however, this is just a personal preference. The WoW addon developer community does not seem to have the same spirit that the larger open source community has, and ownership of work appears to take precedence over free software. Frankly, I'm suprised that addon WoW addon authors don't just use the AGPL license to forcibly kill any attempts to maintain their projects without their express permission. That said, I would probably lay most of the blame at the feet of Blizzard for this, as they haven't taken an active role in developing a community other than to say "we have a forum", which no one uses because CMs ignore it.
The problem is that there is no formal license distributed
at all. They have an
Addon Development Policy which links to several other policies, but you never have to agree to anything and you never have to package your projects with a specific license. I don't even know if an implied license would be applicable here.