Originally Posted by
Greyscale
Well, yes of course it was. Blizzard "did shit".
No, unfortunately I don't quite see what you mean. To me that looks awfully lot like "as long as I get my stuff free, I don't really care who gets screwed", but maybe I'm reading it wrong.
How about this for an idea: Every author can decide what they want to charge. They can put their addons behind paywalls if they want. Some addons (and WA strings) will be free and some will cost money. If you don't want to pay, you can always use some other addon/strings.
This gives the addon authors (those who produce good,valuable software) opporturnity to get paid for hard work (because let's face it, this is where the *actual* work effort is). String authors (those who put in time/effort to producing good quality assets) will also be able to get paid.
There will be a bunch of people who don't want or can't pay and this will create the demand for free alternatives. Just like it is today with commercial/open source software. You can buy Photoshop for money or you can download Gimp (some some other OSS alternative, there are many). This also forces the paid addon authors to up their game, because the free alternatives (if they're good) will eat into their earnings.
Or alternatively - everything must be free (as in speech) and no one gets to paywall their addons or derivatives.