Recently Curse and WoWInterface got together to come up with a solution for an ongoing problem. The problem in question is WowMatrix. The reasons they are a problem are many:
- WowMatrix violates author copyright and intellectual property rights:
- They redistribute addons without authors' permissions;
- When they first started they would scrape the legimate sites for addons then upload them to their own site in addition to deep-linking from the sites;
- They edited authors' files to remove donation requests and links to their home sites, etc.; and
- They have failed on many occasions to honour authors' requests to remove addons from their application;
- In a lot of cases the files served to users have been many versions out of date. This leads to authors having users complain about bugs, bugs that were fixed days or weeks ago in versions that are available on the legitimate sites, causing problems for both the authors and for the end-users;
- Until the community raised a hue and cry, WowMatrix didn't even supply the authors' names as to who wrote the addon, let alone provide a link to where the addon was legitimately hosted;
- WowMatrix leeches from the legitimate hosting sites without permission, let alone compensation. Originally, they scraped our sites so they could upload addons to their own site without permission, in addition to deeplinking from our sites. They have finally stopped hosting the addons on their own site, but they still deeplink from our sites, using our resources to run their program. Curse and WoWInterface use a lot of bandwidth every month which costs a lot of money. The way we pay our bills is through site ads, which are directly dependent on users viewing them, and premium memberships. WowMatrix bypasses our download pages, and, as a result, people are not viewing the ads. Of course, this means the ads aren't generating any revenue to pay for the bandwidth. At the rate they were going, if they were allowed to continue using our resources without any compensation, they were going to drive us right out of business. Not only are they stealing our bandwidth and preventing us from being able to recoup that loss, they also have their own ads all over their site and application. They are directly profiting from the stolen bandwidth; and
- Due to the massive resource drains they put on our sites, we have all experienced heightened loads and weaker performance, especially on patch days. During those days they download so much from our sites that sometimes we have a hard time keeping up to the demands; thus causing legitimate users to experience problems accessing our sites. That's just flat out unacceptable.
For months now, both sites and multiple authors have been trying to come up with solutions to the problems caused by WowMatrix. However, WowMatrix just keeps ignoring authors' requests to remove their addons from their application, working around the protections we have put in place, and proving repeatedly that they have no intention of ever becoming responsible, legitimate members of the community. Instead, they choose to continue to leech off the community. Well we, Curse and WowInterface, have gotten together and between us we believe we may have found a solution to prevent them from pulling authors' addons from our sites to redistribute without permission and stealing our bandwidth any longer. Unfortunately we cannot release details on the solution, so as to keep it viable.
"Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah, get to the important question: What does this mean for me, your sites' user?" For the majority of users it should be completely transparent, you should not notice any difference whatsoever, other than improved site responsiveness during patch days. We hope that we will be able to revert the changes made to our sites eventually, if WowMatrix ever stops violating authors' copyright and ceases stealing our bandwidth and other resources.
If you were previously using WowMatrix to keep your addons updated, please use our official updaters (Curse, WoWInterface). You may also mark addons as favorites on both WoWInterface and Curse in order to be alerted when they are updated.
Kaelten
Administrator, Curse & WowAce
Cairenn
Administrator, WoWInterface
Brimmstone: yeah, so they'd have to have people opt in to their service same as we do.
End result, the universality of their app is done for.
@Drool: I'm pretty sure grabbing copies of the addons from Curse, etc, would result in a whole bunch of DMCA takedown requests from authors.
I wish people would stop blaming Curse and WoWInterface for WowMatrix's improprieties...
NEWSFLASH!
WowMatrix could fix this in a blink, if they would only shell out for their OWN hosting space and serve addons from there.
Hell they could even consider manually grabbing (or with the aid of Curse Client) a cache copy of all addons and re-host them quite easily - again, without asking author's permission. (I'm not suggesting they do that, but they could potentially, if they wanted to fix their broken client now and make their customers happy.) And I wouldn't put it past them to try, but the question is, will they make as much ad revenue if they had to splash out on file servers too? They might prefer to start preying on WoWUI instead!
Again, just to make things clear, just because you can read the code does not mean that it is open source. It just means that the source is readable. Open source is a type of license.
@Serial211: Umm... free and non-obfuscated does not equal open source. Please get your terms straight and research before posting stuff like that in the future, please.
@Serial211: Addons have always been open-source because there's no way to actually close the source to prevent it from being read. It's not a pre-compiled language. The closest that you can come to closing the source is obfuscation, which is exactly what Blizzard mentioned in their new policy.
That said, just because something is open source doesn't mean the author doesn't have any rights to it. Library books are open source aren't they? Everybody can just go read them. Does that mean you can just go print copies of your favorite book and sell them? Of course not.
Regarding the "distibution agreement", as far as i know, Curse does not have any distribution agreements with authors. They are free to host addons on Curse or any other site. I don't imagine that WoWInterface has any distribution agreement either. All the companies are trying to do is protect their livelihoods and keep food on the tables of their employees.
Lastly, would you have even tried using the Curse client again if you weren't forced to? I think not. Heck, the only reason you signed up for an account was so you could whine on the forum.
So Blizz has a new policy that requires the addons to be open source. your going to tell me there is a non distribution agreement on every single "open source" addon on this site??? i will agree to a point with your bandwidth issue but the intellectual property is a joke. this is open source people do we all know what that means ? you cant say that you cannot distribute open source.
Essentially the sad thing is that there was no reasonable solution negotiated between the parties. Call me cynical but if the only issue was author's rights nothing would have EVER been done. But goodness gracious as soon as money is involved then things happen. I keep wondering, if wowmatrix sucked then they would have no users and then there would not be a problem. Obviouly that's not the case here...So to WOWace and WOWi good for you for finally figuring out how to stop them. Once you finish patting your selves on your back why don't you go about fixing issues in your own software to make it more popular.
The sheer amount of entitlement here is astounding. Wowmatrix was stealing, plain and simple. The software was set up in such a way that it leeched bandwidth from the sites without any sort of compensation. Do all you folks complaining not realize that if that continued the sites would be forced to shut down due to operating overhead? Then no one, including Wowmatrix users, would have ANY addons.
Believe it or not, you are NOT entitled to an updater at all. You are not entitled to anything. The addon authors make things for free. The sites host them for free. The ads pay for the operating costs of the site. You're not paying for anything. Be grateful that there are coders out there who are willing to write, debug, and update the addons we all love, and that there are admins willing to run the sites to compile them in one or two easy to find places.
People need to quit QQ over this. bandwidth beening stolen? well thats a matter if opinion. these users that used the bandwidth rather they went to the site or used wowmatrix it would have been used anyways. all wowmatrix did was act as a middle man to get the addons. if your sites didnt suck with stupid adds all over the place you would have never had the problem in the first place. try cleaning up the site and remove the annoying adds and banners all over the place and watch traffic come back directly to your site. wowmatrix was more effciant at providing addons then you guys were and that allowed for a large fan base to goto it. if you provide a straight to the point app such as they did there would be less hassle. just my opinion, but overall quit crying about it.
The funny thing its most flamers from matrix say that curse client does not work... in that case maybe it isn't for you, if you cant do 3 clicks (and 2 its to run the client lol) then you shouldn't use it, go back to manual install or even better stop using that magic box from where you are reading this.... less huntards or dktards to pug with.
@ keeker yes curse Client updates your addons with a easy click and omg what is that it installs them also...(gasp)
plus most the ppl i have known to use wowmatrix has had there accounts hacked and then in turn blamed the addon and its authors
so i say to use be safe and download addons from curse/wowace/wowinterface
You know, I'm really surprised at the outcome of all of this.
There are plenty of flames, etc against Curse and WoWI but the point is:
WoWMatrix = thieves
There is no ifs/buts/maybes about this. They were stealing bandwidth from these people. You cannot argue with that.
@Keeker: If you don't visit curse or wowi, where are you going to get your addons? Wowui? Heh good luck there.
WowMaxtrix is not hosting any addons, nor are they distributing them. Instead, WM is deep-linking directly to the downloads on Curse and WowInterface. This uses up the site's bandwidth without displaying ads from the site, ultimately costing the sites lots of money. I do understand why WM had to be blocked.
I used to use the WoWAceUpdater, and I liked it... discovered a lot of new addons that way since it made it easy to try them out. When it was discontinued, I was sad, but I understood. Tried the original curse updater, and I have to say it really missed the mark.
I got to the point where I just went back to my very manual process. I keep three computers totally synched by hand, and now that I have a decent procedure together, I actually find it more reliable.
I've heard of WoWMatrix, and frankly I always found the way they operated to be a bit distasteful. Though from all I heard, it did seem to be better implemented than Wow Interface and Curse's clients.
I'm an addon developer, and I also happen to be a web hosting provider for about 14 web sites, and from BOTH those angles, I see why Curse and WoWInterface did what they did. Big bandwidth costs big money, and authors host addons where they host them for their own reasons. After all the palaver, I checked WowMatrix web site, and lo-and behold my addon is there too.
I never authorized them to host it.
Granted, I wrote it for myself and to share with whoever wants to use it, and I don't ask for any donations on it, but I'm still a little bothered that I had no say in who/where my addon was hosted. I'm also bothered by the idea that they may end up hosting an older version that I'll get incorrect support calls on.
Oh well, I hope Curse and WoWInterface prevail.
WADDU has broken too, so I installed the new Curse Client... and magically it does its job pretty well actually ... big thx for the new version! Keep up the good work!!
WoWInterface has said it was being measured in Terabytes of data. I'm guessing it'd be similar numbers for Curse. That's thousands of dollar a month in bandwidth.
So, no, they are not 'being butt hurt', they are trying to keep the sites OPEN!
Does ya'lls clients (Curse Updater and WoWI updater) automatically download any additional addons if required? With WowMatrix, I could, say, download/update a fubar plugin, and if i forgot to install fubar also, WowMatrix would automatically install it for me. Ya'lls client do that? HMMMM? Hmmmm?
Edit: Can Yall post some numbers as to how much bandwidth ya'll were loosing? Personally i think ya'll were just butt hurt that WowMatrix figgured out how to do something better than you first, and now yer takin it out on the little guys like us users. I know i will not be visiting either wowinterface or curse for quite a while after i finish posting here
Here's a crazy idea, how about you both get together and write an addon updater that does away with both Curse Client and the Wowace updater?
There is an obvious reason why so many people use wowmatrix, and it's that it's better and simpler to use. You can argue all you like about it but if you had a better client people would use it instead.