Louis Gerbarg

So with the release of #midnight there has been a lot of upheavel in the #wow addon community, which has caused me to have to look at new UI addons, and I am struck by just how crazy the whole ecosystems licensing situation seems to be.

There are a lot of opensource addons, but there are also a lot where the authors want to retain control so they explicitly write an empty license which reserves all rights for themselves. When I ask authors to change the license to actually allowing copying the addon for installation I invariably get some sort of response of the form "The license is only for modifying my addon's source, not using it." IANAL, but to me that falls flat because:

1. Absent an explicit grant there is no implicit right to use it anyway
2. There may be an implicit license created because the author uploaded it to something like curseforge, but that is both somewhat vague for the users, and leaves the authors exposed since they have not disclaimed any implied warranty granted by their implied license.
3. For addons there is no object code/artifact that can bear a different license than the source code.

When I had to deal license issues in the past lawyers have told me is that if there is an ambiguity in the license and you have a written statement from the copyright holder about their intention a court will generally use their written statements to interpret the license. So the action of me asking for the change and them telling me they don't think they need to change their license because it grants me the rights may resolve the issue for me, but I find that unsatisfying.

In some ways it is not a big deal, either just ignore it like everyone else, or don't use the addons. But I can't help but feel a lot of this is people who have never written software vibe coding licenses for their vibe coded addons, which makes me actually worry a lot about what this looks like for more consequential opensource projects.