There’s a raid addon called RDX (for “Raid Data Exchange”) made by some warlock in a super-elite guild… and he charges for it. This makes me angry.

People leaked the code for “RDX 5” and apparently there’s a version out there from the website “Conquest” with additions made by other people, so the addon-author “lessened the security checks” (I don’t know waht this means–there’s probably a Microsoft-style online check for authenticity/paid-ness and it disables itself if you haven’t paid?). He claims that he “lessened the security” to give access to RDX 5 to the general public because RDX 6 is about to come out anyway. (I think a more likely story is that people got their hands on the code and un-securified it.) Now, you can pay to download the RDX 6 alpha, which doesn’t work with a raid group yet.

I can’t believe how elitist people are. Yes, I believe that he works hard on this addon. Yes, I believe that he is some kind of good coder. No, I don’t think he should “restrict” his addon to world-first guilds who pay him. The whole point of a coding community is … to have a community, right? Of course all the addons I’ve ever seen in the entire world were all free. Yeah, because of this you get a lot of shitty addons, but there is the occasional outstanding one, and those rise to the surface.

But he’s charging for it because he knows his addon is good and “all the world-first guilds use it.” He doesn’t need it to be free to be widely used and he doesn’t even want to offer it for public consumption because we’re not good enough for him. I can’t believe that he was able to pull this off. It makes sense though, because there’s a small community of “world-first” guilds that are way above everyone else (we have no world-first guilds on Dragonmaw–far from it), and they use this as another way to make themselves feel better than the rest of us. Another badge of elitism–“we pay for RDX.” It’s just really strange. Even saying so reeks of some sort of crying on my part, “wahh those guilds are better than us and I’m just trying to think of something bad to say about them,” but it’s how I feel.

If I knew more about the politics of free software, I would say a lot more. I want to tell Lawrence Lessig about this or something. I just can’t believe that requiring online “security checks” to use software (a la Microsoft) has found its way into the world of WoW addons.

See for yourself: http://www.rdx-raid.com Someone in his guild has a blog: http://furryhealing.blogspot.com/ People elsewhere flame him: http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5780 and in the thread about the world first 4 horsemen kill: http://www.curse-gaming.com/de/wow/news-318-1-four-horsemen-killed-by-deathtaxes.html …etc. Google.

Very strange.