A Different Take on RDX

The title links to a post by someone who is quite irritated by Veni charging for access to the website which hosts RDX. For those of you who are lazy I'll first quote the entire article and then my reply to it.

The article:

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: Curse News Post ...etc. Google.

Very strange.

My reply:

Hi, I found this article from a technorati search because it links to my blog (http://furryhealing.blogspot.com). Seeing as you seemed pretty irritating by the whole thing I wanted to explain a little bit.

First, I'm not a member of his guild (Scions of Destiny I think), in fact I don't even know him except to know he writes some pretty nice code.

Second, I'm not even in one of these 'elite guilds' you mention. My guild isn't competing for world firsts, in fact for the most part we aren't even competing for server firsts (seconds maybe).

Third, RDX is most certainly not CTRA with some new bells and whistles. Personally I have not looked at the LUA code of CTRA particularly closely but I will tell you with certainty that RDX is far and away the superior raiding tool.

Fourthly, this is nit picking but since I probably sound like a prick anyway.. CTRA wasn't really the first raid windows either, it was just the most widely distributed.

Since I'm not in a guild competing for world firsts which requires use of this add on you may (or may not) be curious about why I chose to pay the money to get it. Its pretty simple really, curiousity. I was curious to see what the code for such an elaborate add on looked like (I'm a programmer/developer by trade), even more so I was curious to see if he could really deliver on all the things he's claimed RDX will be able to do.

To contrast, my experience with CTRA is that it is an addon of basic windows with some nice extra information available to raid leaders. However, it is extremely static, and has remarkably little customizability. RDX by contrast provides incredible oppurtunities to change raid windows in a way which makes them more useful to the user.

As far as paying for the mod, I actually understand where the irritation fueling those feelings comes from. The simple solution is of course if its not worth it for you, don't get it.

Thanks for the different point of view none-the-less, most of the things I read about RDX are about how great it is.

This is what I'll call a 'lazy entry' on my part. What I quoted for me is simply the comment I left on the journal article.