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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kafen" data-source="post: 5191536" data-attributes="member: 11273">Two points... I support the developers of third party software for the first point. I develop software that consumes hundreds of hours of my time which makes it personal on some level. If the general community does not show its concern over bully tactics over free software, what is the point in defending any software on the practical level. The people advocating the idea that software developers need to smile and take the hit merely because WOTC is 'big' are hurting the entire gaming community by feeding the climate of fear. As reasonable developers, Masterplan deserves the protection of the community if you like their software and want to continue using it. On the second point, I have no pity for WOTC if they send out letters to Masterplan people when enforcement involves WOTC sending out letters to the torrent sites targeting the copyright infringing material. It is a legal step toward judicial barbarianism of the 1930s and 1940s for software developers to let big companies get away with it in silence. The chilling effect on innovation is huge with a message that does not speak well for the industry. So yes, I get excited when people cheer a large corporation for using scare tactics to hurt the gaming industry. The truth is that I suspect people are treating this like an edition war topic which it is not. It is not about 4e versus The World. If you go to the Masterplan site, the hot topic is the legal aspect. It has nothing to do with Edition War pride and gaming system fights at this point. It's about good software that is under attack by a large company which affects the entire gaming industry. Masterplan is moving on, though. So, the edition war pride stuff is a moot point. The license debate is beside the point. WOTC is going to take its bloody nose for this one and Masterplan is going forward to version 9.0 which means everyone wins. Heck, even the pirates win. Public trackers place the torrent sharing traffic at 30x the data traffic since I spotted this one on the Yoko Critic. It's the real lesson we take from this bit - big companies can bully little ones, but pirates are going to steal the data once they hear about it. Most because it is the hot topic of the day on Facebook and the Masterplan site. The forums, too. *shrug* Anyways, I never said they should turn away from 4e. Why not increase their user base at a critical time in their development?</blockquote>

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