[Dean C]

Originally Posted by Spinball

The important fact that you are completely ignoring is that when people start using mods they become dependent upon them. The better the mod, the more dependent. Take one of the most popular mods, for example, (either) arcade. Say the next release of vB broke it and the author couldn't be bothered to update it. How many THOUSANDS of people would then be demanding that their favourite forum administrators get their arcade going again?
The admin of those forums would be left stranded and with vBulletin.org's current policy, nobody could adopt the hack.

Look, your point is mute. It's been stated umpteen times in this thread, by myself and others. Modifications are copyrighted to their owner. Not you, not anyone else is allowed to modify that code and distribute it. Simple as that. Nothing you say or do here will change that, unless they implement a checkbox where modification owners can choose to exempt their modification from that copyright.

It's not my problem if you're dependent on my mod and I abandon it and it's not vBulletin.org's. It's yours. I'm not saying it's right, and I certainly would never abandon my users, and I completely understand where you're coming from.

No matter how much you complain about it, there's only one solution to the problem and that's adding the checkbox. And even then, I personally won't opt in. And I think a lot of hack authors would feel the same way. There's a lot of intellectual property involved in big modifications such as the arcade hack you use in your example, so I doubt John would want anyone taking over his code should he disappear for whatever reason. And you must also remember that some people disappear for reasons out of their control. A member here a few years ago disappeared, and last I heard he was kicked out of his home, and living without a computer in one-bedroom flat in a bad area. These circumstances were out of his control. Once he sorts himself out, I think he'd be pretty annoyed that all the hard work he'd put in was out of his control. This is why copyright is there, to protect people like this

On a completely unrelated note, some of the links on your homepage are broken. I was trying to view your home cinema