Founded and released that in 2005, got so much trouble because of that and wasted loads of cash to keep up project through numerous DDoS attacks, hacks (one of them even causing github downtime in 2013).
oh well. Next :-)
This comes down to two parts being problematic:
- we took away business from private servers as there was now an open source solution - applying the open source community model on the private server scene was a disaster. It was to idealistic.
In hindsight, the open source part was basically painting a target on us.
As an example: private servers running mostly use MaNGOS (there is not much else to use) and pretend to have built their own software and advertise by bashing MaNGOS.
Remember that huge buzz about how Blizzard should offer servers running older expansions that was headed by a private server named Nostalrius?
Well, those guys used MaNGOS source code with just a few bug fixes, and snatched an invite to Blizzard: http://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=44218
In the end, the sources went public and it appears they were using a five year old MaNGOS codebase and not the famed "own codebase".
A repeating pattern ever since 2005.
All of that said, myself and millions of others who have enjoyed classic servers over the years have you to thank for laying the foundation,and I agree with the other (downvoted) poster who says it saddens him a bit to see you regret something which has brought so much happiness to the world. If you ignore the selfish server administrators and look at the comments from some of the better parts of the community you'll quickly see that you've helped a lot of people cope with various ills in their lives, and many people have outright told me that they felt classic servers had helped them stave off depression or even suicide.
If you go back to old MaNGOS sources and do the diff on that old state you can see it is just a few bug fixes.
It looks like Nostalrius and Elysium developers simply did not figure out that after that MaNGOS was split into distinct projects for each of WoWs expansions and decided to stay with pre-split version.
/facepalm
The community itself bashes a ton on private servers for taking GPL code, adding a bunch to it, and then never releasing changes even after they go under.
It probably relates back to the general disinterest / apathy / ignorance of software freedom in gaming / hobbyist scenes in general, though. If you have never written a line of code in your life you probably have no idea how the world operates in regards to licensing. You don't distinguish VLC from Windows Media Player besides the visuals you see in front of you.