In fact, I agree with the donationware idea. Not that I think it would bring back much money, but it sure would give the chance to some people to feel they have contributed in some way to the plug. It leaves a choice to those who are using the plug to show their appreciation through remuneration if they want to.

But still, I don't believe a person creating plugs (which is a hobby) should be able to charge money for his/her plugs if he/she wanted. Charging money usually means we think highly of our work, and I don't know many people who wouldn't overprice.

Let me explain how I would judge if something is overpriced.
Have a look at EVN: 30$ for one engine, 6 storylines, one wide galaxy,
The thing many people will ignore/forget is the engine when pricing. They compare the storylines, the systems, the weapons, the graphics, but they forget the main thing: what holds it all together.

For this reason, I think that any kind of plug should be priced (if necessary) at 10$ maximum. This means that only something that could be put at a similar or higher level than EVN could be priced 10$.
(note: any plug that changes the engine with Matt Burch's permission would probably then be able to go up to 15$)

So, anyway, back to the matters at hand.

Economically speaking, any work has the right to be remunerated. Ethically and legally speaking, something started with the idea of doing it for free and kept as a hobby should not suddenly become something people pay for in the eyes of the creator of that something. It's just not right.

To use the legal point of view, let's say (I'm using easy and understandable terms here, no worries) that you mentally sign a contract with the community once you start working on the plug. This mental contract is based on the agreement of both parties, yourself and the community. It is regarded as a true contract, based on this agreement (the community can agree silently here).
This mental contract says: "I will do my best to bring you, the community, this plug. I will not charge you for it, because you have already offered me the chance to start work on it".

A contract cannot be changed unilaterally by yourself in this case. The only party here to be allowed to change that contract alone is the community. The community can say "This is so good that I will pay you for this!". Perfectly legal. But you cannot say "This is so good that you will pay me for this!". It's illegal.

Another way to change this contract is by getting a third party involved, ASW in this case. They can create a new contract with you that will destroy the mental one. Perfectly legal.

But, I repeat, you cannot yourself decide to charge people for that something you started with the idea of making it free for the community.

You might object, for example with the idea of a band that starts by playing music for free, and then starts asking money for gigs and albums. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but it doesn't work that way.

me thinks about the legal problem for ten-twenty minutes before solving it

The community the plug-in developer "works" for is a very well determined party. When musicians decide to write songs/play them, the public is not determined at all. There is therefore no contract.
If a band is formed for one specific goal, there is a contract between them and the audience related to their goal. They cannot change their policy without ending the contract that was born, and that means including the audience in the talks.

My band was formed with the idea of playing for the school public. After almost two years, I wanted to organise a big concert for which we would ask 2 Euros per entry. The school prefect refused flat out. The only way I was to ask for money was if we changed our "contract", whereby we got the "concert hall" for free. I couldn't ask for money if I didn't pay

Hope you understand this. If not, do ask simpler explanations

I can understand the concept of a verbal or written contract, but I disagree with the concept that a mental contract with the community somehow magically springs into existence when someone starts work on a plugin. Basically there is no contract between plugin makers and the community because neither side agreed to anything, and its not illegal to ask the community to pay for a plugin. As far as I'm concerned a person or team can do whatever they want. Its up to the individuals in the community to decide weather a plugin is worth the asking price.

Sure if a team promises to not charge for a plugin and they turn around and do so they are in the wrong and hopefully the community would punished them for it.

Also, if this magical mental contract binds plugin makers, wouldn't it effect people who make third party plugin editors? All they did was make a program to help people with their hobbies right? And their making the editor was just a hobby right? Why should they be allowed to charge for their editors but plugin makers not charge for their work?

To sum up, just because something people do is a hobby doesn't make it somehow illegal for them to charge money for other people to play with it. There is no mental contract because nobody agreed to its terms. So I think people should have the right to charge for a plugin, as long as ATMOS or ASW doesn't stop them for copyright violation or something like that.

Just to add some thoughts to the discussion, and address some thing that have been said a couple of times.

People have said repeatedly that one "shouldn't charge money for a hobby". Well, the point of this whole thread is me asking: "Could you do plug-in development as a paying (side) job, instead of as a hobby?" Do remember that both EV: Override and EV Nova got started as plug-ins, and eventually transformed into commercial efforts.

And the money wouldn't be as much to pay for the tools , but for the massive amount of work that is required to make a very good total conversion plugin - several hundred hours.

I'm really not trying to introduce the idea of evil, money-grubbing commercialisation into the whole process of making plugins. I've simply seen a silly amount of extremely wonderful total conversions fail over the years, stuff I was really looking forward to, and I do think that if the authors had had that extra incentive of "I'll be paid a bit for my troubles", more of them might've been completed.

Zarkonnen, on Apr 10 2005, 02:04 PM, said:

JDo remember that both EV: Override and EV Nova got started as plug-ins, and eventually transformed into commercial efforts.View Post

Also keep in mind that (as far as I know) no actual monitary rewards were reaped while the games were in-process- I think that the developers had to wait untill the shareware fees began to roll in. In that meantime, surely they had to have means to support themselves.

Quote

And the money wouldn't be as much to pay for the tools , but for the massive amount of work that is required to make a very good total conversion plugin - several hundred hours.

I'm really not trying to introduce the idea of evil, money-grubbing commercialisation into the whole process of making plugins. I've simply seen a silly amount of extremely wonderful total conversions fail over the years, stuff I was really looking forward to, and I do think that if the authors had had that extra incentive of "I'll be paid a bit for my troubles", more of them might've been completed.

To make that much money one would probably have to charge as much for the TC as Nova itself cost, or even more, and also have ASW's backing. I can't be sure there.
(edit: amplification and clarification)

This post has been edited by rmx256 : 10 April 2005 - 04:26 PM

Pace (haldora), on Apr 10 2005, 04:39 PM, said:

If a band is formed for one specific goal, there is a contract between them and the audience related to their goal. They cannot change their policy without ending the contract that was born, and that means including the audience in the talks.
View Post

Do you actually know anything about law?

Under UK law (I'm not going to speculate about other legal systems) a contract only exists if money changes hands.

Also, many contracts have clauses which allow a particular party to vary the terms at will.

I think the degree of difficulty posters on this thread have in making a coherent argument against paying for plugins speaks for itself. There is no conceivable ethical, moral or legal reason why a plug-in designer should not charge for their plugin. On the other hand, anybody who objects to the author's policy in doing so can complain to the author, or simply not buy the product (though they cannot ethically, morally or legally use it against the terms set by the copyright holder).

Re the argument about the engine: the EV engine existed before Nova. It was developed further for Nova, but is in a real sense flawed software because of the bugs that weren't ironed out. This was not the case for EV and EVO, where the engine was largely bug-free when released and the few bugs were ironed out with subsequent releases.

Re the argument about not charging more than $10. If I want to charge $300 that's my business. If you're not willing to pay it, that's your business -- you just don't get to play my game. You may personally consider $3 or $30 or $300 too much and 'overpriced', and this will influence your willingness to pay. We all make choices of this kind every day we buy something -- do you buy WalMart or Nike? Do you buy Nikon or Sigma? Some people think that $1,000 is too much to pay for the difference between f2.8 and f4 on a zoom lens. Those people buy the f4 version. At the professional end of the market, though, everybody buys the f2.8 not the f4. Some people think that QuarkXpress is overpriced at $1500. Those people are welcome to use Microsoft Publisher at $90.

Martin Turner, on Apr 10 2005, 10:25 PM, said:

Do you actually know anything about law?
View Post

Actually, yes. Studying law is what I'm doing. Sorry if it's not UK Law, but it's as European.

In Belgian Law, which is based on Roman Law (from which all Western law comes from, even a certain part of the Common Law ), here is what happens with contracts (translated from French, but as I do not know all the English legal terms, you may have to correct me):
"a contract is a will agreement settled between two or more people in order to have legal effects (to create, modify, trasmit or undo subjective rights or obligations)".
From its creation point of view, there are unilateral contracts, and there are also contracts born from a tacit consent. This tacit consent is based on the fact that whoever does not speak, when he could have, is considered to be in agreement.

And I'm sure that contracts aren't only the written ones or the ones when money changes hands in UK Law, or that there are other, non-contractual ways of creating obligations and subjective rights, and one of those ways has to be similar to the thing I'm talking about.
After all, believe it or not, UK and Continental Law have different means of arriving to a solution, but the solution is almost always very similar.

This whole question is a moot point. There is no way to charge for a TC with the security measures of EV:N. The very first copy would have to be sold; after that, who knows.

I'd buy swag, like hats and shirts, if I liked it enough.

nfreader, on Apr 11 2005, 09:00 AM, said:

I'd buy swag, like hats and shirts, if I liked it enough.
View Post

You'd be one stylin dude. Nova Shirt, Arpia Hat, Polycon Pants... Shoes? Watches?

The whole "attire" thing bugs me... Maybe a mousepad...

It was mentioned higher up this thread, but it's my understanding that any moneys collected on plug-in project would necessarily be split with AmbrosiaSW and ATMOS in view of royalties on a legal basis.

The wranglings over the minutia of who gets what and the logistics of making that process work would - to my mind - be enough to render the entire proposition more hassle than it's worth.

This post has been edited by Hudson : 11 April 2005 - 01:38 PM

As long as you don't include any one else's property with it (eg. resources from the original EV Nova scenario, graphics from a free 'shipyward', etc.), there is no legal way that someone can stop you from charging for a plug-in. Sure, someone who had bought it could post it to a web site, but they could do the same with a copy of Mac OS X, and it would be equally illegal either way - you certainly wouldn't be able to get it on the Ambrosia add-ons directory unless Andrew was feeling extremely reckless.

Whether anyone would actually be willing to pay for a plug-in is another matter, of course, and sites like Ambrosia's forums or EV-Nova.net wouldn't be under any obligation to help advertise and distribute it.

On a few of the other things that have been posted in this thread:

• The law doesn't distinguish whether or not your work is 'good enough' to merit protection; intellectual property laws are based around original creation, not quality. Similarly there aren't any limits on what prices you can charge beyond what people will pay.

• Regarding the idea of 'paying for the tools you use', what about the 3D software essential to creating any major plug-in? Apart from that, neither ResEdit (which was more or less essential to the creation of any Macintosh software prior to Mac OS X), NovaTools, MissionComputer, nor any other plug-in development utility I've seen sets a condition that what you create with it must be distributed freely.

• The 'mental contract with the community': no such thing. First of all, you can't have a contract with 'the community' (only people or legal persons such as corporations can be parties to a contract). Besides, who would decide what the interests of 'the community' are? Secondly, the idea that plug-ins are free is custom , not law. The fact that something is usually done a certain way doesn't mean that anyone doing it is required to do it that way.

• Since plug-in development doesn't even have to be done with reference to any community - this one, EV-Nova.net, Kontik Research Front, or whatever - there aren't any grounds to assume 'tacit consent' even if there was some sort of attempt at a 'plug-in developers' code'.

Hudson said:

It was mentioned higher up this thread, but it's my understanding that any moneys collected on plug-in project would necessarily be split with AmbrosiaSW and ATMOS in view of royalties on a legal basis.

Provided the plug-in didn't include any of Ambrosia's or ATMOS's property, there's no real reason why - of course, users of the plug-in would still need to buy EV Nova in order to play it, and Ambrosia would be within their rights to ban advertising for and discussion of it from their forums if they were upset.

To sum up: there's plenty of room for debate on whether anyone would buy a plug-in, and whether it would be nice to charge for one, but there's no way you could use the law to stop them. If you want a plug-in whose creator charges for it, though, you have no legal way to get it but to pay for it, and no reputable site is going to help you get it illegally.

Pace (haldora), on Apr 11 2005, 04:57 AM, said:

Actually, yes. Studying law is what I'm doing. Sorry if it's not UK Law, but it's as European.

In Belgian Law, which is based on Roman Law (from which all Western law comes from, even a certain part of the Common Law ), here is what happens with contracts (translated from French, but as I do not know all the English legal terms, you may have to correct me):
"a contract is a will agreement settled between two or more people in order to have legal effects (to create, modify, trasmit or undo subjective rights or obligations)".View Post

Erm, I don't want to be rude, but what year are you in? I suggest that you check the idea of a tacit agreement being a contract with your tutor. I think the words 'will' 'agreement' and 'settled' would militate against a 'tacit agreement'.

You certainly could not enforce a tacit contract of this nature under EU law. When I was European Communications Manager for a major multi-national we faced a large number of EU legal issues to do with contracts. A tacit contract would have made a nonsense of most of them.

In any case, Copyright and Intellectual Property are settled internationally. David Arthur's post is quite correct, and there is no implied obligation on the part of an author to distribute their works according to any terms or conditions to which they have not explicitly agreed.

BTW, where do you live? I lived for about a year in Liege and Charleroi, and about eight years in Gent.

I, personally, would loved to get payed for what I do. I'm 12, I have no job/allowance, and the money would be appreciated. Seeing as my mom doesn't know plug-in creating from video game designing, she asked me once,"Can you get paid for this?". I had to destroy her high hopes by pointing out the difference between plugs and video game design. The truth: I could get paid, I wouldn't work faster and it would take one helluva (pardon my language) lot of money to get me to sit down and make a TC, between school and all that other fun crap, I only have time for small plugs PLUS I work on Windows, so not as many people would get it. As far as I'm concerned, all this law stuff is boring, dull, and confusing.... If I did get paid it'd go to a Xbox.

Martin Turner, on Apr 11 2005, 11:26 PM, said:

Erm, I don't want to be rude, but what year are you in? I suggest that you check the idea of a tacit agreement being a contract with your tutor. I think the words 'will' 'agreement' and 'settled' would militate against a 'tacit agreement'.
View Post

1rst year, but we've already seen the validity characteristics for contracts, and consent is one of those elements that are needed to form a contract. There are 3 different problems/exceptions encountered: unilateral ones (in this case, the Law most of the time), contracts between absentees and tacit consent (he who says nothing when he could have expressed his opinion is supposed to agree). All this (except the unilateral contract idea) is inherited from Roman Law, though there might be details we haven't yet been told of. "Qui ne dit mot, consent" goes a saying in French.

And EU law isn't only Continental law, as it uses a little bit from everywhere, so maybe this isn't used there. I have no idea about that.

Martin Turner, on Apr 11 2005, 11:26 PM, said:

BTW, where do you live? I lived for about a year in Liege and Charleroi, and about eight years in Gent.
View Post

Brussels. I have to say I don't know Ličge, Charleroi and Gent all that well. Most of the time, when I travel around Belgium to cities like that, it's for fencing competitions or simple excursions

And in any case, I admit "defeat". My conscience, telling me this isn't quite right, told me to try to use law in this case, but it would seem it doesn't work the same way in other places.
I apologise if anyone was offended.
Charge what you will to whom you will, but know that others , like Polycon and Unity, have already made a huge impact on the community and have not asked for a single cent. In the end, I think that those most appreciated and most remembered will not be the costly plugs, but the free ones, the donationware ones and the new games (I'm thinking of SS, which is turning more into something new than into a plug).
It is also much more rewarding to hear people praising the plug than to hear them complain about the price tag.

Oh, and zapp, once you're done making your plug, try to make it a novel. That's what I'm going to do. Who knows? It might work. I've got me more than 340 pages, and have more I need to implement to make it a novel, but it's worth the try. And anyway, I plan on finishing it because other people want to know the story, but do not have EVN.
By the way, Martin, what made you decide to make a novel out of Frozen Heart?

This post has been edited by Pace (haldora) : 12 April 2005 - 12:30 AM

Quote

In the end, I think that those most appreciated and most remembered will not be the costly plugs, but the free ones, the donationware ones and the new games (I'm thinking of SS, which is turning more into something new than into a plug).
It is also much more rewarding to hear people praising the plug than to hear them complain about the price tag.

I think you're jumping the gun a bit here. As far as I know no plugin teams have yet declared that they plan to charge for their work. Maybe someday one will, and I think it will be interesting to see how the community reacts.

Quote

Maybe someday one will, and I think it will be interesting to see how the community reacts.

Yeah, here's your sneak peek. Pace hit it right on the money

Quote

once you're done making your plug, try to make it a novel.

I've always wanted to be an author, and that's a good idea.

Pace said:

My conscience, telling me this isn't quite right, told me to try to use law in this case, but it would seem it doesn't work the same way in other places.

It's not a matter of different laws in different countries (though differences in terminology and translation may be further confusing the issue, I don't know), it's just that this simply is not a case where contract law applies. An informal understanding between a group of people who consider themselves to be 'the community' that conducts a certain activity cannot become binding on everyone else who does that activity. Contracts are by nature voluntary agreements between legal persons (which, once again, 'the community' is not); that's what distinguishes them from laws.

Remember, Nova itself was going to be a commercial plug-in, and the reason that didn't happen was not any legal problem with the model, but that it was so good that Ambrosia liked it so much they asked to pick it up as EV3.

Pace said:

By the way, Martin, what made you decide to make a novel out of Frozen Heart?

Didn't the novel come before the plug-in?

David Arthur, on Apr 12 2005, 01:13 PM, said:

Didn't the novel come before the plug-in?
View Post

Quite correct. I wrote the novel when I was 21. The plugin came around ten years later.

The moral problem I see with charging money for a plugin is that it is darned arrogant. Most editors for EV Nova I would assume were made with the intention of helping hobbyists create mods for the game. Using them to make money for oneself, though not illegal per se, is taking a bit of license with the intentions of the editors. Also, your work had better be darned professional if you want to get payed for it.

Keldor Sarn said:

Most editors for EV Nova I would assume were made with the intention of helping hobbyists create mods for the game. Using them to make money for oneself, though not illegal per se, is taking a bit of license with the intentions of the editors.

I can't speak to the intentions of other authors, but with MissionComputer I actually considered including language about limiting commercial use, but then decided that it wouldn't be fair to do so.