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CCP's blue list must be huge.

I'm monitoring all the questions in this thread, and will work with our legal counsel to come back with answers after the holidays. So far the three main topics we need to clarify/address is how and what you can charge for, the source code access question, and the bits about hiring, but I'll also make sure we answer other questions that have come up. Thanks for your feedback and input so far!

/CCP Seagull

All I have to say about the new CREST Api is this.


Edit to answer the question in the post above mine:

As I understand it, this change will allow developers to make apps that actually affect something in game directly. EFT, EVEmon etc are great but they are all limited by having read only access to data. This change will let them do things with low abuse potential that require write access like *sending* an EVEmail. The possibilities are only limited by which parts CCP chooses to make available, and the extent of that hasn't been announced and probably isn't settled.

So I'll come out and point out the obvious.. by definition "premium content" implies some form of premium. Otherwise it wouldn't be.

So, this is obviously a big one for those of us who have considered investing a lot of time and effort into developing third party applications based around EVE. Such a clause mandates that we cannot expect reasonable remuneration for our work from those which we provide our applications or services too.

It hugely disincentives developing with it. Time is valuable. The time I spend programming can and will be spent working on something else if I cannot benefit from it in some way, and as a result CCP ends up not benefiting from third party application developers.




10 days is less than 2 weeks, i.e. less than a short holiday. 14 days would be preferable for this.



CCP is headquartered in Iceland.
CCP's legal council is based in Iceland.
CCP's server services are provided from London.

Why exactly would we be signing up under the laws of a third party country which has no jurisdiction to either?

Having re-read everything, it seems there are now no plans whatsoever to allow developers to charge for their apps.

When the original anouncement was made (over a year ago now?) I thought the whole point of the dev licence was to allow us to charge for third party apps. As a consequence, I started working on a new version of my application that I intended to charge real money for.

Having spent over 500 hours of my free time on this over the last year or so, finding that I can no longer charge anything at all would be... Disappointing.

Obviously the original version was very much a draft proposal. I'm just surprised that such an apparently key part of it has been dropped. Especially after what happened with capsuleer.

Anyone knows the reasons for not allowing us to charge for apps anyway?
Also what about gambling sites? thats a pure profit concept by nature.

Automatic payments and contracts, which I believe will be the single biggest use for CREST once the functionality becomes available.

Oh right, you got a point there. I didn't consider that applications might want to use CREST only for the application owner, but not for users.
I think I'll leave now before the discussion starts if a gambling bet is (partly?) a fee.

open source vs proprietary, open source wins imo, so much talent in the world that can be creative that the community can use.

this proposal is a new rebalancing of ccp of the api services (the $99 was charged not to be cost effective but still wtf), still shame there is some grey area's, tbh if it weren't for 3rd party developers this spreadsheet game would be very difficult to play by uninitiated, gues we need to see the Silver Lining in this.

I'm pretty sure that shadygirl is either woefully uninformed, or just trolling... I suspect the latter, but I'll humour the post and reply.

Who cares for money? Simply put anyone who wishes to be rewarded in some tangible way for the time that they invest in creating such programs. I have been a developer for around 10 years now and have produced a variety of software designed to integrate with third party producs and services, much of which I dual licensed, and I am quite familiar with investing many hundreds or even thousands of hours of development time into pieces of software and to be frank, even when making something cool, the "coding high" doesnt last forever, and it's good to know you're going to get something out the other end of staying up for 18 hours in a row trying to debug some obscure error rather than just throwing in the towel.

The reason I claim you may be woefully missinformed is that the whole point of creating APIs and Frameworks around your platform (CCPs in this case) is to build an ecosystem of third party tools which are available to your users to enhance your product, at no per-application development cost to yourself.

CCP stands to profit from the production of CREST (and the API) otherwise they simply would not have made it. These third party tools will make their platform more accessible, and easier to use. They stand to benefit a great deal indeed. Such APIs are most often given away for free to get the biggest possible gain from their time investment in building the API.

Requiring open source simply is not going to happen. It's a cloud cuckoo land to imagine that is ever going to be the case for more than a small percentage of all software, and I also take exception from you claiming it improves security. Unless third parties were to validate every single line of code for every binary or script released for usage then you're still trusting whoever put it up, what's to say someone did not put in a backdoor prior to compilation? 99% of people are not going to go and compile their own applications, and what with the way that I suspect most of these applications will work, they're certainally not going to set up and maintain their own extensive codebases, databases and resources.

So CCP should first get the simple one out of the way; charging ISK for access to services should be allowed. It's a well established pattern with existing EVE related tools such as killboards, forums and route planners etc.

Charging real world money for it? Well, unless CCP wants to build its own payment system for creating licenses for third party sofware, and have contractual terms saying all payments have to go through them (Think Apple) then that's a non-starter too, really. They would be much better off coming up with a series of constraints and limits on sale (i.e. default maximum fees) to keep things sensible, if the product is not good enough, people simply won't pay for it, or will use an alternative. If people are willing to pay for it then it must add enough value that CCP probably should be dropping them a mail asking them for some kind of deal.

In summary:

* People want the opportunity to gain from their time investment.

* CCP is giving it away for free because that's what is most profitable for them.