..Moderator hat on..
Ok Jay, I appreciate your support but most of us do look at things as a general customization community. Artistic people squabble more often than most but differences in opinion are not differences in principle usually.
DeviantART has done a great deal for that community. Different websites are tailered for different people. And as our community grows, and it is growing quickly, more and more sites will come into existence. Deskmod is coming back. Heck, even Skinz.org may return at some point. And that's how it needs to be because there are now so many users into what was once our little private club that no single site can contain them all.
I take it you're a software developer, Jay? Because I too just as most of the mainstream skinners and developers feel the slight sense of queaziness about programs that 1) Patch someone else's DLLs without their permission and 2) Use their format without permission. The whole thing brings up memories of the Napster debates on skinz.org. Some people didn't see the big deal. But those of us in the intellectula property business did see it as a big deal. People who create things should have control over those things. Like it or not, Microsoft created a UIS1+ level skinning format for Windows XP. And they decided for their own reasons to put security in it.
If someone else wanted to use it, they could have gotten a license. ICQPlus just licensed the WindowBlinds UIS skin format. That's the proper way of doing things. You get explicit PERMISSION.
How can any site that would support MSSTYLES ever say no to a rip? What's the difference? Is it okay to rip Microsoft's format because they're a big company? OS skins have always been a gray area, but it has been long established that other people's formats are a no no to use without permission just like using other people's skins. But my opinions on this are constantly called into question just because MSSTYLES competes with WindowBlinds's UIS format. That's a strawman perspective though because just about anything that involves customization will compete with something Stardock makes at this point.
And it should be pointed out that of all the software developers in this market, only Stardock hosts skins for other programs - even competitors (we host Dangeruss's Hoverdesk themes for instance). If someone knows of a developer in the community that is LESS competitive with other devleopers in it, let me know.
As I said to Jark earlier, look at how aggressively he defends his site in a MESSAGE BOARD. Imagine how I must have felt to logon and read an interview in the main news section read by tens of thousands of people in which I am personally attacked. Not Stardock but ME, Brad Wardell. And for what? Because I pointed out that Style XP is just a DLL patch? It clearly didn't do very much good because there's still people running around thinking it's a skinning app and now requesting to have a Style XP section (if you're going to have a section, it should be called MSSTYLES since that is what they are).
If the interview was supposed to clear things up, I would say it made things worse. More people than ever think that Style XP is some sort of customization program. It's not. It's a 200K download which includes a skin in it and an installer. Why do users think it's so small? Because it doesn't do anything but patch a DLL.
But I don't think it's fair for you to attack (or "Savage") DeviantART. They don't claim to be a technical site. Clearly a lot of people are not familiar with what this program does. They just see something that gives them basic skinning for free.
Being "paranoid" I looked at the people who criticized WindowBlinds or boosted this progrma. They aren't WB users. None of htem had ever commented on or created a WB skin. None of their screenshots showed WB in use. So from a business perspective, does it matter that the people who previously were happy using either nothing or that font that changes the title bar buttons are planning to use a crack that lets them have different colors of Luna?
Has anyone noticed how many of these people who hate paying for a $20 program already have Windows XP, a $150 upgrade days after release? These are not the types of people who pay for software in the first place. And if skin sites in the community want to cater to the "Warez" crowd, that's certainly their right. The more warez people that leave here and go elsewhere the better.
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