[Mogobu The Fool]

I just wanted to put in my two cents on the issue:

1. I don't personally begrudge PHT charging what he did. Pricing is not simply return of cost; it's also demand vs. supply. Someone could spend thousands of hours making something nobody wants; that will not justify a $1000 price tag. PHT was providing something a lot of people wanted badly, and he provided a functional tool on a timely basis in a game where time is a valuable commodity.

2. I fully support Juk's decision to publish based on his own ethics. He was offended by the effects of the supply-demand equation based on what he knew to be, at core, a simple process. Some people just kvetch; he produced and changed the supply side of the equation. It's a fair market, and open-source people are allowed to produce open-source projects.

3. I don't think this changes the "Party Response" equation much. At worst, it hastens the inevitable. At best, it HELPS. The surest way to get Party to take actions to block this memory-grabbing technique is to use it on a broad scale in a publicly-discussed for-profit scheme where someone is selling hand history data. What I'm saying is that I felt that the hhSmithey operation would be more likely to get this technique blocked than the PHT operation, even though hhSmithey was not discussing their technique or even selling software. The logistics of a large-scale data collection enterprise demand the efficiency of a memory-grabbing technique like this; I believe Party would draw the same conclusion. It was a public and growing Data Service, and that's the kind of thing that offends Party on all counts: it makes a profit off other people's private information, and it creates a very bad public image problem for Party if they fail to act against it. It's much easier for Party to quitely allow solo-operation tools (like HUDs) or grey-market activities which are never publicly exposed.

The availability of a free tool which achieves what most people want on an individual-enterprise level will do much to limit the size and perceived "threat level" of hhS and PHT, making Party actually less likely to mount a response.