An artist's depiction of an Extended Unit Death
I'll admit having skimmed a lot of the last couple pages; good points were made from both sides, and then things started getting ridiculous. I'm not particularly partial to either side, as I have reasons for both of them.
Protection was a solution to the problem of map stealers. Unprotection is a solution to the problem of protection. (Is protection a problem? If you do not believe so, you're very likely against most cases of unprotection.)
Here are my own personal Pros/Cons for unprotectors:
PROS:1) Availability
If you're like me, you have at least one unprotector sitting with the rest of your mapping utilities. Unlike all of my other utilities (which I get from Sen), I have to search and acquire an unprotector on the webby-web. The convenience factor of making Sen a one-stop-shop is apparent when you're setting up your mapping rig on a new computer.
2) Personal Map Recovery
I've had the misfortune of losing the original unprotected versions of my map, and I'm sure many of you can say the same. With an unprotector, I can regain access to my maps if I ever need to update it. This is among the legitimate uses of unprotectors, and it can be argued that we shouldn't restrict something that has legitimate uses only because it can be misused as well.
3) Map Corruption Reversal
Some of you may be unaware, but a lot of corrupted maps can in fact be repaired using an unprotector. I've fixed a number of issues (including storage leaks, random crashes, string limit/recycling craziness, and unreadable maps, to name a few) by simply running the file through an unprotector. (This is something I like to do when a friend gives me their project that has corrupted in some way). Because of their nature, unprotectors rebuild broken areas of maps; a program that was built to uncorrupt maps would function the same way as an unprotector, and that's certainly a tool that (on the surface) our community would not want to exile.
4) Educational Purposes
This is probably the weakest of the supporting arguments for a number of reasons, but there is some merit to it. At one point, I protected maps with GUEdit, which if you don't already know, is one of the weakest forms of protection out there. Why did I do this? Because there was still heavy concern of maps being stolen, but the people that steal maps are often times not very reputable mapmakers, and a simple failure to open in an editor would deter that particular group from editing the map. Those that have the tools of the trade are likely experienced in mapmaking, and generally speaking, veteran mapmakers are less interested in stealing the work of others, as they're capable of creating great content on their own. This was my theory, at least, and it definitely seemed to be accurate from my personal experiences. This, coupled with the previously mentioned ability to view maps without being able to edit them, makes it a weak point to allow unprotectors, but it is a point I'll acknowledge nonetheless.
CONS:1) Map Stealing
The big one; this is the reason we have the rule in place. Protection was made to prevent people from stealing the map. Unprotection was made to undo protection. So, even if their intentions were pure, unprotectors are the embodiment of allowing map stealing to continue. We are a community that abhors the stealing of maps, and so it is only natural that we would not distribute programs that are designed to negate protectors (which are efforts to prevent map stealing).
2) Educational Purposes
I'm actually listing this as a con as well. Almost all the basics I learned from mapmaking I learned on my own. If I saw a system in a map, I would challenge myself to recreate it. If it was truly beyond my current capacity to learn, my answer was not to unprotect the map and scan through the author's work. It was to come to the community, reading tutorials and asking questions. Never have I looked at the solution to a problem and learned more than when I go through and attempt to solve it myself.
3) Respecting The Author
Let's be honest here: unprotecting somebody else's work without permission is disrespectful to some degree. In some cases (like I mentioned earlier about myself), the author is fine with it, depending on the reasons for unprotecting the map. But I cannot tell you how many people come to me asking what the most powerful protector is (see the next point). They really do not want others to open their map, and to come to Sen and see that we distribute tools that do exactly what they don't want to happen, it discourages them from wanting to contribute to our community. We are a community of mappers, and we should respect what our members want. (If you're going to argue that members want unprotectors, my answer is that unprotectors do not really contribute to the community, whereas members and their works do; in this case, even if the opposition to unprotectors were in the minority, their reasoning is more objective for the betterment of the community.)
4) Protection Competition
Count the number of threads asking for the best protector. Even with no unprotectors allowed on the site, some mapmakers are very concerned that their maps will be unprotected, and they're looking to beat any unprotector on the market. Now look at the answers in those threads. Many of our members instead encourage compression over protection, as there is a direct benefit to using compression and ultimately any "stronger" protection today will be just as weak in the future. The inquirers were well aware of the major unprotectors at the time, and were desperate to use something that would best all of the unprotectors they knew about. You may remember some Korean protectors floating around (Shadow Protector, which was ported to Special Protector) which worked for a while to defeat the versions of the major unprotectors at the time. Some of these protectors were actually breaking maps (most notably making imported sounds no longer work), so broken maps were being distributed in the name of protection, only to have that protection become useless by the updating of an unprotector. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.
5) Unprotection Competition
I can guarantee that throughout history of protectors, there has been made a specific protector to unprotect it. If you recall the early stages of OSMap, a protector came around as a response that included data that would cause OSMap to crash. Great, except then came along Unused Unprotector, which defeated that protector quite easily. There is always a quick response for unprotectors to beat protectors (you'd be surprised how many protectors and unprotectors actually exist; it's just that some are so specialized that they are irrelevant for modern use), just like how there was a quick response from hacks when Blizzard would issue a new patch. The authors of unprotectors only stay relevant if their product is still useful, and the product is only useful if it can unprotect the latest maps. The reason SCMC is undefeated in protection is a combination of it being the latest form of protection and the only tools we know of to try against it are old and outdated. There are more recent and powerful unprotectors floating around than OSMap, and if we welcome unprotectors into the community, we may help to popularize them and make them more readily available for average mappers. (If you maintain the belief that this is not a negative thing, I'll refer you to con #4, which is a vicious, cyclical response to popularized unprotectors.)
I know there are more pros/cons to this, but there were certainly some mentioned here that I don't think qualify. The whole "open source movement" argument, for example, is an ideology that many members do not subscribe to (many new maps we get are still protected in one form or another as evidence of this). Denying unprotectors is not denying open-source maps; we are not restricting this ideology by excluding unprotectors here, and we are not forcing it on our members, either. If you want to edit a map that isn't yours, get the original author's permission, plain and simple.
Saying unprotectors should be allowed here because they are readily available is also not a good argument; many things that Sen does not tolerate (warez, pornography, etc.) are readily available elsewhere, but we don't allow them here because of the characteristics of the content.
Finally, saying the rule shouldn't be changed because it's been like this forever is also not a good argument; tradition is not inherently correct. Along those lines, however, I don't think activity should dictate principle, so I would disagree with the idea that unprotectors should be allowed simply because there is less traffic and fewer offenders out there.
Yeah, sorry; I tried to keep that brief, but I just wanted to get all of my thoughts out in one go.
Can we stop using analogies? Unless someone needs clarification on what protection or unprotection does for a person, there's no need for them. Some of the discussion just shifted to
how valid the previous analogy was instead of actually discussing the issue. If you can't construct your argument without referring to a loosely related analogous scenario, then you either don't have an argument or don't understand what your argument is. [/PSA]