I am not sure on the any of the legalities of it, but as far as I know, modding is more of an open thing where you can take things from here and there in order to learn or do some certain tasks, etc. But unless you are trying to blatantly copy someone's work, I doubt that they are going to have a problem with what you do. You can always ask for their permission if you end up using some of their files, programming, or whatever.

Without visions of money or malice, you should be pretty safe, since most modding is done for fun and learning

But you should ask them first before releasing your mod.

It doesn't require it, but I still think you should give credit to them if you use any of their codes.

of course you gotta give credit. thats why you should put something in the readme or the descripton or whatever, but when you ask it could last forever for the answer and they most often just say "of course", so save your time and begin to work.

Unless someone has explicitly released a work under the GPL or such or otherwise explicitly authorized all and any reuse in other mods in advance, you *must* ask first. "Oh it's just a mod, nobody will care if I just credit them" is no excuse. Ask.

If you never get a response, then find another way to do it without their work.

FYI all the stuff I am releasing under my googlecode project is under the MIT License which I believe means you use it liberally as long as I get my credit somewhere.  I don't list it in any of the individual files but I did tag the entire project with this license.

If anyone else wants to host their mods + source code in the same project repository, just PM me and I'll add you as a contributor so you can check stuff in and we can have one big happy google place to store these mods.

what the docent said certainly hadnt holes in it. its rather my brain that has the holes.

btw. i wasnt talking about text for a commercial product but about sourcecode of a mod for another mod and i mentioned above that you should give credit. i think that sourcecode aint comparable to text but rather to the information a text would transport. so if one found out that the earth is a pizza and would scream that out into the world then i couldnt say that i was the one who found that out. though i could still go on telling everybody about it or say based on the work of mrappard who found out the world is a pizza i investigated further and discovered that the mount everest is made of cheese!

besides that this whole discussion aint bring us nowhere because every modder is ok with anybody just using their work and giving them credit i just cant agree with kryo who said "If you never get a response, then find another way to do it without their work."

the problem with this is that code just aint text that can be written in many ways without losing information. so if there is something that has to be done there sometimes just arent many solutions or the solutions are very similar or almost identical. in these cases finding another (a really different) way would be like inventing the wheel a second time just with a few bumps in it. if one doesnt want these bumps he could write the whole code with other variable names and slight variations again, but what would that help? right, nothing. it means just more work.

gpg should write something into the license that every mod thats coded is automatically put under an open source license.

I just want to say that anyone who wishes to use one of my mods is welcome to do so, just mention my name in discription or something.

When someone uploads a mod, and doesnt say anything about licenses, it means they dont mind people using their work.

Common sense plus generosity is always appreciated

Granted it's worth noting that the main feature of my mod are the models, which I had to calculate the trigonometric values for the translations manually in since I didn't have 3dsm