Copyright/license of mod?

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

if you copied someone elses code you should put a note about it in the readme of your mod.

But you should ask them first before releasing your mod.

would be polite but most open source licenses dont require that.

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

I have just added the line under Author to read like "Neilo, with credit to mrappard" as i will have too in my new favor item mod using his Favor Item Tab mod.

I'll be honest i had not thought of asking for permission to use other mods, i thought giving the full credit would have been enough, but if we have a consensus to seek permission, then i will do so.

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.

yep.  Feel free to use anything I put out without permission.  Just put credit in the readme or even a comment in the code.  I suspect most modders would be OK as long as you don't just copy their code entirely, rename it and call it your own.

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.

and there we are discussing intellectual property.

the problem about most mods is that they are small. so small that there hardly is another way to achieve what the mod does (besides make it look different).

some time ago we have learned at school that if you put something out into public without having a patent for it, it becomes "common knowledge" (dunno the word in english). that means if one just gives out something without explicitely saying how it should be used (license text or similar), you can use it. perhaps its different in other countries. also its a mod of a commercial game. i wonder if there is something in demigods license which says how to handle that sort of things. i mean seriously: if someone mods demigod, he is using gpgs work in the first place so he certainly cant claim any right on the code IF he hasnt coded something _really_ new.

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.

Derog what your teacher said has a couple holes in it. Technically and legally the words I am writting right now are under copyright by me. And technically if you were to copy and paste them into a book I could sue you for copyright infringement. Every piece of work regardless of the copyright symbol or in public view is under copyright. (And thus under Fair Use as well.) To allow your work to be used by other it's best to license it. Under international copyright law these rules apply (Although slightly differently in different countries.)

For example on my code I used this licenese. Which was very easy to use.

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Simply cause it looks pretty and people don't have to worry about keeping the copyright information and sourcecode stuff.

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.

That is flatly untrue. I don't allow recycling of my mods as a general rule for a variety of reasons (ex: who's going to get blamed if they screw it up?); unless someone makes a damn good case for including them in theirs I just tell them to have people download mine from the source themselves.

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

From my experience as a long-time SupCom modder, there was little issue here. Typically, actual code is a negligible resource when it comes to mods, and resources like art are much more valuable. Partly, this is because most mods require no complex code at all, and anyone who's read the Lua manual (and caught up on Demigod's systems) should be able to write virtually any mod. Not just that, but it's common that people will ask for technical support for a piece of code, and end up have it nearly entirely written by a more experienced modder.

As a combination of these factors, I find that there is very rarely a problem with "code stealing", and using concepts & ideas about how to accomplish something, as opposed to copying and pasting, is virtually never disagreeable.

However, to be certain, you should always ask the mod author. Kryo has every right to maintain exclusive right to his code and tell you to go write your own.

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

That sounds very painful.