First of all, can you? It’s an offhand question, it’s important. If the “source” for this mod is available, that implies that reusing the source is not an unexpected course of action. If it isn’t, then you’re not really taking that guy’s work, you’re making your own that does the same thing.

Second, what kind of “right” are we talking about? Legally, there should be nothing stopping you. But is it ethical? Depends a lot on the circumstances. The first question has something to do with it. For example, if the author deliberately open-sourced their work, they probably included some kind of license with it and possibly even guidelines for contributors. Maybe you could even contribute your change to their mod instead of making your own.

That’s just an example, though. What I would suggest is reaching out and checking how they feel about it. And if I had access to their source and reused it, I would not simply publish it as my own without attributing the original author. Hell, even if I merely used their source as a reading material to learn how to do something, I would probably include some form of attribution.

The point that I’m trying to make is that the old-school hacker culture depended a lot on the spirit of sharing. When someone shares their knowledge and their code, that’s one thing. When you take it from them, that’s another.

How wrong is it to just take? Again, it depends a lot on the circumstances. Say I took one of @Xevyr’s mods, found a way to “decompile” or otherwise reverse engineer what he did, changed one little detail, and published it on Steam as my own without even a mention of the original work and its author, and without ever contacting @Xevyr about it. That, in my opinion, is not “old-school hacker ethos”, that’s being a dick. I might not be breaking any laws, but I would be dishonest.

On the other hand, if I reached out to @Xevyr and said “hey, could you either change X or at least let me help change it” and he cussed me out and called me names, you can bet I would, at the very least, feel okay with making my own mod that does the exact same thing with my change in it. Whether I would try to reverse-engineer his work or whether I would simply try to replicate it on my own is a different discussion.

In between those two extremes there’s a huge grey area where you have to apply your own judgment and risk that someone might disagree with that judgment. For example, if someone else’s mod suddenly starts interfering with yours, and you reach out to them, and they blow you off, what do you do?

Anyway, I went off on another tangent from my previous tangent :laughing:

The short answer is, as always, “it depends”. If I painted the old-school hacker community as some kind of utopia, it wasn’t my intention. It’s not like people back then didn’t make honest mistakes or that there weren’t any dicks or any drama. I simply wanted to point out certain differences that I value and consider important.

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