Surface Mounted Counterweights: Updating someone else's work?

[DMFirmy]

Hey all,

Recently I ran across the Surface Mounted Counterweights mod which was written by Uocjat. Sadly, as handy as this little mod is, it only seems to work in Sandbox games, so these weights aren't available in my Career games. Try as I may, I have been unable to contact the original author, and the parts included in the mod are relatively simple and straight forward, so I went ahead and modified them so that they were integrated into the Tech Tree (along the Construction path), and I uploaded them to my website.

This brings me to an interesting question, however... How valid is it for me to pick up work done by another author to update or modify with the intention of sharing it back to the community? I was not able to find any license information for this mod pack, and the models and textures are extremely simple (something most novices could knock out in minutes). There is also no code involved in these parts, just simple text .cfg files. For the most part I don't plan on making it my habit to take over the work done by others, but this was something that my son actually asked if I could do and I figured if I was going to do it anyhow it was worth sharing for others. It was also a good opportunity for me to get my hands dirty in some KSP mod basics, since I am an enthusiastic programmer and game tinkerer.

Anyhow, hope these parts are useful to some of you, I know they can come in handy.

Edited June 13, 2014 by Specialist290

[Specialist290]

Welcome to the forums!

Unfortunately, if there's no license listed with the parts, it's best treated as under "All Rights Reserved." In that case, you'd need the author's explicit permission to modify the code for anything other than personal use or upload it anywhere yourself or at least to share it here on the forums or through any of our official channels. If you haven't been able to contact him, then I'm afraid your out of luck

That said, if you know what you were doing, you could code your own parts from scratch using your own assets (or assets you'd be licensed to use, provided you abide by the terms of whatever license they're under) and share those as your own original work.

Hope this helps!

[Javster]

KW has weights I think

[BudgetHedgehog]

Correct, you can't redistribute the mod, whether you changed it or otherwise.

However, if you use ModuleManager to apply the changes (@PART[blah]{techRequired=fleep} or similar) rather than editing the cfgs entirely, you'd then just be distributing a cfg file that bears no resemblance to the original mod. In fact, any cfg edits can be done in this manner - as long as you're not distributing the plugin, it's fair game. I know for a fact that this is a way to get round licenses because one mod, Kethane Plus, uses it to change the Kethane parts without actually distributing them.

If you need help writing a MM config to make these changes, I'll be more than happy to help you and of course, you'd be free to then release the configs under whatever terms you want. They are, after all, your work. Don't be surprised however, if someone makes their own and releases that as well - if it's something as simple as adding them to the tech tree, chances are someone's already made a config for that.

And no, KW has no weights.

[nli2work]

Lackluster Labs has some balancing weight parts.

I've taken to enabling KAS anchors' surface attach to give myself some weights as well. easy enough to do.