Discussion regarding unathorised forks of mods and their distribution

[Technical Ben]

I think using the name falls under a trademark issue, ie Firefox is released under some kind of GPL derivative, but the name itself can't be used unless certain conditions are met.

While it seems unlikely that anyone is going to get a legally binding trademark for their addon, it would probably be a good idea for anyone releasing an alternate version of something that is still under active development to use a different name. If nothing else it would at least prevent confusion. That wouldn't be a bad idea for one of the forum addon rules.

I don't think you need legally binding contracts. It's just part of most countries "natural" laws applied. If you lie to a customer, impersonate another, etc. It could fall under quite a few. But like downloading a film, is rarely sorted outside of politely not doing it, or the other extreme of going to court.

x64 is a ....ing disaster of a release. It shouldn't be available for us to even tinker with for the number of phantom issues it has. And if you're going to start trying to throw mods into that mix, you ought to have enough of an idea of what you're doing tech-wise that you can recompile a mod to run on x64 without having to wait for someone else to do it.

Please not this again. I get no more crashes in x64 than I did in 32. It might be for many that it's buggy. But I remember many more times in the past where KSP was more buggy and MORE users were effected and there were more forum posts on it. Though I'm not privy to the support the developers need to apply, so it may be that side has increased.

Edited November 2, 2014 by Technical Ben

[Plusk]

Them mods are disabled in x64, so people dont come crying and bothering the mod developers about things that they cant fix. As i understand ferram4 requested a name change for this fork, to prevent just that. So do as requested, if you insist on catering to that playerbase, under your own name, so development of actual FAR isnt slowed down due to that.

Also, going against the developer wishes wont get you any credit in this community. Do that on your own peril. I wouldnt blame ferram4 for changing the license, although it would be a terrible loss, if such essential mod would cease to develop if anything happend.

[RoverDude]

Please not this again. I get no more crashes in x64 than I did in 32. It might be for many that it's buggy. But I remember many more times in the past where KSP was more buggy and MORE users were effected and there were more forum posts on it. Though I'm not privy to the support the developers need to apply, so it may be that side has increased.

And this is also why we can't have nice things. Because people pass off their individual anecdotes as hard data analysis. And the problem is that this kind of misinformation (that x64 is of comparable stability to x86) is precisely what exacerbates the issue. Heck, even Squad has made it clear that x64 is less stable in 0.25, not to mention the collected data on the very same folks who are writing the mods that are now being locked out.

So if you wish to help the situation, the first thing I would suggest is to stop perpetuating the idea that x64 is NOT a hot mess and not that big of a deal. For you personally? sure, rock on. But let's not add to the misinformation shall we?

(Edit to add link in case people can't be bothered to read stickies).

Edited November 2, 2014 by RoverDude

[Technical Ben]

Is x64 causing more support ticket requests than normal then? As said, that's not something I can see as a user. It is something the developers and modders can feed back. I'd not seen the modding specific post by squad, so thanks for the link.

I guess I'm one of the exceptions that if a mod/additional feature in development does not work, I wait until it does (waited for 64bit, waiting for MP/atmos tweeks etc). Sorry, I forget a large proportion of the internet acts less than civil.

But if a modder wishes to support x64? Then all good to them. Doing so under someone else's name, is so low they'd need a drill to get their belt back!

[edit]

PS, sorry, I've been playing modded .24 and no mods in .25, so could not comment on the mod situation, just KSPs stability in general.

Edited November 2, 2014 by Technical Ben

[NathanKell]

Wait, so you're not even playing the current version of KSP and you're trying to convince us we're wrong about the general stability of the x64 version of the current version of KSP? You know, the one where Squad said it's less stable than .24? ...

On the topic of this thread: While it is factually true that There Will Be Trolls/Jerks/etc., as I said before it's a colossal dodge of responsibility on all our parts if we think that absolves us of the need to, each and every one of us, confront them. I don't believe people are unchangeable, but even if I did there's a far cry from "there's a jerk every few pages of thread" to "there's a jerk every few pages of thread, who promptly gets piled on by everyone else." Can you see how the latter is much, much less dispiriting for mod makers?

[Technical Ben]

As said, I've avoided the buggy parts, avoided complaining, and concentrate on the progress and thank the devs and modders when they do. If Squad say "this bit is buggy" I'll not instantly reply with complaints about bugs to them. I also wait a few weeks until Modders give the "all clear" for updates.

I'll need to work on dissolving differences in opinion though, I'd not noticed how much slack people had given Mods (both forum and game) recently.

I'm not sure that stopping all use of mods or all use of 64bit would be the answer. As someone has thrown a spanner in the works by trolling and stealing a mods name (FAR), sorting that would be the priority, for certain.

[AbhChallenger]

So this is likely how this is going to go.

Controversy grows.

Topics locked with no news for weeks.

Practice eventually banned.

So why not save yourself the time Squad and just ban the practice already?

[mcirish3]

Well, I guess i came too late to this discussion for any reasonability to be had, that is what I get for staying off the comment pages for 2 months. It is quite clear that RoverDude is right and no ones views are going to be changed, the issue is far larger than any amount of discussion will solve without the intervention of Squad. For the sake of the community I would suggest that perhaps their is a 3rd solution to this. I have been told repeatedly now that it is not hard to edit and compile the source code for these mods for your own personal use. Now I don't know if this is true because frankly I would not know how to begin. But if it is not hard to do, as so many have claimed and the software to do it is free ( I am guessing there is some truly open source code out there for that) If some knowledgeable programer wrote a handy dandy thread explaining the process in easy to follow steps and squad was kind enough to give it a sticky on the add ons page, I see no reason why Senshi would need to continue his thread. I see no reason why the modders should object since now no one is distributing their mod and ignorance at least to some degree is expelled from the community.

Of Course this assumes that all those people saying it is easy to do, didn't mean it is easy to do for a computer programer, as opposed to the average joe who is willing to learn.

I think Senshi is only trying to help a disenfranchised group, created by many factors, and truly no one is blameless in this. Not Unity, Not Squad, Not the Mod Makers and especially Not the community. But if a better choice can be found that causes less division in the community lets go with that.

Edited November 3, 2014 by mcirish3

[Boomerang]

Well, I guess i came too late to this discussion for any reasonability to be had, that is what I get for staying off the comment pages for 2 months. It is quite clear that RoverDude is right and no ones views are going to be changed, the issue is far larger than any amount of discussion will solve without the intervention of Squad. For the sake of the community I would suggest that perhaps their is a 3rd solution to this. I have been told repeatedly now that it is not hard to edit and compile the source code for these mods for your own personal use. Now I don't know if this is true because frankly I would not know how to begin. But if it is not hard to do, as so many have claimed and the software to do it is free ( I am guessing there is some truly open source code out there for that) If some knowledgeable programer wrote a handy dandy thread explaining the process in easy to follow steps and squad was kind enough to give it a sticky on the add ons page, I see no reason why Senshi would need to continue his thread. I see no reason why the modders should object since now no one is distributing their mod and ignorance at least to some degree is expelled from the community.

Of Course this assumes that all those people saying it is easy to do, didn't mean it is easy to do for a computer programer, as opposed to the average joe who is willing to learn.

I think Senshi is only trying to help a disenfranchised group, created by many factors, and truly no one is blameless in this. Not Unity, Not Squad, Not the Mod Makers and especially Not the community. But if a better choice can be found that causes less division in the community lets go with that.

Honestly, this is one of the better compromises I've heard.

If you want to seriously play around with modded x64, then here's a thread detailing how to go about freeing up some of the mods that are locked again x64. Anything you break is your responsibility and if you're clever enough to read these directions and sort out the requisite software, have fun.

Hopefully that limits x64 mod usage to people actually willing to figure out what they're doing and therefore those who might actually be able to provide useful feedback to Squad and/or the community. While weeding out the people who just want what they want right now and who'd just clutter up support threads.

[steve_v]

Hopefully that limits x64 mod usage to people actually willing to figure out what they're doing and therefore those who might actually be able to provide useful feedback to Squad and/or the community. While weeding out the people who just want what they want right now and who'd just clutter up support threads.

Precisely. However in order for such a filter to be effective it has to require *some* effort.

The relevant code is easy to find, and easier to disable.

Information on installing a C# compiler / IDE is abundant on the 'net.

You don't need to know how to code, just how to use a search engine and follow instructions.

As much as I respect the spirit of the suggestion for a dedicated thread, I really don't see what spoon-feeding is going to achieve - apart from lowering an already quite reasonable bar.

If people cannot even read the stickied posts re. how to report bugs or the 'WinX64 NO SUPPORT' message (often in big bold red) in the OP, what makes you think they will follow the instructions re. how to re-compile a dll?

By all means, open such a thread, I might even be inclined to help where I can.

Call me a pessimist, but I predict it will quickly turn into a mess of endless spoon feeding requests & 'you just do it for me plz, this too hard'.

If it remains a 'how to compile mods from source' thread, all good. If it turns into a hacked dll distribution thread, not so much.

The urge to help each other is strong, but let's ensure that the helping does not make life harder for those most valued members who make the shiny toys, lest they go away.

[KasperVld]

So this is likely how this is going to go.

Controversy grows.

Topics locked with no news for weeks.

Practice eventually banned.

So why not save yourself the time Squad and just ban the practice already?

Community policy is a thing the community moderators (and eventually Squad) decide on, sarcastic comments like this do not help.

[Senshi]

To be honest, I didn't have the first clue about C-type languages or Visual Studio before the Win64 trouble. Only when FAR was locked - and I can't play KSP without FAR anymore, I tried... - I had to do something. So after about half an hour of googling I had it all sorted and my first recompile was done. Didn't even ue VS, but cmd-based MSBuild (which is far less bulky). VS is more comfortable, however, when working with git.

This still isn't representative, as I know my way around computers and general code concepts quite well (over 10 years of active coding/modding for other games. Java, Python, LUA, etc. are all in my repertoire), making it fairly easys to grab onto new concepts. While providing a guide to compile Win64 yourself would certainly provide a nice filter, I doubt it's a sufficient or fair one. As steve says, people are more probable to just come asking for the work done. When I made a post in the FAR megathread about having compiled my private win64-enabled dll, I immediately was contacted by a bunch of people asking on how I did it. On writing out the "tutorial", all of them were like "hell naw, can't you just send me the dll, pretty please?"

But I am conflicted myself. Win64 is a mess, and I'd fathom a vast majority of the Win64 players does not know or understand the randomness behind the bugs such as pointer truncation. At least that's the one I am (probably) encountering as well. My KSP64 does crash, and in an entirely random fashion (but only when I'm above the 32bit memory limit). But as Win64 is offered by Squad, many people simply don't believe the "experimental/unstable" tag that has been put on it by Sqiad itself. Unless you actively want to experiment or simply can ignore those issues, you'll do better by just sticking to Win32 and keep doing the old snip'n'tuck on your mod set. The only section where you can go to would be the BugStomp-Reddit where people attempt to gather data on the bugs. Mentioning any Win64 bugs in any mod thread whatsoever doesn't make any sense, as Unity plugins are entirely platform independent. KSP64 doesn't crash more or less often because of mods (except due to increased memory usage). But the myth of "KSP Win64 never crashes for me" somehow doesn't seem to die.

[Diazo]

But the myth of "KSP Win64 never crashes for me" somehow doesn't seem to die.

First, just to get it out of the way, this refuses to die because there are people out there 64bit does work for, I happen to be one of them. I also realize that this means nothing in terms of overall stability and so I've never brought it up before because I am aware that does not make 64bit KSP less of a bug ridden mess that it is. (I also have the skills to run a stripped down gaming machine, I know exactly what every program that automatically runs on start-up is doing and this is something the average user does/can not do.)

However, what I really wanted to comment on that I have not seen specifically noted, the whole issue about mods/licensing/author's wishes is an issue that has been growing for a while that the 64-bit locking served to trigger off, is that the community of KSP players has changed and while this incident has served to highlight that fact, it has been true for a while.

KSP started out as a pretty demanding rocket sim. You had to track everything yourself and all KSP itself did proper was let you fly the rockets.

At this point, the player base was pretty much limited to people who had reasonably high technical skills, these are the kind of people who are also likely to be reasonably computer savvy and so the forum (and mod bug-reports) reflected this.

Over time, KSP became more and more a main-stream game, especially with the Steam release, and the player base changed to reflect that. You now have a player base that is pretty much the same as every other game out there and the forum/community has reflected this. While this increase in player base is good for the game itself, it also means that the average player is now much less technically adept, they go to make a post asking for help and don't realize that without posting the ksp_log that we are going to be unable to help them. No malice or anything on their part, they just don't know they need to.

If we look back at 0.24 and especially all the poor bug reports cluttering up the mod threads, we can see this effect in action well before the current events that caused this thread.

And while I strongly oppose the "mod-makers need to suck it up and deal with it" as they most certainly shouldn't, it is a fact that the player base they are releasing the mods into has changed and the mod makers are going to need to take a step back and decide how they are going to handle it.

As a mod maker myself, I am going to post bug-reporting instructions in the first post of my thread and simply ignore bug reports that don't comply, but each mod maker will have to decide for themselves. I also have a fraction of the user base that the big mods have however so how applicable that is....

Coming back around to the 64-bit locking issue, it has highlighted all this and has focused attention on the issue of mods released to undo the decisions of other mods. As a community we are currently trying to come to a set of agreeable terms on this.

For me personally, I fully support the principal of mods modifying other mods. That is one of the underlying principles of open-source, if a program (mod) makes a decision you don't like you can do something about it. The catch is it must be done in such a way as to remain civil, polite, and not rebound onto the original program (mod).

Which is why I am quite dismayed at the reaction Senshi has gotten in releasing his 64-bit enabled versions. (Note I am specific to what Senshi is doing here, previous 64-bit enablers varied anywhere from being rude to outright trolling.) Senshi has been polite, civil, and has made it clear he is not going to allow his work to rebound onto the original author's shoulders, so what is the problem with what Senshi has done?

No matter how tight-knit a community is, there are going to be disagreements. As long as those disagreements are handled politely and civilly, they don't cause any long term harm so everyone, please take a deep breath and think about what you are posting, both on this issue and on a go forward basis.

D.

[Wanderfound]

Which is why I am quite dismayed at the reaction Senshi has gotten in releasing his 64-bit enabled versions. (Note I am specific to what Senshi is doing here, previous 64-bit enablers varied anywhere from being rude to outright trolling.) Senshi has been polite, civil, and has made it clear he is not going to allow his work to rebound onto the original author's shoulders, so what is the problem with what Senshi has done?

A lot of the initial reaction was due to the misleading wording of the original post. A lot of readers (myself included) interpreted the OP as saying "I asked Ferram if it was okay, he said no, but I'm gonna do it anyway". Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case, but I don't think the original reaction was unreasonable based on the information given.

As for the broader issue...the modders were getting a lot of hassle from clueless x64 users. So, in order to filter out the clueless, several of them put locks on their mods that were deliberately designed to be easy for a clueful user to circumvent. However, then some folks came along and started handing out copies of the keys, defeating the original purpose of the lock. The obvious next step for the annoyed modders is to put on a lock that isn't easy to circumvent.

This is not a good outcome.

[Diazo]

As for the broader issue...the modders were getting a lot of hassle from clueless x64 users. So, in order to filter out the clueless, several of them put locks on their mods that were deliberately designed to be easy for a clueful user to circumvent. However, then some folks came along and started handing out copies of the keys, defeating the original purpose of the lock. The obvious next step for the annoyed modders is to put on a lock that isn't easy to circumvent.

This is not a good outcome.

Note my part about "not rebounding onto the original mod" part in my post. Senshi has made it clear that anyone using his version is to report issues in his thread, not the original thread.

So Senshi's intention is not to circumvent the lock, rather he has built an identical room to what is behind the lock and not placed a lock on his door to get in. However, due to how the internet and forums work that means giving out the keys to the lock on the original mod, but Senshi has made it clear that anyone that has taken his key is only to enter his room. (I am aware how well users follow these instructions remains to be seen.)

Which comes back to my point of how the community is going to handle mods of mods that go against a decision the original mod has made and the fact that we are currently struggling to define what we are going to see as acceptable.

For me personally, what Senshi has done is an acceptable way to release such a mod.

D.

[Wanderfound]

I agree that Senshi has gone about this about as well as possible, if it is to be done at all. However, I also agree with Ferram that the most annoying and clueless of the users are very unlikely to confine themselves to this thread.

If they're ignoring all of the other "64 is intrinsically unstable, don't ask for support from modders" notices out there (which they demonstrably were), what makes you think that they'll pay attention to the "don't hassle the modders" warnings in this thread?

[AbhChallenger]

Community policy is a thing the community moderators (and eventually Squad) decide on, sarcastic comments like this do not help.

And it does not help waiting until things get out of hand to finally decide that indeed something must be done. It is obvious that eventually it needs to be banned.

[Diazo]

I agree that Senshi has gone about this about as well as possible, if it is to be done at all. However, I also agree with Ferram that the most annoying and clueless of the users are very unlikely to confine themselves to this thread.

In my opinion it most certainly has to be allowable, in this specific case the mod-makers have a good reason for their decision to lock 64-bit, but what about next time when the justification is a lot weaker (or non-existent)? Or when a mod-maker leaves KSP and stops updating?

We are seeing the downsides to allowing unrestricted modding of mods here, but in the long run the positives vastly out weight the negatives.

If they're ignoring all of the other "64 is intrinsically unstable, don't ask for support from modders" notices out there (which they demonstrably were), what makes you think that they'll pay attention to the "don't hassle the modders" warnings in this thread?

In this case, the fact that they have to go to a separate thread to download the 64-bit enabled version. It is a lot harder miss the warnings when it is a second download in its own thread. Also, I'm expecting a lot of the people this is aimed at won't even find the 64-bit unlocked version and just download the main mod and run in 32-bit mode.

I can't predict the future so we will see, but just the fact it is a second download will (hopefully) stop people from reporting 64-bit issues in the original mod's thread.

D.

[Technical Ben]

I guess KSP will the the entire growth and development and history that games like Minecraft have gone through. I hope Squad manage to weather the storms, make the right decisions and climb the mountains. (Ah, I missed the obligatory "and reach for the stars" quote. )

[Putnam]

Squad's policies and support towards modding are way better than Mojang's, so I doubt it'll go through the same development.

[Beowolf]

The OP asked Ferram his thoughts. He said NO. There were no mixed signals there.

If you wish to bandy forth on legalese, no point in engaging, you are absolutely 100% correct.

Yep, he is absolutely 100% correct, just like you said.

I dare you to publicly ask Microsoft or Apple for permission to create and distribute .... using their operating system, and then forever abide by their public response. An author's opinion doesn't mean a damn thing ethically. I imagine Orson Scott Card would prefer only straight people read his novels...so? I'm sure Hunter Thompson wished that every cop who ever read his works would burst into flames. That doesn't make it a binding agreement!

Hell, it's my position that everyone who reads my words here has to vote Democrat tomorrow.

These authors CHOSE their license. You clearly think we owe them more than they claimed. Nope. You're welcome to donate something more if you wish. I've donated a matching $18 (what I paid for KSP) to nearly a dozen mod authors so far. But that was MY choice, not theirs.

Legal vs. Right. Two very different things.

CITATION NEEDED.

With all that said, I'm personally uncomfortable with forking these projects and redistributing different code under the same name. I'd prefer to see the project, parts and api calls given different names. That would of-course require persistence file editing to get existing flights working, but would eliminate any support crossover problems. Are some global search&replace commands really so big a hardship?

But my personal discomfort does not equal wrong.

[mcirish3]

To be honest, I didn't have the first clue about C-type languages or Visual Studio before the Win64 trouble. Only when FAR was locked - and I can't play KSP without FAR anymore, I tried... - I had to do something. So after about half an hour of googling I had it all sorted and my first recompile was done. Didn't even ue VS, but cmd-based MSBuild (which is far less bulky). VS is more comfortable, however, when working with git.

This still isn't representative, as I know my way around computers and general code concepts quite well (over 10 years of active coding/modding for other games. Java, Python, LUA, etc. are all in my repertoire), making it fairly easys to grab onto new concepts. While providing a guide to compile Win64 yourself would certainly provide a nice filter, I doubt it's a sufficient or fair one. As steve says, people are more probable to just come asking for the work done. When I made a post in the FAR megathread about having compiled my private win64-enabled dll, I immediately was contacted by a bunch of people asking on how I did it. On writing out the "tutorial", all of them were like "hell naw, can't you just send me the dll, pretty please?"

This is exactly what I suspected the real situation concerning self removal of the winx64 KSP block was. I made my previous suggestion operating under the assumption that those who claimed that doing so was relatively trivial were not coming at the problem with an already advance understanding of coding and coding methods. Basically the way I see it, a tutorial may help some one like myself who though not experience coder I do understand the basics. This will still however lock out every one who has a good reason to run winx64 but have absolutely no programing skills. Now probably at least some of them belong to the crowd that was/is giving the mode makers so much trouble but my guess that there are even more who fall into the we get "don't bug the mod maker its not their fault" but don't have the time, inclination or even the remotest understanding of coding to even attempt a removal of the block. Thank you Senshi for the clarification.

This doesn't mean however that I think we should not give it the old college try, it probably won't work but hey can't knock it till you've tried it, right!? and I would love to be proven wrong on this.

... KSP64 doesn't crash more or less often because of mods (except due to increased memory usage). But the myth of "KSP Win64 never crashes for me" somehow doesn't seem to die.

First, just to get it out of the way, this refuses to die because there are people out there 64bit does work for, I happen to be one of them. I also realize that this means nothing in terms of overall stability and so I've never brought it up before because I am aware that does not make 64bit KSP less of a bug ridden mess that it is. (I also have the skills to run a stripped down gaming machine, I know exactly what every program that automatically runs on start-up is doing and this is something the average user does/can not do.)

I would also like to say something about the use of winx64 KSP. Not every user of 64bit KSP is doing so because they want to run 5000 mods on their super duper fast PC. Some of us just want to run 3 or 4 mods on our 8 year old AMD (if you really need to, look up the AMD-INTEL 64bit vs. 32bit war from that time frame) that happens to perform a lot better with x64. We just want to play the game the way it was meant to be played i.e. with the graphics all the way up, on a 300-600 part ship. By the way, Yes the game glitches and crashes 1 out of 10 times I play but it is worth it for the performance boost. So being without that one mod we usually play with (NEAR in my case) means a lot to the playability of the game, especially coupled with atmospheric trajectories which only work correctly with NEAR or FAR.

Edited November 4, 2014 by mcirish3

[RoverDude]

These authors CHOSE their license. You clearly think we owe them more than they claimed. Nope. You're welcome to donate something more if you wish. I've donated a matching $18 (what I paid for KSP) to nearly a dozen mod authors so far. But that was MY choice, not theirs.

Oh, there's no legal or financial obligation to support mod authors. But again, there's a far cry from pushing to the precise legal boundary of the law, and just plain old good manners. I will go back to Majiir's example of a noise ordinance. I could (legally) blast polka non-stop at precisely the maximum decibel level allowed by law at my home from 6am to 10pm every night. Is it legal? Sure! Is it a good idea? Is it neighborly? Well, not really.

The difference here is that if we collectively decide it is ok to play polka sixteen hours a day, then eventually people are going to move away to greener pastures.

Again, not here to change a world view. That will never change. Nor is there any argument on what the legal rights are per a license. But as I said before, this is why we can't have nice things. The modder is not going to be the one to lose - they just go onto another game or hobby (and if they are particularly maligned, will probably lock their license down before they leave). The users are pretty much the only losing party in this equation.

Even if things work out in a stellar way and not a single support request goes into the megathread, the damage has been done. We are showing, that as a community, we cannot have a gentlemen's agreement where a mod is open enough to allow for enhancement and extension in a way agreeable and endorsed by the modder (i.e. I've had at least three MKS forks, and whole heartedly support them all, and generally pull in features if they are good). Instead, we are showing (as a community) that defensive licensing is appropriate. Which will mean that when a modder departs (probably out of frustration), that bit of goodness is locked away forever until someone can do a clean room rebuild - and all users are out as a result.

So yes, I don't debate in any way the legality. I debate instead whether this practice is going to enhance or diminish the community, and ultimately if we look back a year from now, if we will all collectively say 'yeah, that was worth it', or instead lament because this was when it all started to go wrong, and nobody bothered to try and stop it.

[Beowolf]

The modder is not going to be the one to lose - they just go onto another game or hobby (and if they are particularly maligned, will probably lock their license down before they leave). The users are pretty much the only losing party in this equation.

The one example we actually have, Chris, tightened his license and stayed. That IMO is exactly the right thing to do. The license is where the author's intention is supposed to be specified. If that isn't the case, it's 100% the author's responsibility to fix it. And I'm talking ethics, not legalities.

If there's a bug in a mod's code (within its intended scope), it's the author's fault, not the end-user. Well the license is a required part of a KSP mod. If there's a bug in your license, it's your responsibility to change it. It isn't my responsibility to scan everything you've written across a 1000-page KSP forum thread and decide whether what I do will make you happy or sad.

From my perspective, it seems you're saying the licenses are just red tape that doesn't count. In my 30-year professional IT career, the only people I ever ran into who made that argument were the software pirates. No, I'm not implying you're a pirate; only that yours is not a mainstream opinion.

The place we go to find answers to common questions is called the FAQ. The place we go to find out how we're allowed to reuse someone else's code is called the license. If this type of reuse troubles him (and like I said, because the names weren't changed it would kinda trouble me), Ferram can add one sentence to his license like Chris did and the whole issue goes away.

[Master Tao]

From my perspective, it seems you're saying the licenses are just red tape that doesn't count.

Where are you getting that? It's clear to me that RoverDude has said that licenses do not solely determine right and wrong when forking a mod. Licenses can't perfectly encapsulate a modder's wishes, so they choose one that's close enough and make additional requests with the expectation that most people will politely respect their wishes. It's the difference between legal and common courtesy. In other words, licenses tell you what you must do; politeness tells you what you should do.

Senshi's doing a pretty good job of finding a middle ground between the two: following the license, but also working to ensure the original authors' major concerns are addressed.