falafails

Unless a license specifies it, it's not something you have by default. That's why it was important enough to include as one of the four essential freedoms of free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms But yeah, it's not like anybody will know or can stop you from doing it.

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Making the permissions screen here not intimidating and defaulting to more open would definitely be neat to see. Right, but I feel that's more giving back to the gaming community rather than the modding community. And I don't really like the idea of violating a license as written, even if nobody finds out. I'd say the Nexus donation point system gives a small financial motive, along with things like Patreon being more popular. There's probably also being concerned about somebody else profiting off of your mod in some way, even (especially?) if you aren't.

Makes sense, guess it could just be chalked up to a difference in philosophies. I've only dabbled in modding, but I do write a lot of software. I've benefited a ton from the open source ecosystem others have created, so I try to give my users those same freedoms: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.So for me, I guess making my creations open is how I can give back to the community that enabled me in the first place. If people use them to learn from or make something greater, that's pretty awesome. If people don't even care they're open and just use them as normal, that's awesome too. Only exception I have is for things I make money off of, that making open would hurt. ;) Maybe the main difference is that mods are more art than software typically is? There's less room for somebody to take my work and butcher the vision of it, at least.

Always been wondering this, but why aren't open source/free software licenses more popular for mods? The large majority seem to have some bespoke combination of restrictive permissions, and some don't even have anything specified. Things like the Cathedral Project are awesome, but definitely the exception rather than the norm. I feel like this is bad for the community, especially those building the open source modding tools that we all rely on. Things like Nexus Collections and Wabbajack could just be sending somebody an archive if mods were openly licensed, rather than huge development projects. Anyways, curious to know the reasons or if anybody has ideas on how to improve things. Would be cool to see Nexus using their influence to shift the community in this direction, but I get that it'd be detrimental to the business model. My hunch is the largest reason to not openly license a mod nowadays is monetization, which is understandable. Guessing things like the Creation Kit restrictions also make it bit trickier, too. Apologies if this isn't the right section, couldn't really find anything else that fit better than feedback/questions.