This is just sad. Seeing modders accusing each other and stating that they’ll drag them to the courts is just SAD. Not because there was a disagreement between two teams, but because modders should have high standards and should not cause troubles to the community. These are the guys that we love and should not behave child-ish or like some triple-A ‘God awful’ companies. First things first though. In case you were unaware off, SkyrimOnline is a mod for Skyrim that promises to bring some Online functionality to it. The team felt the need to speed up things, therefore they started a partnership with SkyNet. And then, all hell broke loose.
As usual, there are two sides to every controversial story, so we’ll present you both. According to the one side, SkyNet group stole SkyrimOnline’s code and donations. According to the other side, well… they forked and translated SkyrimOnline’s coding, therefore SkyrimOnline does not have any power over that translation. SkyNet claims that Github’s license (a license that is used in SkyrimOnline’s code) allows them to fork it, as it just means that they can have their personal copy of this code.
We’ll link you to both sides, but in our opinion SkyNet is at fault here. SkyrimOnline has coded everything and SkyNet should NOT translate and fork it. This is common sense. Yeah, given the fact that they started a partnership, they could – legally – be able to, but they shouldn’t. It’s like programming a new indie game, inviting a group to help and then finding out that the group has actually ‘translated’ and forked your hard work. It’s just not right.
Obviously, SkyrimOnline is also to blame. The team shouldn’t had a common PayPal account for this project with another, unknown team. In addition, the team shouldn’t give away the entire code, even when both sides agreed to let SkyNet bind the C++ code to expose a scripting API.
You can read SkyrimOnline’s story here, while SkyNet’s story is available here.
Both teams promised to keep developing their mods, so it will be interesting to see which one of them will be best!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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