@ Manteuffel
A well thought out and presented post, thank you.
@ All
We are in danger of revisiting the age old issue of legality. It has been hashed out & discussed so many times before. I believe we have reached conclusions on this matter to an adequate point.
In short, UBI own the commercial & intellectual rights to the game and as heartc states even if a modder changes/edits files, they still
legally belong to UBI but we are not in a court of law, we are in a community where most people wish to do the right thing while making the game we all love better.
Please, lets not go down this path of legality again.
What we are trying to establish here are guidelines which the community can respect and work to. Not only for the sake & ease of any modder but for the benefit of the entire community. This will help with future releases and also, hopefully, lead to a correct proceedure when wanting to use older mods. That's all.
We are not trying to set presidence here, in fact many of the ideas put forward in this thread have been 'unwritten' guides for a long time however, now is the time to get these guidelines agreed upon and 'put out there' for all to see and work too, if they so wish. They will not be forced upon anyone but it is a recourse to fall back on if an issue should arise in the future.