Modpack with only open source mods?

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Hammerson

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Did you go anywhere with this, Tylor?

I don't think it sounds elitist at all, if anything it's the other way around ;)

It's also not true that most mods are closed. I was surprised at how many great mods turn out to be open source but not advertised as such.

Open source mods open up entirely new avenues for customization and making highly tailored modpacks.

Take iChun's Morph mod which is all the rage. It is actually GPL! So if you like the mod, but think it would be a bit overpowered/wacky in your modpack to gain the ability to morph just from killing a creature, you can rather easily hack it to give the ability from a book, or a potion. iChun is IMHO a hero for open sourcing such a revolutionary mod (and it's nice, readable code too!).
 

ShneekeyTheLost

Too Much Free Time
Dec 8, 2012
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Lost as always
Did you go anywhere with this, Tylor?

I don't think it sounds elitist at all, if anything it's the other way around ;)

It's also not true that most mods are closed. I was surprised at how many great mods turn out to be open source but not advertised as such.

Open source mods open up entirely new avenues for customization and making highly tailored modpacks.

Take iChun's Morph mod which is all the rage. It is actually GPL! So if you like the mod, but think it would be a bit overpowered/wacky in your modpack to gain the ability to morph just from killing a creature, you can rather easily hack it to give the ability from a book, or a potion. iChun is IMHO a hero for open sourcing such a revolutionary mod (and it's nice, readable code too!).
For the purposes of making mod packs, there is zero difference between OGL and Blanket Permissions. The ONLY difference is if you actually want to get into the mod and start tinkering with it. Once you open up an IDE, you aren't making a mod pack anymore. In fact, you shouldn't be opening up an IDE when making a mod pack, because now your version of that mod is different from every other version of that mod, which means the ONLY place to GET that mod will be from YOU. This, to me, seems completely and totally contrary to the idea of OGL. Furthermore, when the mod updates, you will have to fire up your IDE and change whatever you changed last time before you can update your mod pack. This is counter-intuitive.

I'm... not a fan of the Morph mod. I think I'll just leave it at that.
 

Hammerson

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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OGL? What's that, to me that's WotC's open gaming license and surely no one uses that for software.

Of course, licence notwithstanding, I'm not about to start a competing fork of Morph or any other open source mod. As Paul says, everything is permitted but not everything is beneficial. And yes, anyone tweaking a mod on the source level for a public modpack takes on a maintenance burden well in excess of what you would by just installing and configuring it.

But there's a reason people use github, you know! Porting your changes can be as simple as pulling from the upstream repo.