New to Modding, what is allowed?

[Leoncio]

Hello,

I've just started to look at just making some small changes in other peoples mods, going into their .lua scripts and changing the colors, recipe resources, etc.
As I was doing it, I started to look into more complex mods that I've enjoyed and wanted to see "how-it-works", while doing so I realized that I had copied parts of
one mods code and put it into another one, as well writing my very own code to it to make some more alterations.

Having no background in computer science, coding and modding I have very little knowledge regarding the ethics of what I have done, seeing as I have no intentions of posting it up on the mod portal for other people to use, is this something that people generally dislike, welcome, stay neutral to the topic of changing someone else's mods?
From my own point of view, as long I don't distribute it as my own, and give credit to the original authors of the mods, I don't see anything wrong with what I did. Although as I said previously that I am new to this scene, I have very limited knowledge to the general culture of modding.

I was also wondering, is it ok to contact the creators of the mods and ask them if they want to look at the changes, and maybe implement it to the code if they consider it good enough?

Cheers

[Silari]

Every mod on the mod portal has a license assigned to it - that license says what you're allowed to do with it, whether it be copying bits, redistributing it, whatever. Most mods are under the GPL or another fairly permissive license, but you'll need to look through each one. I'm not about to get into details on what each allows - google can answer that.

[Xorimuth]

You can copy and alter mods as much as you like, as long as you don't share those copies/alterations with anyone else. If you do want to distribute them, then you have to check the licences of the mods that you copied.

[robot256]

My first mod copied a few subroutines from another mod. I messaged them, asked for some advice and if they minded me using that code. Most folks are reasonable if you ask politely.

You may have already figured it out, but there's lots of "mods of mods" that change the characteristics of an existing mod without having to copy anything. You can declare the original to be a prerequisite, and in your own mod's data stage modify values like recipes already created by original mod. You can also reuse graphics, and some mods have the graphics packaged separately so you don't need run the original mod's logic to use the graphics. None of that is affected by licensing, because all the mixing is done inside the game. There are lots of questions answered on the forum about this type of modding.