Licenses - The Modding Community
Licenses
Every mod and asset published on The Modding Community carries a license. This page explains what that means, what the common licenses actually allow, and how to choose one that matches what you want people to do with your work.
This page is written to be useful , not authoritative. It is a plain-language summary, not legal advice. If a licensing question genuinely matters to you — commercially, or in a dispute — talk to a lawyer.
When you publish a mod or an asset, you keep full ownership of it. Uploading to TMC does not transfer your copyright to us — to TekWorks LLC , the company that operates The Modding Community under that name, or to anyone else. All we take is the licence we need in order to host and show your work, which is set out in our terms of service. What the license does is tell everyone else what they may do with your work.
The license you select is displayed on your item's page so that anyone downloading it knows where they stand. Without a stated license, the legal default in most of the world is all rights reserved — meaning nobody may legally redistribute, modify or reuse your work, even though you published it to a community built on doing exactly that. Choosing a license deliberately is almost always better than leaving it implied.
The license selector on a mod or asset currently offers MIT , Apache 2.0 , BSD 3-Clause , GPL , CC0 , CC BY , CC BY-NC and All Rights Reserved . It is a deliberately short, curated list rather than the whole SPDX catalogue, because every entry on it carries a plain-English explanation of what it actually permits. If the license you want is not on it, state it clearly in your item's description and include the full license text in your download — that is what legally governs your work either way.
The License and the Permissions Tab Are Not the Same Thing
Alongside the license, an item carries a set of owner policies — whether redistribution, modification and commercial use are allowed, and whether credit or share-alike is required. These sit next to the license on the item's page and speak the same vocabulary on purpose.
They are not a substitute for it. The license is the legal instrument ; the policies are the owner saying what they will and will not object to on top of it. Where the two disagree, a reader should assume the more restrictive one applies and ask the author . If you are the author, make sure they agree — granting MIT and then stating "no commercial use" is a contradiction, and MIT is the half that is enforceable against you.
Two Kinds of Work, Two Kinds of License
Modding covers two quite different things, and they want different licenses:
- Code — plugins, scripts, tools, patches. Use a software license: MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD, GPL, LGPL, MPL.
- Creative assets — models, textures, sounds, music, maps, writing. Use a Creative Commons license, or a custom one.
Software licenses are written around concepts like source code, linking and distribution, which do not map cleanly onto a texture pack. Creative Commons explicitly advises against using its licenses for software. A project containing both can license each part separately — that is normal, and worth saying plainly in your description.
Permissive licenses say, roughly: do what you like, just keep my name on it and do not sue me. They are the easiest for others to build on, and the most common choice in the modding world.
MIT
The MIT License is short, readable and permissive. Anyone may use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and sell your work, including in closed-source and commercial projects.
- Requires : keeping the copyright notice and license text with copies of the code.
- Provides : no warranty, and no liability for you.
- Good for : plugins, libraries and tools you want adopted as widely as possible.
Apache License 2.0
The Apache License 2.0 is MIT's more thorough sibling. It permits the same things, but adds an explicit patent grant and requires contributors to state what they changed.
- Requires : the license and notice file, plus a note of significant modifications.
- Provides : patent protection for both you and your users, and a trademark carve-out.
- Good for : larger tools and frameworks, or anything likely to be used commercially.
BSD (2-Clause and 3-Clause)
The BSD licenses are functionally very close to MIT. The 3-clause variant adds one condition: your name may not be used to endorse derived works without permission.
- Good for : the same cases as MIT, when you want that endorsement clause.
Copyleft licenses say, roughly: build on my work freely, but what you build stays free too. They are the right choice when you want improvements to come back to the community rather than disappear into a closed fork.
GPL (v2 and v3)
The GNU General Public License is the classic strong copyleft. Anyone may use and modify your work, but if they distribute it — or anything built on it — they must release the complete source under the GPL as well.
- Requires : source availability, license and copyright notices, and a statement of changes.
- Prevents : closed-source forks and proprietary repackaging of your work.
- Good for : mods and frameworks you want to remain permanently open.
- Note : v3 adds protections against patent claims and hardware lock-out. v2 remains common in older projects for compatibility reasons.
LGPL
The GNU Lesser General Public License is a weaker copyleft designed for libraries. Changes to your library must be shared, but a closed-source project may still use it without becoming GPL itself.
- Good for : shared libraries and APIs you want closed-source mods to be able to depend on.
Mozilla Public License 2.0
The MPL 2.0 applies copyleft at the level of individual files . Files you wrote stay open even inside a larger proprietary project; the rest of that project does not have to be.
- Good for : a practical middle ground between MIT and GPL.
AGPL v3
The GNU Affero General Public License is the GPL plus one addition: running your software as a network service also counts as distribution, so a hosted version must publish its source too.
- Good for : server-side tools, web panels and backend services.
Creative Commons licenses are built for creative assets — models, textures, audio, maps, artwork and writing. They are modular: each is a combination of a few conditions.
- CC0 — you waive your rights entirely and place the work in the public domain. Anyone may do anything, with no attribution required.
- CC BY — anyone may use, modify and sell the work, as long as they credit you .
- CC BY-SA — as above, but derivatives must be shared under the same license . The creative equivalent of copyleft.
- CC BY-NC — credit required, and no commercial use . Note that this is not an open-source license, and "commercial" is fuzzier than most people expect.
- CC BY-ND — credit required, and no derivatives . The work may be shared but not modified, which makes it a poor fit for most modding.
If you want your assets reused as widely as possible, CC0 or CC BY are the usual choices. If you want your work to stay in the commons, CC BY-SA .
You are not obliged to open your work. All Rights Reserved means people may download and use your mod as published, but may not redistribute, modify, repackage or fork it without your permission.
This is a legitimate choice — but if you make it, be explicit about it. Say what is allowed. Most disputes in modding start not with malice but with a creator who never stated their terms and a user who guessed wrong. A short, clear paragraph in your description prevents almost all of them.
Custom licenses are allowed, but be careful. Homemade terms are frequently ambiguous, unenforceable, or accidentally incompatible with the code they are built on. Prefer a standard license wherever one fits.
Charging for an Item
TMC lets a creator charge credits for access to an item. Charging for something and open-sourcing it are not mutually exclusive — you may sell a GPL mod, and the GPL does not stop you. What it does mean is that whoever pays for it receives the GPL's rights, including the right to redistribute it themselves, for free, to anybody they like.
So decide honestly what you are selling. If the answer is "convenience, support and my continued attention", a permissive or copyleft license is perfectly compatible with a price. If the answer is "exclusive access", then All Rights Reserved is the license that matches, and choosing MIT instead undoes the paywall the same afternoon somebody re-uploads it.
You may not charge for content whose underlying license, or whose game's terms, prohibit monetisation — see our terms of service.
A quick way to narrow it down — what do you want to happen to your work?
- "Use it however you want, just credit me." → MIT for code, CC BY for assets.
- "Use it however you want, no strings at all." → CC0 .
- "Improvements must come back to the community." → GPL for code, CC BY-SA for assets.
- "Closed-source mods may depend on my library." → LGPL or MPL 2.0 .
- "It will likely be used commercially, and patents worry me." → Apache 2.0 .
- "People may play with it, but nobody forks or reuploads it." → All Rights Reserved , stated clearly.
Whichever you choose, include the full license text in your download — conventionally as a LICENSE file — and add a copyright line with your name and the year. The selector on your item page tells people what to expect; the file in the archive is what actually travels with your work.
Changing a License Later
You may relicense future versions of your own work at any time. What you cannot do is retroactively revoke a license already granted: copies people obtained under the old terms stay under those terms. If your project has multiple contributors , relicensing generally requires all of them to agree, so decide early.
The same rules protect you when you publish and bind you when you download. Before including someone else's work in yours:
- Read the license. Not the summary on this page — the actual license attached to the thing you are using.
- Attribute properly. Nearly every license short of CC0 requires it. Credit the author, name the license, and link back to the original.
- Check compatibility. Licenses combine in one direction only. Permissive code (MIT, BSD, Apache) can go into a GPL project; GPL code cannot go into an MIT-licensed one. Mixing CC BY-NC assets into a project you want others to sell does not work either.
- Respect "no derivatives" and "no commercial use". These are not suggestions.
- Ask when unsure. Most creators are happy to grant permission if you simply ask. A short message costs nothing and resolves the issue permanently.
When a license requires you to pass conditions on — as GPL and CC BY-SA do — the resulting work must carry those conditions too. You cannot make a strong-copyleft dependency more permissive by wrapping it.
Game & Platform Terms Come First
A license you choose only governs your own work . It cannot grant rights over content you do not own. In particular:
- Game assets belong to their publisher. Extracted models, textures, sounds or code from a game are not yours to relicense, no matter what license you apply to your mod.
- Publisher modding terms apply regardless. Many studios publish EULAs or modding policies that restrict what may be modified, monetised or redistributed. Those terms override anything permitted here.
- Decompiled or reverse-engineered code is a legal grey area at best and is usually prohibited outright by the game's EULA.
Content that violates a publisher's rights will be removed from TMC when we are made aware of it. See our terms of service for how copyright complaints are handled.
Content Hosted Elsewhere
A mod or asset on TMC may point at an external install source — Nexus Mods, CurseForge, the Steam Workshop or a Git repository — rather than hosting the files here. When it does, that platform's own terms govern the download, in addition to the license the author chose.
TMC is independently owned and operated and is not affiliated with any of those platforms. We reference them because our members use them, and because we have a great deal of respect for what they have built for modding. Listing a mod here does not move it out from under their rules, and it does not place it under ours.
The Modding Community — the site, the app and the tooling TekWorks LLC builds around it — is itself built on a great deal of open-source software, and on the goodwill of the people who wrote it. The licenses described on this page are what makes a community like ours possible — we take them seriously, and we ask that you do too.
If you are unsure which license fits your project, or you believe your work has been used on TMC in a way its license does not permit, email us at [email protected] or reach out through our Discord. We are happy to help you think it through.