Whether this was done deliberately is of some debate, and be warned: the whole thing gets messy from here on. So SKSE’s code-stealing claim pretty much means that the Skyrim Together team - whether knowingly or unknowingly - stand accused of making money from someone else’s work.
#Skyrim together mods#
Most mods are free, yet these Patreon donations mean that Skyrim Together is thought by some to fall in the realm of ‘paid mods’ (however, upon release it will be free of charge), as supporting them on Patreon got you access to January’s Closed Beta. That number has plummeted to $25,292 as of the date of publishing this article (overnight alone they’ve lost over 300 supporters), although that’s definitely still a lot of cash. Where this all gets dicey is Skyrim Together’s Patreon, which was earning the team $33,000 a month as of February 23 according to Zaric Zhakaron, a YouTuber whose area of expertise includes the Elder Scrolls community. So the team are attempting to be as transparent as possible with SKSE, which in my book is commendable. In their subsequent March Activity Report posted three days ago, Skyrim Together owns up to their mistakes, apologises, and stated that they were “most likely going to end up handing over our first open beta binaries to the SKSE team to do their tests before offering them to you ”. Anyway we are going to make sure to remove what might have slipped through the cracks for the next patch”.
#Skyrim together code#
Skyrim Together issued an official statement on the matter six days ago, stating on Reddit that “there might be some leftover code from them in there that was overlooked when we removed it, it isn't as simple as just deleting a folder, mainly our fault because we rushed some parts of the code. The Yamashi mentioned in their post is the Lead Developer of Skyrim Together, who had previously worked on Skyrim Online, and addressing the claims about him is a whole other thing which I’ll get back to later. It's technically always been under common copyright law, but after Yamashi's terrible behavior towards the script extender team (best left to another post if you really care) he earned a special callout in the license: ‘Due to continued intentional copyright infringement and total disrespect for modder etiquette, the Skyrim Online team is explicitly disallowed from using any of these files for any purpose.'" "Skyrim Together is stealing SKSE code, uncredited, without permission, with an explicit term in the license restricting one of the authors from having anything to do with the code, who denies using any of it…The proof is pretty clear when you look at the loader and dll in a disassembler… Common is of course MIT-licensed and doesn't require attribution (but is always appreciated), but the main SKSE source isn't.
#Skyrim together mod#
It all kicked off when a SKSE developer posted on Reddit accusing Skyrim Together of stealing code from SKSE, citing the fact that they’ve found core components of the SKSE mod deep within Skyrim Together.