With what’s happening at GitHub I feel like I need to move some game modding projects elsewhere before GitHub wants me to give them my phone number.
For normal stand-alone projects I would go to Codeberg. I’m wondering if game modding projects are welcome there, as that seems kinda out of scope of their mission statement. Obviously the mods can only be compiled or run with access to the closed source game.
If Codeberg is the wrong place for my projects, can you recommend an alternative?
I think you’re best asking a lawyer, to be sure.
But from what I, random citizen, have looked into the matter out of curiosity, apparently they’re a grey zone, usually overlooked, ignored or accepted. But while you’d be sharing differential code, not the protected code itself, you needed to break a patent by reverse-engineering the game, which for draconian laws like the DMCA, is potentially worth even federal prison. Plus for others to apply the mod, they’d need to break the patent too by using the tools you indicate.
And there are cases where the game has official modding tools or that the devs explicitly say they’re fine with mods. In such cases, I’m fairly sure worrying isn’t needed.