It's fucking astonishing to me the way mod authors act about their mod "ownership" and that the community actually supports them at all.

I often wonder if novosy that makes mods actually does any programming work outside of Bethesda games. Have none of them used GIT/open source stuff before?

Let's go over the fucking amount of effort and money required just to get the game to the point where you can make a mod:

1)Bethesda makes the fucking game 2) Bethesda makes the creation kit, and distributes it for free 3) A modder, using a mix of community created documentation and other people's existing mods to learn how to make whatever their making 4) the modder makes their fucking item list edits, or makes some amateur textures, or writes some scripts. 5) the modders scripts require SKSE, a utility, much more complicated than their own mod, made available for free to them and their user base, 6) the mod requires ENBboost, again a freely available utility built by more talented people, to fucking run smoothly. 7) the mod is then hosted, for free, on nexus or Bethesda or some other hosting site, built out specifically to make their mods available and easy to download. 8) the community spreads news of the mod via word of mouth/various forum 9)the user downloads and installs the mod using MO or NMM, made available for free 10) the user uses Loot (available for free) and wrye bash( free) to make the mod work with their game 11)the community then provides nearly all of the bug reports, QC, troubleshooting of mod compatibility, and word of mouth advertising 12) other modders potentially provide content patches for the stuff they made

To be entirely frank, the effort to create the mod, as labor intensive and PITA as it may be, is nothing compared to the effort and money and infrastructure and community knowledge required to even allow the mod then be created and implemented in the first place. Nearly every step of that list requires groups of people more talented and doing more difficult (actual) software development work and spending money on hosting just to get to thbe point where the modder can make their fucking waifu mod, and they actually have the audacity to pretend people can't do what the fuck they want with it, especially if they abandon it?

Fuck no, your mod exists exclusively because of paid infrastructure and development efforts of hundreds (at least) of other people giving you shit for free, and a community that existed long before you started modding.

Modders don't "own" shit, and it's infuriating that they think they do. They certainly deserve to receive every bit of credit and recognition for making a mod, and people that try and steal credit for somebody else's mod are scum, but once you make use of all the freely available development tools and hosting infrastructure and community feedback to make content for a game you didn't make, you dont "own" shit.

Your rights as a modder stop at getting credit, especially if you abandon something, just like any other open source project.