I am replying in a private capacity and not as a member of staff. I would also like to point out that I am quite a junior member of staff and will have little say in the final decision
(Furthermore, this is probably mostly gibberish until I give it a re-write. And even then I'm not promising a substantial improvement).As I see it, it boils down to two things: copyright and what is in the readme.
The ReadmeFirst off, this might be a good time to consider what you put in your own readmes - people may still be reading them in five or even ten years time. Do you want to allow people to convert your mission for other games by BIS? Or maybe just move it to another island, eg. Desert Everon or Winter Kolgujev?
Clearly you cannot gauge what the future holds and hence you cannot forbid everything that may become possible with what you create for this game. This may be less true now that BIS have released three games in the genre, but you may see that it holds when you look back to the years after OFP appeared.
CopyrightI am sure there are people who could argue over what is covered by the concept of copyright - is it the specific sequence of 1s and 0s that describe the pbo in binary or is the mission in its entirety as a work of art. Ultimately it doesn't matter, as it is considered to belong to the author for the copyright period. Which is how long? I don't think that has been established. Books and musical compositions have long durations, typically 50 - 70 years. But these are electronic trifles that people aren't even charging money for...
In short, unless you have permission from the author, don't mess with it.
Broadly speaking, the conventions of the community are as follows:
Approved providing advice to help members to run old missions - finding addons or suggesting how to correct the addons list.
Tolerated taking apart of missions and addons to learn how they were created.
Frowned upon making available someone else's work that you have edited without permission - eg. new textures on an addon.
What you are proposing is mostly
with some bits of
. Since OFPEC aspires to pure
, I don't think your edit of the mission would be hosted here.