A licensing question: part of Warlords appears to use cRPG's GPL-licensed code

I'm not part of either team — just someone who cares about open-source modding and went looking into something. I want to be careful and fair, so to be clear up front: this is about one specific component, not a claim that the whole mod is copied.

The short version

cRPG is open-source under the GPLv3. Anyone can use its code — the only condition is that if you ship it, your project stays open-source and you credit the original. Warlords is closed-source, and it ships one component copied from cRPG: the friendly-fire reporting system (the thing that tracks team-hits, lets victims report, and kicks repeat offenders). The internal structure is cRPG's, just with the visible chat messages reworded.

Most of Warlords is its own work — this is about that one system, nothing more. I'd rather undersell it than overstate it. And if I've gotten something wrong here, Warlords devs — I'd genuinely want to hear it; this isn't meant as an ambush.

Why I'm confident

The right way to test "did B copy A" on a shared engine is to subtract the engine first: only count things that exist in cRPG and Warlords but not in the base game (otherwise every mod looks alike, since they all build on the same TaleWorlds code).

The friendly-fire component carries 17 such cRPG-invented names — method names cRPG coined like GetReportedTeamHitBreakdown, DecayAllReportedHitsFromUser, and CheckAndMarkDecay — none of which exist anywhere in Bannerlord itself. Seventeen invented names, all friendly-fire-specific, in one file. That's not coincidence.

The clearest single piece is a little helper class called TeamHitRecord — same name, same fields, same invented CheckAndMarkDecay method with the same logic in both mods. Warlords reworded the chat strings but left the skeleton — and the skeleton is cRPG's.

Why this is worth raising at all

It's one component — so why bother? Because this is a small modding community, and it runs entirely on trust and goodwill. GPLv3 is about as generous as a license gets: it costs nothing, asks for no money, and lets anyone use the code — the only thing it asks is that you keep it open and credit the author. If we collectively shrug at a violation of a license that asks for nothing, we've quietly decided licenses don't mean anything here. That's the slippery slope — the next person has even less reason to honor the next license, and eventually nobody shares anything openly because there's no point.

And it's worth noticing a double standard. If someone shipped another modder's hand-made map, custom models, or sound work without permission, people would be upset — and rightly so. Open-source code deserves the same respect, even though it's less visible. If anything it's the gentler case: this isn't really "theft" — cRPG is open source, free for anyone to build on, the Warlords devs included. An open license is actually more generous than the "all rights reserved" sitting on most maps and models — it lets you use the work at all. The only catch is the single condition attached to that freedom: keep it open, and credit the author. That's the part that wasn't honored — and a license that costs nothing and asks for so little isn't a reason to treat it as optional; it's a reason it should have been easy to respect.

On the "it was mostly AI" point

One of the Warlords devs has been open about leaning on AI heavily, so I'll address it directly: it doesn't change anything. Copyright is about the output, not the tool. And the evidence actually shows how the AI was used — a model writing genuinely independent code would never reproduce cRPG's exact invented method names. Those only survive if the real source was fed in and lightly edited. Keeping the structure but rewriting the visible text is what an automated rename pass looks like, not a fresh reimplementation.

What I'm asking

Nothing punitive. Don't harass anyone. This is a normal, fixable GPL situation:

1. Credit cRPG for the code that came from it, and
2. Comply with the GPL for that component — release its source under the same license, or replace it with an original implementation (not by running cRPG's code through a model again).

I'd also genuinely welcome TaleWorlds' view on this — it's happening on their platform, in their ecosystem, and they clearly understand licensing (their own game ships full attribution for the open-source libraries it uses, including LGPL ones). A word from the platform holder on redistributing GPL code stripped of its license would help settle the norms for everyone.

Full technical writeup, with the exact identifiers, the side-by-side code, and checksums of the analyzed build so you can verify it yourself: https://github.com/ImperialAuditor/wl-crpg-gpl

cRPG's maintainers are the ones whose work this is, so I'm flagging it mainly so they're aware. What happens next is theirs to decide — and honestly, my hope is just that it gets resolved by complying with the license. Nothing more than that.

I've tried to keep this factual and constructive rather than a pile-on, and I'm hoping it can stay a civilized discussion.

submitted by /u/ImperialAuditorPrime
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