by Hooray » Wed Oct 23, 2013 4:01 pm
Due to FlightGear's open nature, it is fairly straightforward to "mod" it, because you don't need to use any heavily-restricted 3rd party SDKs - and you could argue that we've been seeing lots of "mods" over the years actually - such as flug's bombable addon, Thorsten's local weather system (now "advanced weather") or the "ATC aircraft". Similarly, there are a few core projects that started out as a "mod" and that got absorbed somewhere down the road.
FlightGear being based on XML, scripting and open file formats, you can easily modify it - usually even without having to touch the source code. Some of the more recent additions like the Canvas system for example, make it increasingly easy to customize FlightGear in totally novel ways, and even use it for completely new projects and unprecedented ideas.
Thus, nobody here is opposed to "mods" or "modding" - as can be seen, we are seeing dozens of such "mods" that have become a part of FlightGear - and you could even argue that any new aircraft/vehicle is a form of "modding" FlightGear.
As has been mentioned previously, modding is already possible - it just works in a slightly different way, because it doesn't necessarily involve SDKs or building FG from source - Thorsten and others have demonstrated that the simulator can be extensively customized/modded without having to touch any C++ code - the most advanced weather system we have is not written in C++ code, it's been developed in scripting space and augmented through custom shaders.
Bottom line being, "modding" is already going on - it's a part of FlightGear development - it's just that some of these mods stand a better chance of being integrated/absorbed at some point (think weather, rembrandt, canvas), while others may have a hard time (think bombable).