I was curious to know how much does someones original code need to be altered before it is ok to post it as new code, i realise that you would be using their code to begin with.....as an example in this thread :-

Kain's flags hack v1.0

Kain has made a wonderful hack here but it seems he no longer is around to update it and I changed the code to work on my 3.6.4, how can I share that with others if I'm not allowed to post the code and I can't contact Kain ?

It's still that persons code. Releasing a new mod with the fix would be a copyright infringement.

What I would do is post the fix in the original hack thread of the author. Just post the fixes that you made and people can fix their own.

As far as I'm concerned the closest you get is recoding it all together with the same idea in mind. It's better that way anyway because you know the code.

ok, thanks for that guys, my learning curve seems to be improving so i'll work on writing my own version completely from scratch

If you need any help, all you need to do is ask ;)