Legality of the mod i'm working on

[nellia]

I've been working on porting these maps to the beta. My ultimate goal is to get every map ported over, with some adjustments to the maps to make them play better (or work at all) with beta source, adding the cut weapons, etc. So far I've gotten 1 1/2 maps (I'm cutting each map in half to account for the entity limit so it's actually 3 maps) working well enough, however something has been gnawing at the back of my mind this whole time: am I even able to release this as a mod? As far as I know, you don't need to own Half-Life 2 to download the mega pack and play the beta, and while it is a very different playing experience, with my mod you would be able to play through all the Half-Life 2 maps (or at least most of them, I realize this is a very daunting task and idk if i would be able to see it through to the end). So I feel like I wouldn't be allowed to release it to the public? I feel like i already know the answer because it seems pretty obvious but just figured I should ask.

[Витой]

Well, people were releasing their HL2 beta maps and mods since 2003. And while Valve doesn't like our community and the very fact that the code and playable build was stolen from them, they just don't care much about people using HL2 beta content and making mods based on it. As long as you don't distribute stolen source code you're fine.

[Bruner]

This site has been around for about a decade and a half and the leak it's self was nearly two decades ago, so if this site and a whole bunch of mods centering around the beta have survived for this long, then you're probably fine.

[nellia]

Thanks for the responses. I wasn't worried as much about using the beta as I was about porting half life 2 onto it, even if its the older xbox version but this makes me a lot more comfortable.