ezze wrote:About the second part of your question. Unfortunately to be totally safe from any legal problem the new textures must be considered derivative works of the originals so cannot be put under free licenses.
The only hope is a whole new Tamriel-like world that keep the feeling, but actually has nothing in common with Tamriel. Like what they did for Thief with The Dark Mod.
Technically, the new textures being derivatives depends on what they're doing. I'm not entirely familiar with the Morrowind Overhaul, but just because they're usable interchangeably does not make them derivatives. I've looked over a couple of the texture packs they use and it looks like they'd be fine for standalone use (though you'd need new models, which would have to be designed to be compatible with the textures which were defined to be compatible with the old models, which sounds like a nightmare because it is), but you'd really be better off starting from scratch for practical, not legal, reasons if you wanted to make a redistributable OpenMW game. OpenMW loads a lot more than just the textures; we're not talking about the free Doom reimplementations that can get by with less; everything in Morrowind's assets that isn't strictly mathematical can be assumed to be copyrighted, and as such would need replacing, and that includes even the world of Morrowind's geographical data, all its characters, so on and so forth (unless, of course, you can prove that they are faithful replicas of real things, which is basically impossible).
Why not a complete open-source game ?
