When I fork it the first thing I did was to rename it, and it is necessary:
it is not intended to be backward compatible with old addon, it is never meant to be a fix/patch. I have no intention migrating whatever the data struct or saved vars from previous addon. If I ever want to publish it I have no desire to investigate and communicate whatever you might need to do to make it work if you have an old addon installed. No disrespect to anyone, it was for my convenience. I am used to how it works in github: when I fork, I fork and give credits and such, I do whatever makes sense to me in my own fork, since no license says I cannot. If I am trying to take over the ownership of existing github repo, I ask the owner of course.

No legal expert but I have a feeling that you may lose the case in court. Without explicitly specifying a license does not mean it is explicitly prohibited to use/distribute. And ZOS may have the ultimate "intellectual property" since we are basically calling their functions here and there and all of these are subject to ZOS addon licenses. If you call that as fancy as "intellectual property" then it is still arguably if hello world application is "intellectual property" or not, and to what extend you can claim that is your patent.

You are comparing apple to pear, one is physical thing another is lines of code. A proper comparison if you have to do this: I found a painting of lemon tree in the middle of the public road(not in private property), and I found no signature or anything on it. I like it so I took a picture of it(I left it on the ground as it has always been) and paint one myself. Then hang it on my own wall and all that. The painting looks alike but too shame all lemon tree painting looks alike cuz that is how you know it is a lemon tree. Bad example I know, but I tired.

Agreed, if it is a one liner change, I will definitely upload straight to original addon, but keeping the same name could be the recipe for chaos, say you are trying to load two different glibc with unknown loading order, each has different dependency and save a different config file, etc, again bad example but you get the idea.

Understood, I obviously had no idea what are all those rules about, how the ownership of addon works in there and how to link/update someone else addon. I just personally never had any issue forking a repo, especially a dead repo with no licensing info. Who are we kidding most of the code in ESO addon is just calling ZOS defined function and most likely copied directly from the offical ESO UI Github.

But rule are rules.

It is really about how you define a "new addon" vs "copy it with a new name". Do I copy code? Yes, I copied code from all those addons and of course directly from ESO UI Github. I did link the one I get the most code from, but protecting the "original idea" of the addon is probably going too far, well I had the idea in my mind before searching for existing addons, and of course there are a whole bunch of them. It is common sense that people wants to block potion when it is not effective on CA.

I saw you wrote addon yourself so you probably know this already, all those addons are pretty much using the same code at core. Is that because they copy each other with new name or because this is exactly how ZOS allows to interact with game client?

Message sent, but TBO it was a personal addon, I don't mind sharing it if people find it useful. But I also have no interest providing backward compatibility to old addon with original lua filename and such. We will see.

I didn't find any licensing info in this addon and in github, let me know if you find it otherwise.

I have sent the original author a message as requested, but I don't change a line and release it as a new addon, do a diff and see what is actually going on.

For example:

Fixed one hand/shield not working
Fixed potion detection failed due to API changes,
Fixed gear detection failed likely due to API changes as well,
Fixed pvp only mode
New Feature: added in-combat only mode,
New Feature: added reticle toggle
New Feature: added profile management

A good potion of the code has been rewritten/refac

There is no working clever alchemist helper working with the current version, that is why I made this one based on a two years old broken addon, but I have zero issue take it down and enjoy it just for myself.