Now, after revolt by players including a campaign of bad ratings for the GTA games on Steam and a Change.org petition with over 77,000 signatures, Rockstar Games may have worked out a solution. A post on its support forum today said that Take Two has agreed that it will "generally" not take legal action against third party projects as long as they meet certain guidelines.
While it went out of its way to say that this is not a waiver, and "is not a license, and it does not constitute endorsement, approval, or authorization," it may be enough for modders to breathe easy. Rockstar representatives have told PC Gamer and Motherboard that it is in contact with the makers of OpenIV, apparently to try to prevent people from using it to affect the GTA Online multiplayer. There's no word from the team yet, but today the tool received an updated build.