Etiquette for maintaining and updating abandoned open source project

Question

There are couple of abandoned .NET project which released ZIPs of source code that I would like to do some maintainance work on, and make my own additions. These were simply distributed as ZIPs and weren't hosted on a site like sourceforge. One example is mentalis security tools)

What I'd like to do it to take the code and make some of my own changes and additions, then publish to GitHub. I plan on keeping most of the original code, but I would really like to restructure it a lot etc. The BSD license used would allow me to do this but I want to understand if there are particular conventions I should follow? Anyone have examples of projects they've taken to github or elsewhere from other places to do their own updates?

Answer 1

In general, it's good to give credit where credit is due - make it clear where the original project was, etc.

Beyond that, the BSD license is pretty open and unrestrictive - especially if you're also planning to distribute your modified version under the same license, then pretty much all you need to do is do that.