Psion said:
In some cases, I think it's failure to fully understand what they were getting into. In other cases which I have less sympathy for, those concerned have implied some sort of ethical breach. In these cases, that strikes me as saying one thing and meaning another.
Being candidly honest (!) for a moment, when we first heard this idea, we weren't wild about it - but you have to understand the position of the publishers at the time.
The D20 market was very competitive back then, and there were companies literally fighting for their lives. By way of example, when Mongoose first started, we listed over 100 companies with product or who had announced product - looking at the state of play today, there are only a handful of those companies left, and I am struggling to think of more than two (us and Green Ronin) who emply full-time staff - apologies if I missed anyone, it is not a slight
So, you have to remember that it wasn't a game to many people - this was how they made their living, paid their mortgage, and so on.
Now, very few publishers had any problem with material being reprinted (they existed, sure, but were few in number), and most seemed to be very liberal with their material, allowing the republication of far more than just the designated OGC. They knew what they were getting into with the OGL, and respected this sharing.
But for a non-profit group to come along and just hoover absolutely everything up, then put it on a web site for free? That made a lot of publishers. . . uncomfortable. Remember, this was their living.
With hindsight, it was the wrong position to take. The effect on sales would likely have been minimal (yes, you could argue that it might have increased sales through greater visability - but no one wanted to take that risk by being the first), and there is some question as to whether a great deal would have been achieved without direct co-operation from the publishers concerned. After all, we alone were generating huge quantities of OGC, and there were plenty of others out there creating a huge mass of information. Of course, that just made it worse, as we could all see a situation where one publisher had all their material posted, while another (direct competitor maybe) had none.
So, wrong position but, really, understandable.
It is therefore without hypocracy (!) that we have made the offer to provide exactly this information to anyone who fancies resurrecting this project - see the Publisher's forum for details