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Mike Mearls On the OGL
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<blockquote data-quote="wayne62682" data-source="post: 4312130" data-attributes="member: 40455"><p>While I agree with a lot of Mearls' views, the one thing he's forgetting is that the <strong>reason</strong> there wasn't many of the kind of additions that WotC expected people to do is because hardly anything was added to the OGL. His analogy to open-source is flawed because with open-source software, <strong>everything</strong> is available for others to make use of and change, and by the GPL it must <em>remain</em> that way. 3.5 had what, the core books, psionics, a few variant rules and that was it? You couldn't use mechanics from other books, so they pretty much forced publishers to "fork" D&D and make their own systems so they could increase the number of things they could make use of.</p><p></p><p>WotC clearly just wanted people to supplement "their version" of D&D, not fork it or create their own settings and products. This is evident by how they reacted to things like Mutants & Masterminds, True20, et all and how these types of products have been squashed by the new GSL. The thing is, you can't tell people you're going to open your content to help other people make supplements for it... and then not open anything beyond what amounts to version 1 of it.</p><p></p><p>If the OGL failed, it failed because WotC wanted to keep their position as "king of the hill" and didn't want to share. In fact, their OGL (and now GSL) are more reminiscent of Microsoft's recent idea of open-sourcing things (basically, we give you some of the code, not all of it, but you can only use it on very specific things i.e. a half-assed way), and not real open-source.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="wayne62682, post: 4312130, member: 40455"] While I agree with a lot of Mearls' views, the one thing he's forgetting is that the [b]reason[/b] there wasn't many of the kind of additions that WotC expected people to do is because hardly anything was added to the OGL. His analogy to open-source is flawed because with open-source software, [b]everything[/b] is available for others to make use of and change, and by the GPL it must [i]remain[/i] that way. 3.5 had what, the core books, psionics, a few variant rules and that was it? You couldn't use mechanics from other books, so they pretty much forced publishers to "fork" D&D and make their own systems so they could increase the number of things they could make use of. WotC clearly just wanted people to supplement "their version" of D&D, not fork it or create their own settings and products. This is evident by how they reacted to things like Mutants & Masterminds, True20, et all and how these types of products have been squashed by the new GSL. The thing is, you can't tell people you're going to open your content to help other people make supplements for it... and then not open anything beyond what amounts to version 1 of it. If the OGL failed, it failed because WotC wanted to keep their position as "king of the hill" and didn't want to share. In fact, their OGL (and now GSL) are more reminiscent of Microsoft's recent idea of open-sourcing things (basically, we give you some of the code, not all of it, but you can only use it on very specific things i.e. a half-assed way), and not real open-source. [/QUOTE]
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