Ryan Dancey -- Hasbro Cannot Deauthorize OGL

I reached out to the architect of the original Open Gaming License, former VP of Wizard of the Coast, Ryan Dancey, and asked his opinion about the current plan by WotC to 'deauthorize' the current OGL in favour of a new one.

He responded as follows:

Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does not have the power to deauthorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked.

Ryan also maintains the Open Gaming Foundation.

As has been noted previously, even WotC in its own OGL FAQ did not believe at the time that the licence could be revoked.

7. Can't Wizards of the Coast change the License in a way that I wouldn't like?

Yes, it could. However, the License already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.

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[darjr]

I didn't know Lucas had a forever license to the d20 Star Wars game? @RyanD Can you discuss this when you are on with Roll For Combat later in the week?

Oh and does this mean Disney now has that license?

 

[darjr]

Ope

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I didn't know Lucas had a forever license to the d20 Star Wars game? @RyanD Can you discuss this when you are on with Roll For Combat later in the week?

Oh and does this mean Disney now has that license?

View attachment 271861

Hey, maybe someone can inform Disney's lawyers that Wizards is now claiming perpetual doesn't mean unrevokable.

 

[Henry]

This is the big issue facing anyone who wants to make a deal with WotC-- even just implying that the OGL can be revoked demonstrates WotC is now a bad-faith actor, and cannot be trusted. It's the scorpion telling the frog "Don't worry, I won't sting you again."

To me, it’s like if the FSF and Richard Stallman had said in 1995, “now that open software is turning a profit, we’re retroactively changing the GPL license terms so that we now own rights to all open software published under it -SURPRISE, MOTHER*****!” it would have strangled half of the software that powers the world in its crib.

 

[Henry]

Hey, maybe someone can inform Disney's lawyers that Wizards is now claiming perpetual doesn't mean unrevokable.

As they used to say on Boston Legal (yes I know about as life-accurate as a Star Wars film) “if you want the Jury to care, make it about them.”

 

[Haplo781]

Also, I must add another complaint: the new OGL should not be versioned 1.1. A minor version increase (1.0 to 1.1) indicates adding functionality that is backwards compatible with the previous version. WotC's 1.1 is clearly a breaking change, and thus should have been numbered as 2.0, a major version change.

This aside from the fact that it's not an open license, and in fact not even in the same category of license as the original OGL, since 1.1 ties the license specifically to WotC, rather than being a general content license that anyone could use for any system from any company.

GSL 2.0

 

[Henry]

GSL 2.0

GSL 2: Electrocution Boogaloo

 

[kjdavies]

That's probably a response to the extraordinarily abusive nature of the fandom at this time. There have been threats of violence towards people who make games. It's an absurd response. We are blessed with actual moderators here.

Or "our legal team is handling this and told us to keep silent so we don't make their job harder".

One of the most important bits of dealing with legal situations is to know when to say nothing.

 

[kjdavies]

Well, as numerous sources stated, the threshold for this Royalty Fee only applies if you make 750k or more in a year. Of which there really are not a lot (less than 20 in total). And even then, the fee is only deducted from the money you make above this threshold, not in its entirity 'as soon as'. Anyone that makes between 50K and 750K in a year simply just needs to declare their profits, but not pay a fee.

Until they go an change it... as they reserve the right to with 30 days notice.

 

[RyanD]

Thank you!

Another question?
Did drafts go back and forth between 3pp? And if so were significant changes made? Or did most of the details get hashed out before it was written?

Also where contracts involved at all?

Throughout Y2K I operated a mailing list called ogf-l (actually I operated two, the other was ogf-d20-l for discussions about the D20 trademark license).

Starting at the GAMA Trade Show in the spring we engaged with as many 3rd parties as we could to get as much feedback as we could on the text of the two licenses. A lot of the people who participated in those discussions became publishers of various open gaming projects.

The biggest change was that the initial idea was one license that was both a trademark and a copyright license. That's close to what the leaks suggest that 1.1 will try to be. We abandoned that approach to make both licenses much simpler and easier to understand; but the result was that I spent close two years starting messages with "there are two licenses".

The OGL is a very simple document so the goal was to try an make it as "plain English" as we could while still checking all the boxes needed to make it fit for purpose. There are still some bits I wish had been further reduced but the legal team got to a point where they just didn't want to make further cuts; so we now all get to learn the definition of "potate".

The people who participated in those discussions were important to the process and without their input the license would not have worked as well as it did.

Unfortunately I lost my personal copies of the ogf-l and ogf-d20-l mailing list archives. I suspect that there are people who kept all those messages though. I further suspect that they might resurface as a part of discovery pursuant to litigation so I'm looking forward to reading what 23 years ago me said about a bunch of stuff.