The problem is that viral licenses always help the top of the food chain. Whoever creates the original work is under no obligation to release all of their material under the license but then forces that obligation on everyone below.
I disagree with you here; that helps the people at the bottom of the food chain more than anyone, because it gives them a variety of open content that's not only
massive, but ever-expanding. Literally, each new release is that much more for the community to freely use, alter, and remix in ways that the original creator(s) might not have foreseen, and we're all the beneficiaries of that. The community is the real winner.
WOTC never released the whole Player's Handbook under the OGL. They released a subset. But every producer below them had to release everything they produced that included material from WOTC's SRD under the OGL – which meant WOTC could theoretically use that in their own products but not vice versa.
Yes, it was unfortunate that WotC was able to subsequently release D&D 3.5 products which were not Open Game Content. But making it so that downstream publishers could themselves elect not to release SRD-derived material as OGC (which is the state of things under the CC-BY-4.0) only means that they could emulate the very behavior that you're decrying here. Far better to mandate that all derivative OGC be itself OGC.
There's a wide range of CC licenses, including CC BY SA that do require downstream producers to release their material. An updstream producer can release some of their material as CC BY SA but then any downstream producer that uses any of that material has to release all of their related material under CC BY SA. Hence, the virility.
I think you mean "virality" there, unless there's a subtext of which I'm unaware.
And if the CC SA does require the publisher to release everything, derivative material and original material alike, then that's too far in the other direction. There's no happy medium where derivative material must be shared but original material can be without having to be.
There's another issue with the OGL which is that it's still a license owned by WOTC. That was their argument back when the OGL 1.1 happened. They argued it was their license and they could deauthorize it. They later said they wouldn't do that but not that they couldn't do that. So why would we trust the license now?
Largely because most everyone who was qualified to say so agreed that claim was bunk. It was based on a threat with no real chance of being followed up on. I've said before that shady legal threats which won't hold up in court aren't particular to any license; anyone can threaten to sue anyone for anything at any time; while I understand why publishers find even that too much to countenance, it's still a shame that such bogus threats are able to alter the course of an entire industry.
Why not switch to a better one? Why not switch to one trusted by maybe millions of individuals and hundreds of big companies – one that's been used and refined for almost 25 years?
See above. That "better" license doesn't mandate the same level of openness where derivative content is concerned, and so won't create the same rich environment that we've enjoyed under the OGL.
Anyway, people can do what they want, but that's why I focus on using CC BY. I don't want to lock in downstream producers and one more widely used and trusted across the whole world.
Which begs the question of just how much of your derivative content do you make open? Because unless the answer is "all of it," then you're giving downstream publishers less than the OGL would mandate, meaning that they lose out because of your actions.
Now, I hope you don't do that, so I'll ask you to make a public pledge right now: will you release
all derivative content that you make as open under the CC-BY-4.0?
