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The original 2002 essay by Ron Edwards is still up. That essay has always been somewhat controversial though, and the term may have drifted somewhat in meaning since then. I haven't been following that conversation. It doesn't really take into account the effects of having the OGL as an...

I think it's a good idea to save everything, yeah. The Internet has long gone from being a highway of information to being the ever-burning library of Alexandria anyway.

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Even if only 1 out of every 10 players have decided that they will have nothing to do with WotC going forward, that's huge. The majority of these would GMs, the primary consumers of so-called 3PP content in the first place. I get that if you're not a GM, you may well like whatever it is WotC...

Yes. But it's the Contributors, in the plural, in section 4. It's not "each Contributor separately". They are somehow acting collectively (or on behalf of each other) when they all, inter alia, grant You the right to Distribute, copy and modify "the Open Game Content." They have previously...

Agh. Delete me.

I don’t really see the point of demanding just that update in the language, personally. It’s kind of meaningless in this context. They’re going with this nonsense idea of "deauthorization" now, so shouldn’t we be asking for it to be explicitly "undeauthorizable" instead? This gets silly fast...

I’ve heard this explanation before, MtG being the main competitor at the time. But the mess that was TSR in the 90s is multi-faceted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSR,_Inc.#Final_years:_Financial_trouble_and_sale_(1995%E2%80%931997)

I don't see why it needs to be renamed. It probably should be. The OGL name is tarnished. The new license just needs to specify that it is, in fact, an update of the OGL 1.0(a). And it would need to be compatible in operation, unlike the joke that Wizards is currently trying to coerce people...

To reduce individual risk, this strategy would involve pledging money for a mutual legal defense fund in a "three musketeers" clause, like NATO's article 5.

As I have suggested before, they should transfer their copyright and section 9 powers over the OGL irrevocably to a non-profit third party, ideally one set up for the purpose. The ORC could be the start of an industry association capable of creating such a body. That way, any ORC license can be...

Why is this interpretation possible? They can’t remove the notices from other people’s publications. If those distributions contain WotC’s contributed OGC and declares it to be OGC (and that publisher is a Contributor of OGC themselves), what does it matter if WotC themselves currently do not...

The sophisticated leveraging of psychological warfare techniques suggest otherwise to me. But who knows? Maybe they're both ignorant and habitual psychopaths.

I agree whole-heartedly with 99.9% of the sentiments expressed here. But I have a minor quibble: This will not work unless said new license is an update as per section 9 of the OGL 1.0(a). It would leave orphan works in the old ecosystem, and that is unacceptable.

Thy should really call it something else, yeah. But they're dead set on sowing confusion here, so I'm not optimistic that they ever will.

Indeed. But if the new license wasn't dysfunctional as an update, I think this was the intended purpose. The wording "any authorized version" was intended to avoid the problem of splitting up the OGC between license versions.

Historically? Not so much. https://mightandmagic.fandom.com/wiki/Beholder I think I've seen some rogue displacer beasts and carrion crawlers pop up in various media too.

Sadly, that would have to happen in court.

I'm not so sure about that. From the Gizmodo article: "Another third-party publisher who asked not to be identified told Gizmodo their company “has already collaborated with other third-party publishers” to mount a legal defense of the original, circa 2000, OGL 1.0(a)." There's also this thing:

I think it's perfectly clear that the words "any authorized license" just means that you can use whatever version of it you want. Section 9 gives Wizards or its designated agents the right to make new versions. If that happens, you can either update your own license, or you can keep using the...