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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4316983" data-attributes="member: 1054">This, again, is based on the idea that "opinion" is a synonym for "arbitrary".No, actually, I said "The people who WROTE the GSL were afraid of open source." That's not the same as saying people who approve of it of are. In any event, "coward" is not a proper term. A coward is someone who has baseless fears. As we both seem to agree, if one desires complete control, fear of opening up IP is perfectly valid.Their opinion is VALID because they correctly understand that they will lose control of their IP if it is open.Their opinion is ILLEGITIMATE (or, rather, not worth considering in an objective debate about whether or not the GSL is good for publishers) because it is driven by that fear.In short, I don't consider the fear of loss of control of IP to be a legitimate motivation for behavior. Given that motivation, however, their decisions have been rational.Logical action from a faulty premise. It's extremely common human behavior. If you believe you're going to win the the lottery (false premise) you should spend a lot of money on buying tickets (correct, logical, conclusion).In the case of WOTC, or whoever is actually behind the GSL, we see the primary goal is to "put the genie back in the bottle", hence the perpetual termination clauses. The problem is, the fear that opening 4e in perpetuity will harm a presumed 5e is wrong; the sales of 4e, despite the huge amounts of competitive material out there, prove that. The prescence of True 20, Spycraft, and so on have had little to no obvious impact on 4e sales, which are higher than expected -- and there were high expectations. So the belief that a fully open 4e would lead to long term harm is objectively invalid, as a fully open *3e* did not -- and, indeed, by keeping the D&D market alive and active, probably *increased* 4e sales by reducing people drifting out of the D&D space.So they are making a perfectly rational decision to shoot themselves in the foot. A mostly-closed 4e will lead to attrition and contraction, and when 5e comes around, this will mean lower overall sales, as players will have left D&D entirely and won't be enticed to come back -- if they're gaming at all. Ryan Dancey was incorrect in predicting that opening D&D would lead to good ideas becoming part of the "source code", but he was correct in that it kept gamers playing D&D instead of moving on, and that's helped WOTC directly.And, please, stop conflating "Lizard's opinion of the people who wrote the GSL" with "Lizard's opinion of uninvolved third parties who support the GSL". The drives of both groups are quite different. Actually, I can't figure out the latter at all. Do you think the GSL will produce better supplements than the OGL/STL did? If so, why? There's still no quality control, no approval process. If you think the "Defined terms" will lead to more consistency and quality...read the STL. It was very similar, and the D20 logo didn't mean a damn thing for quality purposes. It seems that there's nothing the GSL does *better* than the OGL from the perspective of consumers, and it does many things worse, so the only motives I can come up with for lauding it are...well, I can't come up with any that are rational, to my mind. "Better than nothing" is about it, and that's damning with faint praise.</blockquote>

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