Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 4200944" data-attributes="member: 8461">That may be so, but I'm not concerned with what's necessarily best for WotC; rather, I'm most concerned with what's best for the gaming community as a whole. Having a royalty-free license of some sort out there is better for WotC, I believe; that said, one with more restrictions is better for WotC, while one with less restrictions is better for everyone else.Ultimately, I find myself more concerned with what's better for everyone else. Partially this is because I think it's more worthwhile to focus on the health of the community overall. However, I also think that adding restrictions to everyone else to in turn give themselves a slightly larger sales profit is discourteous. It's good business sense, but it's discourteous nonetheless. We've heard before that WotC is the 800 lb. gorilla in the industry, that they're so large that they really don't have any true competing companies. Taking that as a truism, adding in restrictions on the license that everyone will use for the purpose of driving up their hypothetical 66% control of the market up to 67% may help drive up profits, but it just seems discourteous to whack everyone else for such a small return.It's nice to give people a gift - as WotC did with the OGL - even if you expect something in return (as WotC did; increased sales). However, later announcing that what you got in return wasn't sufficient, and so your new gift (the GSL) will include restrictions to make damn sure you give back what they consider to be a sufficient gift in return, is discourteous. Gifts aren't meant to be given because of what you expect to be given back; they're given to be gifts.That's not obvious, nor assumed. There's nothing to say that the OGL was either legally or financially unreasonable, it just didn't maximize profits as much as WotC wanted. It wasn't a question of the type of license breaking the company or not - they just wanted more money, and are seeking it by restricting the license.That's fine; that's their perogative as a business. However, that doesn't mean that people who are not part of that business should necessarily be grateful for that.I'm not suggesting anything, I'm just stating my opinion. And we don't know that anyone from the legal team that created the GSL is reading this thread.Strictly speaking, each competing product sold ends up harming (and by extension, pissing off) the company that gave them those tools. But again, if WotC is so massive that they don't even feel the loss, it doesn't seem like that should be worth them getting riled up over it.If you think my respectfully saying that I don't care much for the GSL is making it worse, then I think your view of the situation is unrealistically dire.As it so happens, I have a way to solve what I see as a problem; just don't introduce any restrictions into the GSL. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

Verification