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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 2812321" data-attributes="member: 2067">No.An OGL Patriot doesn't want to see the wheel reinvented. Rather, he would see things using the wheel invented. Cars, airplanes, beet carts, pulley-and-lever systems. In order for people to be free to make cars and beet carts, the wheel needs to be freely available to use. If you have to pay someone to use the concept of a Wheel, making a beet cart suddenly becomes prohibitively complex and/or expensive, involving laywers, PI, copyright, and a million and one other layers of red tape.Of course, if the wheel was free then the creator of the wheel gets nothing after he tells his friends about it. IMHO, that's just fine. An idea is *much* more valuable than any one creator, and any one creator cannot possibly encompass the entirety of an idea.For years, we have been paying people for the wheel. The OGC can be a way to make the wheel usable by anyone. Unfortunately, the gaming community seems much more interested in re-making the wheel (One team makes it oval, one team makes it square, one team uses logs, one team uses stone, one wood, one rubber). And then copyrighting *their* wheel. So no one can use wooden wheels, or rubber wheels, or stone wheels. Unless they make it out of balsa wood or artificial rubber or granite because those elude the copyright and make someone else make the wheel themselves.It's not about getting stuff for free. That's a side-effect. It's about being able to build on what others have done. Sadly, that message is not embraced by the current community very much at all, because we all first played the games in an era where the wheel was copyrighted.The indsutry is learning. Heck, it was just born in 2000. It's not even half a generation old. But sooner or later, people will stop trying to reinvent the wheel and start making internal combustion engines with which to power the mustang convertables of our imaginations.</blockquote>

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