So that really makes me start to wonder what value an OGL or ORC has compared to CC.
I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. This is, however, my understanding.
One of the things the OGL has that CC does not have is that you can specify Product Identity terms that others are completely forbidden from using in any way in their own works without another license from you. For example, if I designate "MyOriginalCoolCharacterDoNotSteal" as Product Identity under the terms of the OGL and you use Open Game Content from the source where I made that designation, you agreed not to use "MyOriginalCoolCharacterDoNotSteal" anywhere in your work unless you separately obtain that permission from me. You can't say "for more information on this class, see MyOriginalCoolCharacterDoNotSteal" - you can't even mention in your Foreword, "I was reading about MyOriginalCoolCharacterDoNotSteal and it gave me a great idea for a book." Under the CC-BY license (the license under which the SRD 5.1 is released), you can probably make that
reference under a Fair Use exception provided you're not copying things wholesale.
Another reason to use the OGL is that the SRD is only a tiny fraction of the material that has been released under the OGL over the past 20 years. There's tons of Open Game Content out there that has not been released under the CC-BY license, only the OGL... and if you want to make use of that content, you're simply going to have to use the OGL.
Of course, we don't know the terms of the ORC yet so we can't really compare, but I'll submit a couple of items that have dissatisfied me with the OGL that the CC-BY license does not fix either as things that the ORC could theoretically do better (if you're interested in these items; not all publishers will be and in fact I suspect some would NOT want these things in the ORC).
Personally, I feel one of the major failings of the Open Game License is that it allowed too broad a designation of Product Identity such that it allowed publishers to, for example, release the "stat blocks" of creatures or spells as Open Game Content but designate all of the NAMES of those creatures and spells as Product Identity, even if they did not contain unique names (to continue the example above, consider a spell named "MyOriginalCoolCharacterDoNotSteal's Faithful Watchdog" versus a spell named "Faithful Watchdog" - it makes sense to allow someone to declare "MyOriginalCoolCharacterDoNotSteal" as Product Identity but it makes less sense to allow someone to declare "Faithful Watchdog" as Product Identity). This made it impossible reference spells from most other sources even if you wanted to (e.g., "for some other great spells for your hedge wizard, we highly recommend Spellname XYZ from the third entry in Section 15 of our OGL - go pick up that book from them and give them money!"). I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how to fix that ("if you release Open Game Content, the Name/Label by which you refer to that content must also be released as Open Game Content?" too kludgy!), but some flavor of restriction on what can be declared as Product Identity so that Open Game Content can at least be effectively referenced in other works would be something I personally would have great interest in seeing happen in the ORC.
A viral clause requiring that all work derivative of Open Game Content (or whatever the ORC-equivalent is) must itself be released as Open Game Content under the terms of the ORC (something similar what the CC-BY-SA does) is also something I would be interested in (this is one clause others may be much less interested in).
Also a clause in the ORC that puts more teeth into "You must clearly designate what is Open Game Content" would be appreciated. If a reasonably intelligent six-year old can't look at your "declaration of Product Identity" and "declaration of Open Game Content" clauses and be able to immediately tell me with 100% certainty whether a given piece of content is "open" or not, you have failed in the task to "clearly" designate it. (This was the only change proposed in the OGL 1.1 that I thought was on to something with its suggestion that "original content" and "reused content" be differentiated somehow, perhaps by a different font color - I don't think different font colors are the way to go for usability but I do think they were on to something with the fact that I've seen a lot of designations of Open Game Content over the past 20 years that I would call in breach of the license by way of the "
clearly designate" clause).
So there are some speculative reasons why someone might want to use various versions of either the OGL, the CC-BY license, (potentially) the ORC license, or perhaps some other flavor of CC license (if I personally were stepping (back) into publishing tomorrow, I would probably utilize the CC-BY-SA license since the ORC doesn't exist yet and I am strongly in favor of Open Content being viral).
