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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9442430" data-attributes="member: 8461">In terms of a holistic discussion of business practices, sure. But there are specific aspects of that discussion that are germane to WotC.For instance, I've seen repeated posts expressing exasperation that the OGL scandal is still being held against WotC. But I think it's entirely legitimate to continue to bring that up, for one simple reason: the continuing harm that their attempt to maximize profit caused to the gaming community outweighs, in my opinion, their attempts to repair that harm.In that regard, my thinking is as follows: we had more than twenty years of the "open gaming" sentiment being united around a single license, one which mandated that derivative material (which in practice meant all new game mechanics, even if some bad actors took advantage of the lack of enforcement to defy this mandate) be open itself, allowing for a "virtuous circle" in which people could build on each other's creativity. And it worked brilliantly; we saw an absolute plethora of third-party books which used material from other third-party books (e.g. there's currently over 9,700 third-party Pathfinder 1E products on DriveThruRPG).But WotC's actions broke people's trust in the OGL, and now we have three difference licenses, at least one of which (the CC-BY-4.0) doesn't mandate sharing derivative content. The open gaming community is not only balkanized, but the idea that building on what others have done means letting someone else build on what you've done is itself no longer the case for at least one of the alternative licenses. The "virtuous circle" is seriously damaged under this new paradigm, and we're all poorer for it.I see that as a major step backwards, and I hold it against WotC because they could have done more to try and fix this.And I'm not saying that idly; I think that there's one very specific, concrete step that they could take to try and repair the damage. A step that would certainly warrant my ceasing to hold the OGL fiasco against them. A step that's both simple and easy on their part:Release an OGL v1.0(b), which would be exactly the same as the OGL v1.0(a) except for the following points: 1) add the word "irrevocable" to Section 4 of the license, and 2) release this new OGL v1.0(b) into the public domain, the same way Paizo did for their ORC license, so that WotC doesn't own it.That's it. That's the single biggest, most important step that I think they could take to fix the damage they caused (not necessarily the only step, but the one that's by far the most necessary). I think (or at least hope) it would go a long way towards restoring the public's faith in the OGL, and it would allow for extant OGL material to be used going forward under a license that people would ideally trust more because it wouldn't have what WotC used to try and undercut the old licenses, i.e. that (incredibly dubious) loophole about it not being "irrevocable" and owned by WotC themselves.Given how little it would cost them to do that, and how much it could help going forward (e.g. no need to re-release older SRDs into the CC-BY-4.0 then, since you'd automatically be able to use all existing Open Game Content with the new OGL), I see no reason for them not to take this step. Even if you think it's redundant due to the CC-BY-4.0, there's no actual cost to WotC. They'd still own the OGL v1.0 and OGL v1.0(a), so why not?But they haven't, and most likely won't. And since this strikes me as them voluntarily not going the metaphorical distance to try and fix what they, for the sake of profit maximization, broke, I think it's entirely reasonable and appropriate to keep holding the OGL fiasco against them.</blockquote>

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