Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8882680" data-attributes="member: 82106">OK, look, this was ALWAYS the case! Hasbro, big company with probably tons more lawyers than the entire RPG industry put together. US is a Lawyerarchy, has been for many decades, at least. Publishing a new OGL may be a discrete legal move that signals the initiation of a war on the Community, but the stockpile of weaponry was always there.Something most people do not really appreciate about ALL Open Source type licenses, is they are all controlled by someone. It is not logically possible to have it any other way. There has to be a provision for revision, the real world doesn't stand still and agreements must evolve. Someone must be privileged to make those revisions, otherwise you don't really have a single stable license to agree on and anyone can morph it into anything. The best you can ever get is something like the GPL where the FSF is a trusted set of community representatives with no iron of its own in the fire. We can generally trust them not to produce the GPLv4 as some sort of monstrosity that betrays the Community's values. Unfortunately the OGL lacks any sort of similar stewardship. Many people have noted this and many of us have long been hesitant to use OGL for that reason.I mean, again, OGL isn't actually the central issue here, Lawyerarchy is really the central issue. In the US WotC is backed with lots of money and whatever the heck they say, that is how it is. The guy with the lawyers MAKES THE LAW. I mean, this is a game forum, there's nothing more that should really be said here!</blockquote>

Verification