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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Matt Thomason" data-source="post: 8899461" data-attributes="member: 6777331">I know where you're coming from.  I'm a big advocate for open-source software myself, but I'm not an open-source purist - I will also use other alternatives if they're more suitable.  I use Adobe products because they're industry-standard and I can't force someone who requests I give them an Adobe InDesign file something else.  I usually use Linux, PHP, MySQL, an Nginx/Apache combo for webservers.  I use WordPress a lot.  I have an IntelliJ IDEA subscription because it's a far better IDE for my purposes than any open-source one.  I use Microsoft Word because it's the most comfortable option, but knowing that I can open those .DOCX files elsewhere if I ever stop using it.  I make the occasional open source contribution myself, because personally I feel that is what we should do, some has been 100% my own original work that had no legal need to be open-sourced.   Knowing that I am not vendor-locked is certainly a consideration (and a big one) for me when it's my choice of which software to use, but it's certainly not the sole consideration.  Every decision I make is based on what the available options are and which will suit my purpose best.While I've never to the best of my knowledge closed off anything I've written under the OGL that wasn't pure Product Identity (noting that many times that wasn't my call anyway because I was producing work under contract, but to the best of my knowledge all of that work was distributed under "all rules within are Open Game Content" terms), I cannot be mad at someone that does, because that's what the OGL terms are.   It may well be a good argument for someone to prefer to work with a different license, of course, but the argument "oh, how horrible, you did something the license is designed to allow you to do" is not exactly a good one to me.It's an agreement, and both sides enter into it with knowledge of what it says.  What it says may not be ideal, but if any party has an issue, they need to make it known before agreeing to it, and not be upset later that the agreement says what it does.  That's the crux of why we're here right now - because WotC wants to do something with the OGL that it was not agreed they have the power to do at the time the agreement was made.  Moving forwards, we may of course wish to argue that any new licence arrangements between ourselves and other parties have better, more open terms, but that's not applicable to the OGL 1.0(a).  That has its terms, they're as it says, and I cannot truly fault someone for actually following them properly, even if it makes me slightly annoyed that they used the OGL in a way that prevents me writing something compatible with their product, because that simply wasn't ever a part of the agreement.  If I don't like that, that's on me to seek out different agreements to work under.</blockquote>

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