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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 4324611" data-attributes="member: 9225">To my mind, the two basic issues are:1) Games are not really the same as software.2) Open source's effects and culture are not without flaws and differences of opinion.With the first point, marketing and parts of the d20 design culture have very much promoted the point of view that there is an uncontested linear process of advancement in game design, even though real gamers have highly individualistic reactions to systems and concepts that do not really demonstrate how one rule is consistently better than another. This is a complex miasm of ideology, some very popular assumptions about game design that may be wrong (such as the applicability of averages to gameplay) and folks just winging that mother wherever they don't know something, but it's not always well-connected to play experiences. Whatever's in the mix, the result is that some folks like "less evolved" games just fine. Open source software is far less amenable to subjective judgments. We may hate an interface design, but things like load times and stablity are not really matters of taste.With the second, the point is that if open source gaming was like open source software . . . it would probably have just as many problems. Open source has high ideals, but interpreting them and bringing them to fruition is hardly without conflict. Take Linux. Everybody loves Linux distros. You can find one to suit your needs without paying a dime.Unfortunately, for the average user, most of them kind of suck. They're hard to install and are missing the easy functionality many typical users want. The fact that you can kludge a solution with sufficient effort is not an answer to this -- it's restating the problem. Consequently, big efforts to present Linux as a flagship OS have often ended up being criticised by a lot of the open source community (see Xandros and Linspire) for having closed elements, even though in many cases, these were the most expedient way to make them work for typical users. There are plenty of divergent customs about what the pillars of open source mean.I'm not sure we can really judge the OGL as a success or failure without adopting criteria that ignore the interests of many people who used it. From one perspective, the "failures" included M&M and True20, which were certainly pretty successful for their designers, sponsors and fans. On the other hand, I'm not sure it sold more PHBs or added many basic play options that the average D&D player really used. I'm sure it did all of this for a certain segment of players (that probably includes the "prosumer" niche that is the dominant voice here at ENWorld) but not necessary enough people to really change the culture of D&D. I think Pathfinder's commercial performance will provide clues about this.I'd say one of the big effects of the OGL is entirely pedestrian. It removed the need to rewrite scads of text about boring things like what skills do and how to make an attack roll. This effect alone made it especially suited for redesigning the core and I speculate this is a big part of why the GSL provides no such privilege.</blockquote>

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