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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1489982" data-attributes="member: 10201">Well, assuming you meant "...between GNU and OGL...", somebody should really tell RedHat that they aren't selling software. Plenty of open-source software is also commercial. Now, admittedly, there are nsignificant differences in the media that make the case not an exact analogue. For starters, it is the source code, not necessarily the software, that is free, while for RPGs there really is no such distinction: an RPG book *is* the "source code". Secondly, while both have development costs, software has almost-zero production costs, while a book has pretty significant production costs. But these are all issues that should've been considered, or were considered, before the WotC OGL was finalized. And one of the "solutions" to the dilemma was pointing out that (1) people like books, and production values matter, and (2) in general, by the time someone gets around to stripping all the OGC out of something and formatting it into a decent document, the book will have already sold a significantn %age of its life--especially if you're trying to address point 1, and make something that has a quality presentation, in hardcopy.I agree that it's not as clear-cut as republishing the whole thing, for free, online being either ok or not ok. That is clearly legal, and i think it may even be ethical--it depends on the circumstances. To take an extreme, i see nothing wrong with doing this if the book has been out of print for a while and the company has said they aren't going to reprint it (and the content is OGC, of course). At the other extreme, there's a world of difference between the publisher saying "please don't just put all the OGC online for free until the book has mostly sold through" and "you are a bad person if you put the OGC online for free while the book is still new". And how much reworking does it take to make a difference? Does it matter whether the resulting work is free or commercial, PDF or hardcopy? Do you consider the Pocket Players' Handbook to be unethical? Does it matter that one of the things WotC said right from the start [paraphrasing their FAQ] was that "anybody could take the entire contents of the D20SRD and publish their own players' handbook, but we're confident that our products' production values will still be better, and they won't hurt our sales"?</blockquote>

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