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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1491906" data-attributes="member: 812">People, people.A. It's perfectly simple to NOT release material under the OGL. Anyone who wants to can do so any time they like. Nobody is being FORCED to use this license. You don't want your material getting distributed by others? Easy: don't use a license which says, "Anyone who wants to can distribute this material."B. Accomodating the wishes of another person has nothing to do with the ethics of obeying the law. If Chris Pramas doesn't like what I've put up on my Skull & Bones campaign site, he's welcome to ask me to remove it. If Andy Smith wishes I hadn't created the Modern System Reference document, he can go right ahead and ask me to remove it.I would certainly want a very good explanation as to why they no longer wished to live up to the terms they originally published their book under. If it was because they had misjudged the market and found that people redistributing their OGC was hurting their sales, I might take my sites down.On the other hand, I might not. I might say, "Well, next time, don't tell people they can redistribute it, how about that?" I don't know what I would do because they haven't asked me to do that. Indeed, Andy Smith has written to me and offered advice on the online Modern SRD, so I assume in fact that he is perfectly fine with the fact that I have created a complete online edition of all the OGC in that book.This does not surprise me, since I know that Mr. Smith understands the OGL very well.C. If it turns out that releasing material using the OGL is not a good way to make money, publishers will stop doing it. And that's okay. There's very little "on the line" here -- the industry doesn't depend on any particular result to this experiment. If OGC doesn't make money, publishers who are trying to make money will stop creating it. They can't stop publishers who don't care about money from using existing OGC, nor can they stop those publishers from creating more OGC, so who cares?Whether or not the mythical "4th Edition" is open or closed is utterly beside the point. That has no effect on the existing OGC. It doesn't matter. It won't be some terrible death knell for the industry. It will mean that future gamers who want to play this game will have to buy it. And that's okay.Everything's okay, people. It's okay to support publishers you like, and it's okay to do what you will with OGC. It's okay to release open content, and it's okay to release closed content. I think it's silly to get huffy about people who are obeying the law, but as you will.I think the best plan is to decide what you think is the right thing to do, and to go ahead and do it. If other people aren't playing by the rules, point it out. If you think the rules are bad, fix them. But don't call people names because they play by the rules. That just makes it look like you don't know what the rules are.</blockquote>

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