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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 1500542" data-attributes="member: 2013">If you equate "market cap" to "successful software producer" then yes, the most successful software producer is the most adamant opponent.  However, I could argue the most successful software producer is the one that had provided the most innovations over, say, a 50-year time period... in which case the "most successful software producer" (IBM) not only is a proponent of the Open Source  Philosophy, but has in fact benefitted GREATLY from the contributions of others (hint: IBM didn't write Linux itself).However, I think you're missing the point of my analogy.  It was NOT to say that "the open source philosophy is the 'best' position."  Rather it was to illustrate some of the parallels in design philosophy and results.Rather, it was to illustrate that the originators of the Open Source Movement - Egen Moglen and Richard Stallman - designed the GPL with one very significant goal in mind: to make it easy for others to build upon their works and at the same time ensure that they in turn would receive the right to build upon THOSE works.  In effect, the GPL is almost an "anti-copyright but you have to give credit" license.  The GPL itself is described by its creators as a "free as in freedom" license - which encompasses "free as in speech" and to some extent "free as in beer."The OGL was created to by WotC/Ryan Dancey for the purpose of "outsourcing" unprofitable areas of RPG writing that WotC didn't want to take on but that helped support the game and drove sales of the Core Rulebooks - e.g., adventures (this has come from Ryan's own mouth many times).  That is their goal - to drive sales of the core rulebooks.Now that we have sight of the goals, it's necessary to consider that on its own, the GPL didn't do much.  It couldn't do much.  There was no point in adopting it unless you were philosophically aligned with the views of the creators.  Similarly, the OGL, on its own, doesn't do much unless you're philosophically aligned with the "Open Gaming" concept.However, the GPL came into the consciousness of its target community - programmers - when this nice operating system called "Linux" came along.  It was contributed by someone (Torvaalds) who WAS philosophically aligned with the GPL.  Suddenly, there was a "starting point" of considerable value from which you could work that gave some incentive to "buy into the GPL" even if you weren't 100% philosophically aligned with it... because if you could TOLERATE it, you had a *very* valuable (in terms of utility, which is valued among software programmers - the target community - above raw economic terms) piece of software to use.Similarly, the OGL came into the consciousness of its target community - game designers - when this nice big rules system called the "System Reference Document" came along.  It was contributed by someone (WotC and Dancey) who was philsophically aligned with the OGL (granted, in the case of WotC it was purely for business reasons and harnessing the Skaff Effect; however, there is a part of me that STRONGLY suspects that Ryan Dancey's motivations were more personal - he has recounted the story of the fall of TSR and how the IP rights to D&D were somewhat scattered when WotC took over and I have this nagging feeling that Ryan himself wanted to put D&D - the game he loved - forever safely out of the reach of those who would ruin it as a game by entangling the IP - and that the OGL was his best effort at doing that by perpetually freeing up as much IP as possible).  Suddenly, game designers had a huge incentive to TOLERATE the terms of the OGL, even if they didn't love them... because they now had a huge and valuable piece of gaming literature to use.Basically, these are the two points I wanted to stress: that (1) the licenses themselves reflect a philosophy and (2) the marriage of a substantial body of IP under the license is what "ignited" the takeoff and in large part provides the incentive for others to follow.  You need both.  Many publishers are not 100% thrilled with every single term of the OGL... but the benefits of access to the large OGC library available clearly outweigh those concerns.  I'm sure IBM is not 100% thrilled with every single term of the GPL... but the benefits of access to the large code library available clearly outweigh IBM's concerns.  Just like the GPL has given us such "smaller, ancillary companies" such as RedHat or SUSE, the OGL has given us smaller companies like Mongoose, Green Ronin, and Mystic Eye (not trying to insult anyone by noninclusion).  Just as the GPL has seen larger, estabilshed companies in its field adopt the code it covers due to the value it provides despite having competing systems (e.g., IBM with its OS/2 system), the OGL has seen larger, established companies in its field adopt the SRD due to the value it provides despite having competing systems (e.g., White Wolf's SSS and Necromancer arms).Just as the GPL has given us "micro companies" - such as the guy working on his Sourceforge project, the OGL has given us "micro companies" - such as ENPublishing or Expeditious Retreat Press... or even just "guy doing his own website" like Bendris Noulg.I think there are a lot more similarities than you might want to believe.Also, consider that the Skaff Effect may apply to Open Source software thusly - the more OSS apps that are out there, the more it drives sales of the OSS leader (NOT the software industry leader - after all, OSS apps are more apt to work with Linux than Windows, and so are less useful in encouraging people to use Windows than Linux)... which might explain why IBM adopted it (to try to win back its dominant position of 2 decades ago from Microsoft).  That the "industry leader" in software is not supportive of OSS may not be the right way of looking at it even though WotC is the industry leader in RPGs.   Remember what happened to most RPG's during the "trading card phase" - all of them were hurt in the "fantasy pastime market" and WotC became the market leader with Magic while it was competing for peoples' entertainment dollar with TSR's D&D.Just some thoughts.  The analogy is not perfect, but there are a darn lot of parallels that are worth considering. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />--The Sigil</blockquote>

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