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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8434496" data-attributes="member: 5948">It was certainly a reaction to the legacy of the Williams era, where TSR was being pulled in so many different directions by different creditors that it was a real possibility that the D&D IP would end up a minor line item on some bank's register of assets (or worse, split between several different banks) and would have never escaped from legal hell.  D&D as a brand could very realistically have died right there if WotC didn't choose to buy out the whole package..I think a lot of the WotC people (Dancey one of the more prominent ones, or at least one of the more vocal) got spooked by the possibility and the OGL sprang from that.  Future-proofing D&D against any future financial/legal shenanigans.  And it had the bonus of hiving off the less-profitable bits of TSRs D&D output - the thrown-together adventures and hyper-niche sourcebooks - onto third party publishers, so the D&D ecosystem as a whole benefited from them being out there, but WotC didn't have to lay out money on them.  And mind you, this was the 2000-era, when open licences and open information and tech-utopianism and the free, equal, democratic internet were still a thing that people actually believed in.</blockquote>