Nellisir said:
I suspect there'll be a mechanism to prevent that. It might be as simply as requiring any GSL product to have X% of new/original Game System Content. It'll might be tough to pull together an "official" SRD if you have to provide an equal amount of new content.
Define "new and original" content.
Here's 200 pages of "extracted" 4e rule in ASCII format.
Here's 200 pages of random names, with tables associated with them (making them "gaming content" -- hey, you can roll on them!)
Presto! Exactly as much "original gaming content" as there is extracted material.
The more you try to define things like "original content", the more convoluted the license becomes. And we're, what, some 30+ days beyond the original announcement of the terms for the license? A month of development time is pretty severe if GenCon is the goal, and if you can't make GenCon, you might as well not shell out $5000.00. And if you don't, you won't make new products until Jan 2009, which means the 4e launch will be a bit sad and empty compared to the 3e launch, with no new crunch books until October.
I don't know what the cutoff will be for developers who want quality products for Gencon, but let's assume a month for production (checking bluelines, last minute corrections, printing, shipping), so that means finished by mid-July. If WOTC releases the license today, that's roughly 5 months to:
a)Review the licenses, do sales projections, and decide if you can make back 5K on top of all your other costs and still turn a bigger profit than you could be allocating your resources elsewhere.
b)Learn the 4e rules well enough to write quality product for them.
c)Write a product, playtest it, assign art for it, lay it out, etc.
This isn't impossible, but it's tight, and getting tighter. I don't know what the 'drop dead' date will be for a lot of companies, but I'd be guessing if it's not here by early March, there will be few takers for early adopter status. (And a lot depends on the terms of the new license, as well. Some envisioned products might not be possible.)
My prediction? Most of the larger companies will either not go 4e or wait until January. Necromancer, by virtue of their close relationship with WOTC, will become the "Judges Guild" of 4e, producing the bulk of third-party D&D-compatible products. (And this isn't a dig at Necromancer; I think they'd agree that being called "the new Judges Guild" is high praise from a grognard like me. At the least, it's SUPPOSED to be high praise, so I do not wish anyone to take offense at it.)