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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnRTroy" data-source="post: 4027703" data-attributes="member: 2732">OSRIC does serve a purpose, to support a game system Wizards won't license, and its creator said he'd shut it down if there was a legal version of it available similar to the 3e OGL license.Most publishers--the truly professional ones, the ones who want to create complimentary and supplementary products from D&D, the ones who would pay the license fee to get the early adopted ruleset--will likely want to use the GSL.  I'll bet there are enough incentives for them to use it--can say "D&D compatible" on it--and it will also likely protect their own derivative works from being reused.  They want to make a decent amount of money.One of the problems with the OGL is that a lot of people used it in an exploitative manner.  I'm not even talking about publishers who creating alternate PHBs.  I'm talking about the people who would compile OGL rules on-line for free from people's products.  Here are examples.Wizards releases a 100% OGL content book, Unearthed Arcana.  People start taking the whole book and making it part of their online OGL-SRD collections.  Instead of showing support for this with buying the book, people just cut-and-paste the whole thing on-line.  I think Andy Collins was right to be annoyed.David Pulver said GOO released their own SRD for their D20 rules.  When they released D20 Mecha, lots of clones showed up immediately, making GOO's own product redundant.Somebody puts up a SRD clone of Green Ronin's True20 ruleset.  He then <a href="http://jhkimrpg.livejournal.com/67263.html" target="_blank">defends himself</a> online saying that's what the OGL is about, and that you "shouldn't use it if you don't want this to happen".  And some people would berate people like Monte Cook for releasing what they called "Crippled OGL", since sometimes he'd keep certain monster names and other items from being reused.So, basically, the OGL in my opinion is flawed because of this viral nature.  It's a virus all right, it's like a contagion.  I fully suspect the new license is designed to be complementary to people allowing the secondary publishers to protect themselves from behavior like this.There's a lot of people out there who want a free lunch.  The OGL was too open.  I think this new license would help the secondary publishers protect their own content.  Unless the GSL is incredibly draconian, it will be embraced by most publishers and I think many fans as well, in fact it may offer the protections they need to prevent the freeloaders from taking their hard work.  If you want total control over your IP, make your own game, don't reverse engineer D&D.  If you want to support the OGL, use the 3e rules.  Be like Richard M. Stallman, show that you will only play 3e because of the OGL.  He only uses Free Software, he doesn't try to go reverse engineer Windows or the latest game, he takes a moral stance.The only incentive to "reverse engineering" the 4e D&D game and attempting to release it under the OGL is to continue the exploitation, to say "f--- you Wizbro, I'm gonna take your game and publish it online".  You have the GSL, and the game is still being published, so there's no excuse that you can't use it freely.  If you say "game rules can't be copyrighted", then do it but don't use the OGL as an excuse or a shield (and I think if Wizards wanted to push an RPG might seem more like a book than a game, legal precedent could someday be set protecting RPG's copyrights, but that's an aside).I personally would take a dim view of anybody doing that, and I hope Wizards decides to make an example of anybody who does.</blockquote>

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