PCGen sellout

[Wanderer]

Looking at the big picture, something very disappointing has happened to PCGen.

Here's a good snip I found on the PCGen yahoo group that pretty much sums it up:

Subject: Wizards must be laughing their heads off


The beginning of the end for PCGen.
This goes a lot further than charging for Wizard's IP.

What started off as a great open source community development project has just undergone a very serious change.

Those who control the development and direction have now incorporated a company that has a legal agreement with wizards to support and develop the otherwise dead PCGen competitor - ETools.

Looks like a lot of effort that *could* have been spent on PCGen will now be spent on ETools - and some other commercial product to be released at GenCon.

Why was it necessary to strike a deal to *sell* ETools from the
website and take on future development and support? Wasn't it enough to agree to sell the wizards modules.
And the subscriptions!! Geez, that's a huge switch to commercialism!
Talk about a complete sellout from the original free and open source ideals!
There is an obvious conflict of interest here, with every financial
and legal motivation to focus on ETools, to the detriment of PCGen.
Looks like this was coming for a while. It turns out that the PCGen dictators pleading with us to abandon the WotC copyright datasets actually end up having a strong personal financial interest in us doing so.

**** Congratulations Wizards! ****

With almost no effort you manage to solve your 2 most diffucult
problems with zero effort to yourselves!
You find a way rescue your own almost dead and despised product, and at the same time you effectively start the scuttling of your thorn-in-
the-side rival software by getting the dicitators to sell out!
You must have thought that you were dealing with a bunch of monkeys, and then actually got away with it.

Ah well. All good things come to an end... I'm just surprised that
the soul of a great open source community project could get sold so easily on the flimsy premise of Wizards IP datasets. Character
generation is mostly about game mechanics - which are *not* subject to copyright. When Wizards changed the SRD spell names, a completely
legal and workable set of *similar* names started getting used by the open community of publishers. That's called *trying*, and what I would have expected - prior to an "our hands are tied" sellout.

Very, very disenchanted. The sad part is that it all just goes to re-
inforce that everyone has a price.

 

[Leopold]

uh oh here we go!

 

[Psion]

I fail to see the problem here. WotC's limping dogs gets fixed, and the gutted PCGen gets reinstated and updated. PCGen is still free. Truly, the situation is as good as could be expected and still be legal.

 

[Ysgarran]

All of PCGen is still open source. You don't like the direction it is going, grab a copy of the source and run with it.

Ysgarran.

 

[Barcode]

Very, very disenchanted. The sad part is that it all just goes to re-
inforce that everyone has a price.

Your other points notwithstanding, the saddest thing is not the fact that everyone has a price, but rather how low that price usually is...

 

[reezel]

You're probably right. How dare they sell out. I mean, honestly, who wants to be able to feed themselves when instead they could work for free for people who just complain about how you did everything in the first place. Those PCGen people are horribly ungrateful

 

[Darkness]

Moved to Software.

 

[Wanderer]

I fail to see the problem here. WotC's limping dogs gets fixed, and the gutted PCGen gets reinstated and updated. PCGen is still free. Truly, the situation is as good as could be expected and still be legal.

Looks like a big step backwards for PCGen to me.

First Wizards made PCGen jump programming hurdles to satisfy D20, as well as OGL licensing issues (which made the program less friendly).
Then it turns out that they're going to charge for the content anyway. In fact, it looks like the costs may make it better to switch to ETools (which gets it for free!).
This is not what PCGen is about. PCGen is (was) about having just enough game mechanics content to use your computer with your books - without having to pay for everything twice.

Now, it looks like a step forward, in that at least there is a legal way to get the content into PCGen (given that its always legal to do it for your own personal use anyway).

Problem is PCGen will definitely suffer badly, since the key people now have a legal duty to bolster the all-but-dead ETools, and ironically win "marketshare" from PCGen.

I don't mean to inflame with the word "sellout", but its unavoidable to notice that the key PCGen people now have a business that will ultimately detract very badly from PCGen.

On a personal level to the top PCGen hierarchy, good luck guys! I guess they've worked very hard for such an opportunity. Its a shame to see that such an RPG opportunity couldn't come from an area that wasn't so detrimental to PCGen.

To me personally, its a great shame to see the beginning of the end, of what was a wonderful open source community project.

 

[Ashrem Bayle]

and some other commercial product to be released at GenCon.

Not to change the subject, but what is this new product? Where has it been officially mentioned?

 

[Brown Jenkin]

I fail to see the problem here. WotC's limping dogs gets fixed, and the gutted PCGen gets reinstated and updated. PCGen is still free. Truly, the situation is as good as could be expected and still be legal.

PCGen is still free only if you you continue to use only the material that is in it now. There is no difference whatsoever between what you will get for free before the deal and after. No Anthony's mojo is by far the stronger since he has in one deal resurected e-tools and priced PCGen out of buisness when they compeat on a level playing field of information. I thought the code monkeys were working on a deal that would give the non-SRD data back for free in exchange for other work, instead it will be priced such that if you use WotC material it will be cheaper to buy e-tools than use PCGen. This is not a Win-Win as is claimed but a Win for e-tools and a major loss to PCGen.