NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wanderer" data-source="post: 722788" data-attributes="member: 9228">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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />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.</blockquote>

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