RPGXPlorer - anyone tried it?

[kingpaul]

I'm not sure I understand the question Paul, could you elaborate plz?

I'll try. And this is how *I* understand how things work. I'm not a lawyer.

If you publish under special license, you completely bypass the OGL. You won't need to deal with declaration of OGC or PI, as you are dealing with the material as copyright. Doing it this way, you'd have to have the publisher's buy-in.

If you publish under the OGL, then the publisher has already granted you rights to the OGC material. If there is any PI in the material you want to use, you'd need to contact them. Just using OGC doesn't require you to contact the publisher.


Now, I know you want to contact WotC. Almost all of their books are closed (the notable exceptions I'm aware of Weapons Locker and Unearthed Arcana). So, any datasets based on their material would have to be under license. The rest of the d20-esque community (including those who publish solely under the OGL to bypass the restrictions on the d20STL), have OGC that you could use.



Did that make any sense....or was I just rambling?

 

[Anurien]

The situation as I understand it is this (basically what you said but in my own words):

1. The only publisher with which you have the scope to disassociate yourself from either the OGL or d20 licence is WoTC since they are the original copyright holder. Obviously this would require an agreement with WoTC first. I don't see why you'd do this though since the d20 brand is a powerful one.

2. All other publishers have to operate within either the OGL or the d20 license, therefore anything (other than their own IP/copyright) in datasets produced for this material would also operate under the same license.

3. Any IP contained in a dataset would require separate agreement with the property owner e.g. in order to call an OGC dataset for Iron Heroes by it's name i.e. Iron Heroes, you'd need an agreement with Monte Cook/Malhavoc. Otherwise you'd have to call it something silly like 'Ferrous Fearless' and hope people make the connection. Not that we'd ever dream of being so cheeky with MC, but it illustrates my point.

As for all the OGC content out there, sure we'd like to see RPGXplorer datasets of it. Once we have v1.0 out of the door, I'm sure our own dataset forum will begin to get populated.

And thanks for the tip on UA, I had NO IDEA that was OGC! Fantastic. I really should pay more attention.

 

[kingpaul]

And thanks for the tip on UA, I had NO IDEA that was OGC! Fantastic. I really should pay more attention.

No problem. Most of it is OGC. There are some IP items in it that you can't touch, but most is completely open.

 

[WingOver]

Kinda. What I was wondering if you would be making OGC datasets, similar to how PCGen does it or if you would be using a special license with the publisher, thereby bypassing the OGL entirely.

If an RPGXplorer's dataset file contained pure OGC, couldn't it be freely distributed as permitted by the OGL? In other words, a customer buys one and then is legally able to share it with his buddies? Wouldn't there have to be an additional license to restrict sharing of the datasets (assuming the RPGX guys wanted to profit from selling them)? Could they label parts of the file as 'product identity' to legally restrict wholesale sharing of the file?

Aside from the legal barriers, will RPGX have any mechanical measures to prevent data sharing (file encryption, etc.)?

I'm asking because I'm curious how they intend to sell data without it being ripped off after the first person in a group buys it.

 

[Vascant]

Aside from the legal barriers, will RPGX have any mechanical measures to prevent data sharing (file encryption, etc.)?

Most of that is not allowed because it would prevent the OGL material from being in a readable format and in such cases be a violation of the license. I ran into this one already when I wanted to be able to put data in a compiled library until my attorney crushed the idea.

 

[Anurien]

OGC content is by definition 'Open' therefore you could freely distribute any components labelled as 'Open' as long as you abide by the terms of the OGL itself. It is not possible to lock or otherwise render OGC data unredistributable without breaching the terms of the OGL.

As for 'closed' content, yes we have a mechanism to prevent unauthorised use. Yes, this involves encryption. Beyond that I can't say as it's a commerical secret.

 

[kingpaul]

Most of that is not allowed because it would prevent the OGL material from being in a readable format and in such cases be a violation of the license.

And this is why PCGen has their datafiles in a tab delimited text file, which is released under the OGL. Our code is released under the LGPL.

 

[Anurien]

LGPL?

 

[kingpaul]

LGPL?

Lesser Gnu Public License...I think. I'm not a coder, so don't know a whole lot on the java side.

edit: Just checked the documentation (imagine that ). Gnu Lesser General Public License.

 

[Mercule]

And this is why PCGen has their datafiles in a tab delimited text file,

Any chance of that converting to XML, an option for PCGen to handle XML, or some such?

Do you know whether RPGT will use XML, other plain text, or a db backend? (I know, not really your beastie.)