Ryan Dancey -- Hasbro Cannot Deauthorize OGL

I reached out to the architect of the original Open Gaming License, former VP of Wizard of the Coast, Ryan Dancey, and asked his opinion about the current plan by WotC to 'deauthorize' the current OGL in favour of a new one.

He responded as follows:

Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does not have the power to deauthorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked.

Ryan also maintains the Open Gaming Foundation.

As has been noted previously, even WotC in its own OGL FAQ did not believe at the time that the licence could be revoked.

7. Can't Wizards of the Coast change the License in a way that I wouldn't like?

Yes, it could. However, the License already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.

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[Maxperson]

You float over there by that mountain, and I'll float over here by this one. Then, we'll both be enveloped by colored balls of energy in which we will clench our fists and yell. Then we'll fly at each other exchanging kicks and punches in an extremely rapid fashion until one of us gets thrown into the horizon or a nearby mountain. Going by previous examples this should take anywhere from 4-8 episodes of time.

Hah! Goku doesn't lose.

 

[Henry]

Speaking of “potation”, which I never noticed before in the license: does it honestly refer to D&D themed drinks as “derivative material”? Because that’s the only definition I’m getting.

 

[overgeeked]

Sure. People CAN be(and often are) exploited, but that's not a property of profit, but of greed.

Profit is just unpaid wages.

 

[Tazawa]

Thank you so much for this!

This leads me to ask if any of the drafts of the OGL and d20 license were ever as bad as this OGL 1.1 document.

Were there threats? WotC ownership of everything in a third party product? etc?

Also I hope someone reading that has a copy of those lists can send you a copy.

The earliest version of the license I can find via the Wayback machine is version .02.

Open Game License v0.1 Simplified

It was simpler than 1.0 which was the next version posted.

The off-l list is archived at The Mail Archive.

ogf-l

www.mail-archive.com

 

[Scribe]

Sure. People CAN be(and often are) exploited, but that's not a property of profit, but of greed.

In the scales corporations operate on, exploitation is absolutely a feature of capitalism.

Once public shares enter the picture, all bets are off.

We are witnesses to this economic illness, right now.

 

[Tazawa]

Speaking of “potation”, which I never noticed before in the license: does it honestly refer to D&D themed drinks as “derivative material”? Because that’s the only definition I’m getting.

In this case, potation is to transfer something into a different format. For example, transfer a text document to HTML for a website.

This could, in fact, be a fairly important term to include in the OGL. It enables the creation of SRD-based content on VTTs.

 

[Tazawa]

The earliest version of the license I can find via the Wayback machine is version .02.

Open Game License v0.1 Simplified

It was simpler than 1.0 which was the next version posted.

The off-l list is archived at The Mail Archive.

ogf-l

www.mail-archive.com

Unfortunately the archive only goes back to 2004. There may be more complete archives somewhere.

 

[Maxperson]

Profit is just unpaid wages.

That's not true at all. No profit = no job. No job = no wages at all. People aren't going to go through all that effort not to earn anything.

 

[Maxperson]

In the scales corporations operate on, exploitation is absolutely a feature of capitalism.

Once public shares enter the picture, all bets are off.

We are witnesses to this economic illness, right now.

The vast majority of corporations have no public shares. That you can point to exploitive megacorporations does not equate to capitalism equaling exploitation or make it a feature of corporations.

 

[Scribe]

The vast majority of corporations have no public shares. That you can point to exploitive megacorporations does not equate to capitalism equaling exploitation or make it a feature of corporations.

I'm comfortable in my position regarding capitalism.