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.

​

 

[~ender]

Gzips for 2001 from this page https://web.archive.org/web/20011220224149/http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/pipermail/ogf-l

None of the monthlys (gzips) for 2001 were archived.

Full download, which starts:
ryand@fr-g.com Sun Apr 8 19:30:54 2001 (announcing change to Mailman from Majordomo)

ends:
sppeters@rci.r-tgers.edu Thu Nov 29 17:02:05 2001

The 11k file I got was the fact that archive.org doesn't like you archiving their archive (they've lost plenty of my stuff over the decades, so yeah).

Update:

The above was eventually extracted as an 8.1M txt file.

All but one of the gzips listed from 2002-2006 (incl 2 oopsies which list as 1986) downloaded. The only one unarchived is the last: October 2006. There are some months missing; either a failure to archive on the original page, or (presumably) no posting volume (0 posts) on the original email list (as those months are not listed in the index; eg: 10-2005, 11-2005).

Have not verified any contents on gzips.