There are a few folks that are pulling out very old cows out of a ditch. Yes, TSR was not very nice, but that particular chapter closed when WotC bought TSR in '97 and Hasbro bought WotC in '99. IF the TSR mentality was still in control at that time, this site would have never existed. Eric Noah was pretty much collecting D&D rumours/rules on here so thoroughly that we started playing D&D 3e before any 3e product was even released. The old TSR would have killed that completely!
The release of the OGL and 3e gave us a new 'golden age' in the RPG market, many, many companies and great products wouldn't exist without it. After the TSR shenanigans and mess, 3e and the OGL created immense goodwill amongst a very negative crowd. Maybe not everyone was drinking the Kool-Aid, but many where, particularly around here.
And the strength of the OGL wasn't that you couldn't otherwise make compatible D&D products. It made it possible to create D&D compatible products very easily and with a recognized D20 brand, not to mention with very little risk if you kept to the contract rules. There is always risk, as shown, someone can ALWAYS dispute a contract, people can do that with the CC as well (and there have been cases involving the CC all around the world). It took WotC 23 years before the actual took action against the OGL, that's long enough to make many folks grandparents...
That someone at WotC/Hasbro was able to push that through at all shows how little connection with reality WotC/Hasbro management has with reality. They are not alone in that. What I don't understand is that people trust corporations... You can trust a person... And even then their views and trustworthiness might change over time. But corporations and companies in general are a collection of people, whose composition changes constantly, whose owners change constantly.
Somewhere between 2004 (Unearthed Arcana release) and 2008 (4e release) WotC management changed their minds on the usefulness of the OGL and with the 4e release they started changing how they used it, with 5e it changed even further. And with a new 'edition' on the horizon, soaring revenue from the pandemic, the pandemic winding down, someone panicked and tried to rug-pull the OGL and change it into some huge money making scheme. WotC bad! Of course, imho many if not most companies related to D&D/OGL were almost as bad, making a circus out of the whole deal and eventually showing that they could be 'trusted' just about as much as WotC...
And while many folks praise that we got many great RPGs from that, I don't agree. I agree we have many great RPGs, but I look mostly outside of the oodles and oodles of D&D clones. Companies and systems that do not have their foundations in D&D/OGL, but where developed from the start independently as something else and not as a 1-to-1 replacement of D&D. I love what Paizo did with Pathfinder, but it's still a D&D clone, even if they've now filed of the serialnumbers... And a D&D clone is not bad in itself, it might act as a replacement because it does something better then core D&D for you, heck I even considered PF2e as a replacement for D&D when I saw the 5e 2024 development... But people and companies now seeing essentially D&D clones suddenly as completely seperate I find dishonest at worst and a selfdeception at best.
