Morrus said:
What I think sometimes gets publishers' goats is the occasional implication - meant or not - that, conversely, their decisions on the use of the OGL are "wrong", or worse, somehow unethical. I appreciate that that's not always meant, but there does often seem to be an element of that in such posts.
With respect, sometimes publisher's decisions
are wrong or unethical (just like everyone else's decisions, in any field). A decision to mark off certain content as Closed when it should be, by the OGL, open - for example.
I agree with your main point, though, that often this derision is wholly unjustified. And this applies especially to the publishers participating in this debate. But that doesn't mean morality shouldn't be a valid concern and relevant issue in choosing to purchase a product. Morality
is a consideration, and sometimes OGC designations
are immoral.
Warlord Ralts said:
Actually, Mr. Cook is fairly reasonable about letting people use his open content.
... [snip]
But you should ask first, it's only polite.
The whole point of the OGL is that your don't need to
ask, although of course contacting the person is polite. The whole point of the original poster, IMO, is that when you don't need to ask you become more creative and productive both individually and as a community (as in the open software community).
philreed said:
Now this means, to me, that if I'm reading the book and it sparks an idea I can create a product based on that idea. It doesn't mean to me that I should just scan in the text and post it online for free.
Should publishers be punished for using OGC declarations like the above?
Your expectations from the OGL are from a publisher's point of view, so you want it to be a resource for publishers and don't approve of free OGC repositories. WotC expects it to sell PHBs, so it expects it to lead to derivative d20 System or near-enough systems to consolidate around D&D, so it probably ain't too thrilled to have FUDGE or Action! or even M&M2 take away from its fans. The open-content-community (a la open source community) wants to use the OGL to set up a creative vibrant community, so wants everything to be free.
The OGL doesn't mean any of these things, it just makes them all possible. The decleration you quoted doesn't mean you should or shouldn't do anything, it just limits what you can(not) legally do.
I think what you're saying is that your desires out of the OGL aren't fully met by its terms. You want the OGL to work for the publishers, not for the free-content-community, and you want it to allow improvement over prior art and not just reiteration thereof. I can sympathyze, but frankly the OGL is just not set up to meet those goals.
And of course no one is punishing anyone.