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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rknop" data-source="post: 8904759" data-attributes="member: 20176">One thing to remember with this whole de-authorization of the OGL 1.0a business--The original leak and FAQ around it suggested that the Wizards leadership of today doesn't understand the OGL.  They seem to see it as a license that lets other people use their content, with no implications beyond that.  While, yes, back in ca. 1990, that's how it got started-- WotC introduced it so that other people could remix D&D 3.0e -- it was explicitly written to be broader than that, and has been used much more broadly than that.  It's a license that allows for sharing of material, and it is in no way (other than historically) tied specifically to D&D, or any other SRD.  It's been used by games completely detached from any D&D SRD (e.g. Fudge), and it's been used by games that evolved out of 3.0 but have gone beyond to be something different (e.g. Pathfinder), and then by people who remix that later content.That's what the OGL is, but what came out in the original leak and surrounding FAQ suggests that WotC was viewing it as "the license that lets people use D&D stuff".  If they're looking at it that way, then when they say "things already released under the OGL 1.0a will still be available under that", probably what they mean is that they think it's entirely up to them to be able to say "OK, you can keep distributing this" -- not even considering the fact that they don't own the copyright to Fudge, nor even the derivative works created based on the D&D SRDs.  They seem to implicitly think that the OGL is just a somewhat different version of the fan policy.Whether they really think this, or whether this is the position they're performing so that they can get what they want (which is either total annihilation, nobody allowed to distribute any more stuff that was ever released under the OGL 1.0a, or just current control, nobody is allowed to release any more stuff under the OGL 1.0a), they're coming at it not as if the OGL were a general license, but as if it were just the terms for using Wizards' content.In that light, saying stuff previously published under the OGL 1.0a stays that way almost certainly means that, yes, you don't have to pull all of your PDFs from DTRPG and pulp all your books, and maybe you can even reprint them, but from now nobody is allowed to (for example) publish any more Pathfinder 1e compatible stuff.  Legally, this is completely dubious -- as many have said, either the license is authorized or it's not.  And, as more have said, they probably don't have the legal authority to deauthorized the license (but may have the bully-pulpit authority to do so).  But, I strongly suspect this is what they mean, because they are viewing OGL through the lens of "the thing that's just for using our stuff, like the fan policy but for publishers."</blockquote>

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