My expectation (not prediction) is that 4e will be extremely closed, with a window dressing license so WotC can say, "look, it is out there".
I'm hoping it's the second option, a more restrictive license but not a "only a few licenses who pay a significant fee" version. The silence from WoTC however worries me, so I'm starting to feel it's more likely the third option on the poll.
What I find more interesting is that it is not going to be an unpopular move at all - it seems to me that since about the release of 3.5 and the collapse of the d20 market, there has been a very strong "official materials only" movement which believes in a certain "game design magic" Wizards of the Coast, and only Wizards of the Coast, is supposed to have. A lot of these folks are remarkably hostile not only to 3rd party materials but the very idea of allowing them to exist. Just read the recent threads.
The "official stuff only" has existed for a long time. Most people usually care about the core product or brand. This exists in other media too. I'm surprised more comics readers care more about the character that the writer--I was so disappointed when Chris Claremont left X-Men in the early 90s and sales still went upward on the books. Heck, some people refuse to go outside one company's output--there are still "Marvel Zombies", for instance. Same thing with gaming--there were people who never tried a game not published by TSR, for example. People are even less loyal to gaming writers than to comic/fiction writers--you can get people who buy only Gary Gygax or Monte Cook works, for instance, but they are a drop in the bucket compared to the game world and setting.
I think realistically, most people purchased official D&D stuff and stuck with it. I had more discriminating tastes, for instance, seeing WoTC lose a lot of the TSR culture I felt was important to D&D, and ignored some of the later D&D 3e stuff for products from Monte Cook and Green Ronin.
I also think maybe some people are or were irritated with the more "dogmatic" viewpoints about the OGL. I think having a license is wonderful but I would get irritated with people who would blast Monte Cook or other publishers for having "crippled OGL", or react with umbrage when I would mention that it might not be seen as nice to take Unearthed Arcana, True20, and other rules and put them on-line for free. Ultimately, most of us want to play the game and purchase quality products, so maybe some of that dismissiveness is a reaction to the more zealous viewpoints towards the OGL.
Ultimately, I think most people just want to play the game. Open Gaming for Open Gaming's sake is a minority viewpoint. We don't need an OGL to create our worlds and modules in private, and the OGL itself isn't required for the D&D system to be licensed. (I do hope there is a GSL with enough leeway). As long as Wizards doesn't get lawsuit happy and attack people putting personal campaign information on-line I don't see much of a backlash to the licensing issue.
I think more people are going to be put off by the radical game changes than any license change when it comes to 4e support. I would actually feel proud if a significant block of players stuck with 3.x+ rules, it would show that people aren't slaves to the brand, but based on past experience I wonder if that would be a reality. Nobody's on top forever, but there seems to be enough excitement and enthusiasm for D&D 4e.
