A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

["Ryan S. Dancey" <ryand AT organizedplay.com>]

On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 23:15 +0100, Rob Myers wrote:

> Regarding clause 5a [...] Does it that have a specific legal 
> effect or is it just to remind people?

One of the objectives of the OGL was to make it somewhat "idiot proof",
that is, we started with the assumption that people would try to take as
great a liberty with the material they found in the world around them as
possible, and assume that "asking forgiveness was easier than asking
permission".  5a pretty much exists to help enforce the idea that
someone (not you) owns the stuff you like, and you can't make it "open"
just because you want to do so.

It also provides specific legal hooks in the event of an enforcement
action.  Proving that a person did not have authority to contribute
could break the OGL's protections, and allow normal copyright law to
come back into play, avoiding the issue of pursuing an infringer simply
on contractual grounds.

> One thing that has struck me about OGL stuff is how little seems to get 
> re-used.

I think you'd be surprised at the level of re-use, but it is subtle.
Unlike the OSS world, where large projects are often built from many
small sub-parts, and the work to construct those sub-parts is time
consuming, error-prone, and often uninteresting, for games, the work of
creating content is usually the "fun part".  There's a creative dis-
incentive to re-using someone else's wheel, when creating "wheels" is so
much fun.  We're in an entertainment business - "fun" drives a whole lot
of decisions.

However, under the hood, there's an increasing body of material that is
getting re-used.  Over time, I expect that trend will continue.  After
30+ years of the RPG era, we've only had 3 years to learn how to operate
in an environment where copying someone else's work is not only ok, but
expected and appreciated.

Consumers will drive this shift over time.  They'll reward designers who
use popular sub-systems (popular meaning many people know how to use
them in a game) by buying those works, and not buying works from
designers who continuously try to make people learn new rules for stuff
they have already spent the time learning in the past.

> Regarding the d20 license, I'm curious about the clause that means that 
> d20 license publications can't include character creation rules. Some 
> games that might otherwise be d20 have decided to be just OGL because 
> of this, and I'm wondering if it would have been better to have a 
> weaker requirement for d20 work and to rely on network effects from 
> people getting to know d20 from these projects.

In a perfect world, with unblemished spheres and frictionless surfaces,
I'd have dumped all the limitations from the d20 System Trademark
License and competed on quality and the value of the D&D brand name.
However, in the real world, I had to convince management that we could
erect a bulwark against someone taking the OGL'd text of D&D, leveraging
the brand (d20) I was proposing to spend gobs of money to create and
make identifiable to consumers, and then selling stuff right back at us
at a discounted price.

WotC has now elected to use the d20 Trademark License to begin enforcing
standards of behavior on publishers, which is a stance I disagree with
strongly (in large part because I am worried it will come back and bite
WotC in the ass at a later date - my distaste with censorship being a
personal, not a business-driven position).  As a result we're seeing
more and more publishers considering dropping support for the d20
trademark and going it "naked" with just OGL compliance.  In fact, these
actions have created a Catch-22 - now people are using "OGL" as a
trademark to mean "just like d20, but without the licensing limits", so
perhaps the whole process will be self-healing in the long run.

Ryan