A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Wednesday, September 15, 2004, at 01:46AM, Ryan S. Dancey 
<ryand AT organizedplay.com> wrote:

>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.

That makes sense. The scenario I used when discussing the C-2.0 licenses was 
"some kid sticks 'Star Wars' on their website under a Creative Commons 
License...". I thought that a 5a-style requriement (no stronger) would be 
good for managing this sort of thing. 

>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.

I suppose one of the interesting things with roleplaying games is that they 
do have this functional component (the rules) and they also have a data 
component (the statistics and descriptions for game objects). So the Free 
Software model maps onto this fairly clearly.

The parts of game products that is most Open Content-like are possibly the 
flavor text, written descriptions and more general text and illustrations. 
Now again this may just be my perception but there doesn't seem to be much of 
that content being marked as Open, it tends to all be marked Product 
Identity. Is this the case, is this how you expected PI to be used and if not 
do you think there's anything the license could do about this?

>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.

Yes, how did you convince them? ;-)

>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.

But possibly not so much for WotC if they sometimes avoid direct association 
with the OGL, for example by re-licensing monster descriptions so they don't 
have to have OGL content in monster books as they did the other year IIRC.

- Rob.