Yeah. On the face of it, it’s a good move, but the full story is far worse.
They “updated” the OGL to be far more restrictive, impose unsustainable fees past a certain level of gross profit, and would grant WotC the full right to use, sell, and even license your work to others, irrevocably.
They tried to de-authorize the original OGL retroactively, fully against the spirit and practice of the license, using some legal chicanery. While the OGL 1.0a was perpetual, it didn’t use the word irrevocable. (WotC’s rights to your content, of course, were clearly put in irrevocable terms).
They only moved to CC-BY after public outcry. While the results were good, it was for PR, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
There’s a new edition coming anyway. Unless they surprise me and put it under CC-BY as well, I’m betting they’ll try again to use a really restrictive license.
Also, even though WotC walked back from de-authorizing the OGL 1.0a, the damage was done. Every publisher I’m aware of that had used it has since moved away from it entirely, with surprisingly little change to the product.
I mean, D&D 5th edition is licensed CC-BY, which is VERY open source.
The base ruleset (SRD) only. Everything else is OGL, which has proven to be as open as
WizardsHasbro wants to make it.Yeah. On the face of it, it’s a good move, but the full story is far worse.
They “updated” the OGL to be far more restrictive, impose unsustainable fees past a certain level of gross profit, and would grant WotC the full right to use, sell, and even license your work to others, irrevocably.
They tried to de-authorize the original OGL retroactively, fully against the spirit and practice of the license, using some legal chicanery. While the OGL 1.0a was perpetual, it didn’t use the word irrevocable. (WotC’s rights to your content, of course, were clearly put in irrevocable terms).
They only moved to CC-BY after public outcry. While the results were good, it was for PR, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
There’s a new edition coming anyway. Unless they surprise me and put it under CC-BY as well, I’m betting they’ll try again to use a really restrictive license.
Also, even though WotC walked back from de-authorizing the OGL 1.0a, the damage was done. Every publisher I’m aware of that had used it has since moved away from it entirely, with surprisingly little change to the product.
No argument here. I’m a PF2e player since beta and won’t touch HasWizards products with a 10 foot disintegrate.
I will, begrudgingly, when my friends run a game. Playing it is okay, running it is a nightmare, and I really don’t want to spend money on this game.
It’s a shame, because D&D has been a huge part of my life, but nowadays, when I want to play D&D, the best way to do it isn’t to use D&D.