<<At one point, Ryan Dancey stated outright that the prohibition on
chargen in a D20-licensed product was meant to be blanket. Not only
are versions of D20 chargen other than that described in the Guide
verboten, but he claimed that having a book with two systems, and no
conversion between them, and chargen for the non-D20 system, would be
in violation. >>
The problem is, as I've noted elsewhere, that the d20 STL and the OGL don't deal well at all with compilations and collected works. I might have a bound volume that contains two games, only one of which was published under the OGL or d20 STL at all.
Right now, WotC's last message to me suggests that they believe within a single collected volume it is entirely possible to apply their licenses ONLY to specific chapters, articles, etc. In fact, if you don't do that, it is a licensing violation to include a review of any non-core d20 product in any volume which had any other d20 licensed source materials. I suggested that this could be worked around by NOT applying the OGL and d20 STL to the collected work, and applying them only to individual non-review articles.
WotC's rep agreed.
<<This was at a point when he was no longer the official
WotC rep, but we have seen no evidence of significant changes in
their stance since he left,>>
See above -- they recently addressed an opinion on collected works which stands in contrast to earlier claims by people such as the one you made above.
<< and he *does* know the initial intent of
the licenses.>>
This only goes so far. Anything not explicitly stated in the license is not per se the only interpretation of the license unless a court has reason to believe that both contracting parties shared the same unwritten expectations.
<<
Both the WotC OGL and the>
D20STL (well, mostly the System Guide, rather than the STL itself)
are horribly written. Anything that gets them to clear up the murky
areas (material that may be PI, material that may be OGC, what
constitutes "character creation" and "advancement", what constitutes
a single product, maybe some other areas) would be great, IMHO, so
long as it doesn't put you in the poorhouse on the way there.
>
Cleaning up the OGL won't help. You can use whatever version you want. But fixing the D20 STL could help.
I've noted elsewhere that the only practical way to get people to use OGL 2.0 would be to create a new type of content called "shared content" or something similar, that is exactly like OGC but has additional licensing restrictions. If WotC released it's 3.5 materials under OGL 2.0 as "shared content", then the viral nature of the license would cause OGL 2.0 to spread (and you couldn't use OGL 1.0 since it wouldn't give rights to "shared content"). Even this is somewhat ugly in that people would now have to separate out "shared content" from "open content" which would be a severe nuisance. So, the end result, is that changes to the OGL would only be put into use on a purely voluntary basis to clarify misunderstandings and to avoid lawsuits via increased clarity. People can be forced to use an updated d20 STL but not an updated OGL.
Lee
