It seems very unlikely that Hasbro, which owns the copyright for the open gaming license, is going to be open to the kind of revisions the community would ultimately like to see, and (thank the makers) it's hard to enforce retroactive changes to the OGL. However, I don't see why the OGL couldn't become subordinate to another open license that was developed by the community to suit its own needs.
Creators will use this meta-license if, and only if, doing so offers a commercial or competitive advantage. The best candidate I can see is solving the problem of attribution. The existing OGL favors the company that designed it by requiring all other OGL works to cite its own core products, while avoiding any reciprocal obligation. It's probably paranoid to think that the relationship between trademark, PI, and OGC was designed as a divide-and-conquer strategy to make it harder for third parties to unite under the OGL banner, but that is the effect it has in practice. When I write a scientific paper, the community standards for publication require me to include specific citations in the text for all the pre-existing material I use. It's easy to see that this makes for better science, because these links allow users to follow information back to its source. The commercial advantages aren't as obvious; until I started looking into becoming a publisher, I always thought it was weird that scientific citations had to include the publisher's name and location. (Science is an interesting case, maybe the oldest formal but unlicensed protocol for openly sharing information, and evolved to worry about issues of priority and credit rather than copyright.) I propose that efforts to envision a new and improved open gaming license should focus not only on defining the goals but also on developing a way that a meta-license could be used to implement those goals. --- Tavis Allison www.behemoth3.com Information wants to be free. Money is not the most interesting form of information. _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
