In a message dated 08/19/2000 8:44:29 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> If you have ideas about ways to improve the license, now is the time to
> discuss them. I just don't agree that you'll get a "better" license by
> having a group of people set up a separate effort and replicate the work
> done to date.
>
> Ryan
I am so happy about all of the comments you had to make. Thank you for
taking the time to clear up some of my misperceptions.
The one thing I can offer you is the perspective of a gamer who intends to
use the OGL. I had to paraphrase the OGL sentence by sentence and reread
my paraphrasing in order to understand what it was really saying.
To provide you with a frame of reference: I'm a college graduate that can
understand (just by reading) the US Constitution, Shakespeare, and my
husband's dissertation titled "Techniques for the Determination of the
Tertiary Structure of Gas Phase Protein Ions by Fourier Transform Ion
Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry"... lol... but the OGL was too hard for
me to understand.
My advice is to do what you mentioned in another post: simplify the language.
As a final step, however, have your legal team, or whoever is doing the
actual writing, to sit down with a few intelligent, non-gaming, high school
students and see if they can answer some comprehension questions.
People fear what they don't understand. Unfortunately, I think most people
are not willing to admit ignorance and would rather turn their nose up at the
OGL than look stupid. I also understand that you can't hold everyone's hand
and that you have worked on this for a very long time, but perhaps this one
last step could make a big difference.
Regards,
Maggie
-------------
For more information, please link to www.opengamingfoundation.org
