Can someone (Ryan?) please address this issue and give us a clear
answer, to wit:Can 'product identity' be made 'open' under the OGL?
(This is a repost from Usenet;since this was posted in a public forum I
see no great breach of ethics in brining it here)
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Lizard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>John Kim wrote:
>> You suggested that the advantage of the OGL was that there would be
>> a lot of free material available. In reality, there already is a
>> huge amount of free material available. In practice anyone can and
>> does make their house rules and so forth available. I see no
>> convincing logic that WotC's OGL will increase this.
>>
>It will increase the interbreeding and mixing of such material.
>
>Suppose, for example, I were to take all the various "Net Spell Books"
>currently out there, slice the contents apart, and produce a
>computerized database of player-contributed spells
[...]
>Under the OGL, you grant explicit permission for me to do just that. I
>feel the cumulative effect of turning every fan work into simply one
>more data point in a library will be greater than simply having the
>works themselves. You disagree. Time will tell.
This is false. According to the current draft OGL, "names
and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, [...]" are
part of "Product Identity" (defined in point #1) which can never be
used in any other OGL work (according to point #7).
(cf. http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/ogl.html )
Now, according to you this is purely an oversight by the
nice people at WotC, and that in a future draft it will be at least
possible for OGL authors to explicitly make their spells "open".
Is this really any different than non-OGL authors, though, who can
explicitly make their material "open", as several authors have done?
In practice, I would guess that the casual OGL users (like netbook
contributors) will just copy the license rather than going through
and explicitly opening parts that are by default "closed".
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