On 17 Sep 2000, at 1:07, Martin L. Shoemaker wrote:
> First of all: congratulations! Always good to know we have a new
> gamer! (Tip: although most dice are too small for small children, I
> have seen some d6's that are about three inches across. Darn hard to
> swallow. And my niece and nephew loved them, because they could then
> roll dice just like their parents. Start 'em early!)
You betcha. We're going to get him started as soon as he shows some
interest.
> Furthermore -- and I'll bet this is a real stickler -- the Plain
> English version would not be legally binding. Only the legalese is. So
> a Plain English version that somehow misleads will actually get people
> into trouble. "Well, it says here that..." "Sorry, but that's not the
> license. That's one person's interpretation of the license." So I
> imagine Ryan is reluctant to put out such a document: misleading
> someone in this fashion would trouble him greatly. He has done the
> next best thing: his Q&A tries to answer common questions about the
> license, while clearly being no sort of license by itself. Yet even
> there, people are zeroing in on places where his Q&A appears to
> conflict with the license; and they rightfully point out that the
> license is binding, while the Q&A is not.
Yeah, I understand that. I suppose I'm looking for something along
the lines of "Section 1 means this, Section 2 means you have to do
this:, that kind of thing.
The reason that I really want to be able to understand this is
because I am planning to self publish some product in the next year
or so and I'm trying to decide whether to go OGL or d20 System. I
feel that because I don't understand the intent of each of the
sections of the OGL, I can't make an educated decision.
> What I would like to see would be for some lawyer -- preferably an IP
> type, but not one connected with Wizards or the OGF -- to decide to do
> an analysis of the OGL and publish it. To the OGF web site, if nowhere
> else. This would be a layman's article on what OGL means, and would be
> a nicely independent Plain English interpretation. Yet it would be
> very unlikely to mislead anyone as a license itself, since it would be
> clearly NOT from the creators/owners of the OGL. Of course, attorneys
> like to get paid for such efforts, so I'm not holding my breath.
Thats is exactly what I'd love to see. I'm not looking to make the
Plain English version binding - I just want to have something that
tells me what the heck the document is saying and how it'd affect me.
--
Lisa Hartjes
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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