> J. Michael Looney
>
> > Yes. Your copyright won't matter because your code will be
> OGC. As Ryan
> > pointed out to me, a work is whatever you represent as a bundle
> to the user.
> > If you distribute OGC with software then the bundle is all
> covered by the
> > OGL. The OGL has two categories of intellectual property - Product
> > Identity, and Open Gaming Content. Everything covered by the
> OGL must be in
> > one of those two categories. Since software isn't one of the
> things that
> > can be PI, it must be OGC.
>
> Ah, no. Depends on what the software does. My idea of software that
> _generates_ OGC, while is self being GPL (a whole other batch of fish) was
> well received by Ryan. The software is a tool for generating OGC, much
> like a word processor or, for that matter a pair of dice. Just because I
> used Word-Perfect for Linux to type up some OGC, this does not make WP4L
> OGC. JavaDM and PerlDM will have the options to generate the tables
> they use, making it available for normal human/DM use. My k-rad kwel
> al-go-rythems, on the other hand, are not OGC. Their output is.
There are some kinds of software (such as an editor/compiler analogue) that
could generate OGC without having any inside their code, but those aren't
the kinds of software I was talking about. My comment was about software
that DOES have OGC in it's code.
My first thought was that you could mark up your input data tables as OGC
and leave the software out of the picture. That's when I remembered Ryan's
comments about bundling and what constitutes a 'work' in the eyes of the
law. If bundling isn't a problem then all of this goes away, but I think it
is.
> I had asked earlier about the idea of software that generates OGL
> material. The software is NOT OGL, it creates OGL material. One of ideas
> I had was that a command line switch that would cause the software to
> "barf out" the tables used, in more or less human (for values of human
> that include DMs :-) ) readable form. I was going to release the software
> under the GPL any way, which tends to blur the open/close thing just a
> bit. Ryan's general comment was along the lines the idea that "the
> _software_ is not OGC, it's _output_ is OGC" is OK. I can dig up that
> thread if you want to see it...
I remember the thread, and I was quite happy with that situation, but that
was under a different version of the OGL than we have now. I don't think it
is possible to write software that isn't derivative of, say, the d20 SRD if
it is capable of spitting out all of the d20 SRD. It had to be in there in
the first place in order to come out. This same logic applies to anything
that is derivative of the d20 SRD, so characters, spells, classes, monsters,
etc. that use the d20 SRD conventions are also going to cause problems.
-Brad
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