>No offence to Faust,
No prob.
>but I certainly don't like the idea of someone else
>reverse engineering a Guild Companion module or product to extract the
>OGC. I'd personally rather do that myself.
I can agree with the sentiment. They are BOUND to screw it up and put your
proprietary stuff in by mistake - then people will believe it is open. BUT
there is nothing you can do to prevent this, once you open something.
If this concerns you, then you should DEFINITELY release a reference
document for any content you deem to be open.
>If large chunks of one of our products did
>turn out to be OGC, we probably would have concerns about it being too
>easily available.
Hey, I have a scanner with a doc feeder. Put out a module, it will likely
take me 20 minutes to have the "open" parts up on the web. (Add an hour for
driving time from the store, I guess.)
If this is the case then all I can say is that you should not ever use any
open material. But then, OC you won't be able to publish under D20 if you
don't.
>I'd be happy with an executive summary of what's OGC in
>a given product on an independent website with the exhaustive details
>being available "on request".
Unless you put the document out yourself it is *much* easier for someone who
wants to use your content to scan and OCR your product, then delete the
closed parts than it is to sit down and write a summary.
>From our perspective, we ALREADY have begun collecting monsters, feats,
skills, and rules and entering them into our archives for our own use.
These take the form (e.g. for a Monster):
<MONSTER>
OGC TITLE: {name of original publication}
OGC COPYRIGHT DATE: {date of original copyright}
OGC CR HOLDER NAME: {name of original producer/copyright holder here}
TYPE: Monster
NAME: {actual name if it is "open", or our "made up" name if not}
-----
{insert standard D20 stats block here}
-----
{insert any open text/descriptions here}
-----
{insert our own notes here}
-----
</MONSTER>
Since we will be using this ourselves in our products, we intend to also
post it online to help out any open game developers out there who also might
want to use it.
Our presentation of these items will conform in every way to the Open game
License.
This is what "open" is all about, guys.
Faust
PS: One ramification of this is that if people take the content off of our
site and refer to the monster by OUR name, then WE will be listed as partial
contributor of that content. This is ONE good argument for why contributors
should probably just open the names of their monsters and spells, and don't
try to keep them as proprietary.
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