On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Jay Adan wrote:
> >Thanks, and yes perhaps they are, but I rather agree with Paul's point that
> >I'd rather have the whole car to sell rather than only rely on the body of
> >the car because the engine can be obtained free on the web. If the consumer
> >is only buying the car's body, then the purchase has less value to them.
> >Therefore why would OG publishers want to actively help put engines on the
> >web for free?
>
> >Steve
>
>
> You tell me. Aren't you the one who has deemed that some parts of your book
> as open?
> You knew what that meant when you did that so why DID you do it if you
> didn't want
> people to be able to use it as the license allows them to do?
Steve hasn't said anything about preventing people from doing what the
license allows them to do. He's asking why he (or any other publisher)
should do the reverse engineering work that a database builder would need
to do to abstract the OGC parts from a complete product. Someone made the
suggestion that publishers should provide the OGC content from their
products to online projects such as the one proposed by Faust. Steve is
saying that there since database of this sort are likely to have harmful
impact on sales of the product, he doesn't think publishers should
actively help those who want to do so; he has not said that people can't
take the OGC content and do the work themselves. According to the OGL,
anyone is free to take and use OGC material as long as they also adhere to
the OGL; so anyone can make a web database if they want to do the work.
But from a publisher's viewpoint, there isn't a reason to help them and in
fact there is an incentive to keep an eye on them. The publisher will
want to make sure that when they do use the publisher's OGC content they
follow the OGL explicitly or the publisher can force such projects to
remove material not in compliance.
And that's a large point of Open projects - the person doing the projects
needs do the work to add some form of value to the project. In terms of a
web database of OGC, that value added is the work involved in accurately
pulling out OGC content from a variety of other sources (since they don't
add any OGC themselves - where are all the people who were protesting
against companies publishing material without new OGC?). Asking the
publishers to provide the simplified OGC content to be posted on a web
site is essentially saying you want to be involved in Open Gaming but
don't really want to do much work for your involvement.
So, sure OGC web databases are likely to exist. But the designers of such
should have to do the work necessary to make them useful and successful.
Which should include purchasing the material they are pulling the OGC
material from.
alec
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