Wow, what a hot topic!
I think the points to observe here are:
1) Once OGC is initially released anyone can do whatver they want with it as
long as they abide by the OGL.
2) There is nothing that says OGC initially has to be free or that it
subsequently has to be free, or indeed travel any particular economic path.
3) OGC's spread is wholly determined by the paths the information travels,
whether that is from one paying customer to the next or from a free website
to the next or any combination of methods.
4) The burden of fufilling the terms of the OGL rests fully on the next User
of the OGC and the enforcement is up to any previous User.
5) Retricting the flow protects the ability to profit from the information,
because wide free availability reduces the opportunity to profit from the
information.
6) OGC is only what you have decided to release as OGC or are re-using under
the OGL terms.
In light of these points, it makes sense to use PI, layout, typography, art,
and anything else you can, to increase the profit potential of a product
which contains new OGC. All these things can increase the value of the OGC
and increase the barrier to entry for users who would try to profit from the
new OGC. The reverse could also be true with a primarily proprietary product
benefitting from the use of OGC, either old or new.
My position is NOT that OGC should be free to all or that it should be easily
accessed, though I may have left that impression earlier. I do believe that
easier access to OGC benefits everyone in the long run, and that belief is in
line with the overall philosophy of the Open Gaming Movement, which includes
providing for the health of the industry economically.
I also disagree that making OGC easily available to developers, hurts the
profitabiltiy potential of those developer's products. If you are a
developer who thinks that your primary source of income is other developers
of OGC buying a copy for reference, then you might be in for a rude shock,
unless you can find ways to add value (as mentioned above). Faust is
offering a way to add value (for free it seems) to your development efforts,
not to the end users who are your primary customers. What good does OGC
really do a developer if they cannot easily share it?
I don't begrudge a developer money for their hard work on a product or their
original contributions to OGC, but then again why should I pay for material I
cannot use (as a developer) like PI and non-OGC just to get the OGC? Free or
not isn't the issue, but wouldn't it be of greater benefit to all of us if we
shared that content and spent our efforts on the quality of the other
portions of our work? End users will do what they please. If they want your
product most will buy it OGC or not.
I guess it comes down to whether you believe that OGC should be freely shared
or easily shared among developers, and whether you think doing so helps or
hurts the industry. The idea, I thought, was to make money off of products
using the tool of sharing OGC, not just to make money off OGC itself by
restricting access to it.
-Alex Silva
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