<<If anyone has any _genuine_ questions or need for clarification, just talk
to me. >>
Honestly, Matthew, this protest of yours is falling on deaf ears. I asked for a clear OGC designation for Ultimate Feats for the better part of a month with you frequently accusing me of trying to railroad you into opening up Mongoose content, when I was actually trying to find out:
1) if you had accidentally closed up any previously open content (which you later admitted to doing)
2) exactly how to interpret your OGC declaration so I didn't accidentally step on any of Mongoose's IP interests
I have found that while you are generally benevolent and try to be generous you seem very willing to dodge people's basic requests for unambiguous OGC declarations, and a whole bunch of us find your OGC declarations baffling.
Nobody is trying to railroad you. If you took the time to simply write up a one paragraph long OGC declaration for each of your products all these Mongoose threads would likely dry up. I think people who are asking for clarifications are really making pretty trivial requests to be honest.
<<
I would remind everyone that I came on to this list to resolve an error that
crept in with the section 15 of one book, and did so to the satisfaction of
all parties concerned. >>
If memory serves I thought people said the Section 15 errors were in multiple publications. Whether or not you resolved all outstanding issues with both Clark and the NBOF folks is your concern.
<< It seems that was not enough for a small number of
people here. Since I first posted on this list, I have seen my company
slated by other publishers (all you gamers have a perfect right to do so,
incidentally, but I get irritated when other publishers wade in), had some
wag begin posting related material to another forum (for the public good,
apparently)>>
Listen, you act like you are blameless here. After more than a month of your protestations that you were perfectly in the right you finally admitted that I was correct and you had accidentally appropriated people's OGC by copying their feats, etc. verbatim in Ultimate Feats and then not appropriately declaring those verbatim extracts as OGC.
Mostly people who chimed in really seem to want you to spend an extra hour every time you produce a product reviewing your section 15 and verifying your OGC declaration. Really, I think if you had done that in the past and/or would agree to do that in the future then most of these protests would probably be immediately silenced.
It's actually your unwillingness to reissue new, unambiguous OGC statements for the products that people find vague and confusing that is generating a lot of the secondary heat you are receiving.
I doubt anyone wants to sue you. However, people do want you to hold up your end of the bargain and "clearly identify" the OGC, and particularly the OGC that you appropriated via the OGL, in your products.
I therefore think the most recent round of questions was well warranted. If you think you are better off simply refraining from answering and simply reissuing OGC declarations, then cool. That's probably a good way to go, because that focuses on providing clear answers instead of round-robin finger pointing from all sides.
<<Now, I am currently floating a few ideas around the office to make a carte
blanche change to our OGC declaration that should suit both our needs and
those of anyone here who regards themselves as the OGC police. >>
Actually a generic OGC declaration is what caused a lot of the problems in the first place. It's probably not impossible to come up with a generic OGC declaration, but it probably makes a lot more sense to spend a few minutes for each publication making sure that said OGC declaration is indeed accurate and wholly unambiguous.
<<
There is more to say, but it really would start the storm - so take this>
posting for what it is worth.
>
I think the storm is only being perpetuated by posts like this. People have honest inquiries. I actually posted several times on the Mongoose stuff before the section 15 non-compliance was ever mentioned. I was honestly interested in purchasing one of your products and had flipped through the product about 2-3 times before I posted to the list. What I got in return was several weeks of being told that I didn't have a clue and that I was trying to railroad you before you finally admitted that you'd effectively closed up parts of the Ultimate Feats book that you didn't have rights over.
I wanted to buy one of your products if it contained a lot of OGC. I think that's an EXTREMELY innocent reason to inquire about your products and I felt I got weeks of runaround before getting my answer. I wanted to know which parts to declare closed, which parts that I could use with the written permission of Mongoose, and which parts were already open.
The point of this post -- if you want people to quit being acidic then listen harder instead of playing the part of a victim. You've made some mistakes and people made a big deal about it. People probably could have been a little more forgiving. But you could have also been a bit faster to listen to people who were asking, for purely legitimate reasons, for you to clarify your OGC designations -- particularly when those people are potential customers of yours.
Lee
