Quote from: ggroy;374085With Goodman Games doing their own Dungeon Crawl Classic rpg, wonder how much longer they will stay in the 4E 3pp market.

Mongoose already left the 4E awhile ago.  Wonder how much longer Expeditious Retreat Press will still be around in the 4E 3pp market.

Are they the last major one?

Quote from: Joethelawyer;374127Are they the last major one?

No idea.  I haven't followed the pdf-only 4E 3pp companies that closely.

Redbrick put their 4E "Age of Legend" project on hiatus, and removed it from their web site.  It was suppose to be a conversion of the Earthdawn setting to the 4E D&D ruleset.

http://www.redbrick-limited.com/cms/index.php?categoryid=1

(Scroll down to March 19, 2010).

Quote from: Xanther;373649Really?  I mean really?  In what industry is this standard?  If by "change at any time" you mean cancel on x days notice, maybe.  

What's an agreement mean if one party can unilaterally change it at any time?  

Almost ANY free license works that way.

Take this one for example that we are typing on right now, vBulletin.  Right from their TOU: "We may modify these Terms from time to time and such modification will be effective upon posting on this Site. You agree to be bound to any changes to these Terms when you use this Site after any such modification is posted. It is important that you review these Terms regularly to ensure you are updated as to any changes made."

When you get a FREE license, usually it comes with a string attached that the licensor can change it at any time without notice.

Quote from: Benoist;373653OK. Stopping reading right there. It's all about the OGL, Mark. Some people supported the OGL, and the very idea of open gaming. Some people still do, and to them, the GSL was like a slap in the face. It was the very company that launched the idea of open gaming that suddenly went "Know what? Nevermind."

Uh, but we are not talking about the OGL, and that was not a reason given by Clark, which is what I was talking about.

QuoteThey tried to sell the GSL as a more "reasonable" OGL to them, but it really isn't an OGL at all. It's a licensing contract. Not open gaming. And that's why people are pissed, still.

That's fine.  Why do you think this is a response to what I wrote?

QuoteWell that, and no responsible company would surrender its business activity to another company with such a capricious (that's being nice) track record as WotC's, which seems to listen more to what Hasbro's shareholders want in terms of bottom-line than anything else.

That's it.

Yeah that part I think is a little nutty.  How many times have free licenses you use been changed without you even noticing? Probably hundreds.  The idea that a free license can be changed by the licensor is standard, and it has happened to you, and only on this issue do you make it a line in the sand sort of issue.

Quote from: Joethelawyer;373656The GSL sucks ass.  

I was glad to see Clark finally agreed with all the stuff I said back on ENWorld, after making a big deal of publicly disagreeing with me regarding the riskiness of the GSL.

Recently, even the Paizo CEO said the GSL and the clauses you point out above were too uncertain for her to risk her company's future on.  

To summarize...The GSL sucks ass.

Yes, it is one clause, same one YOU have probably agreed to hundreds of times without blinking an eye, and of course the chief competition to WOTC for that type of game said the competitor's contract is bad.  And in other news, Burger King says McDonalds burgers suck.

What would be amusing is if WotC goes back to the old OGL for 5E D&D, and nobody produces anything for it.  :duh:

Quote from: Mistwell;374137Almost ANY free license works that way.

Take this one for example that we are typing on right now, vBulletin.  Right from their TOU: "We may modify these Terms from time to time and such modification will be effective upon posting on this Site. You agree to be bound to any changes to these Terms when you use this Site after any such modification is posted. It is important that you review these Terms regularly to ensure you are updated as to any changes made."

When you get a FREE license, usually it comes with a string attached that the licensor can change it at any time without notice.

Then to reiterate the part of my last post, this is essentially an agreement not to sue, at least for now.  You really get nothing but that.  I still wonder what INDUSTRY this is common in.  I can see this is something consumers have to swallow, you get what you pay for afterall, but who in there right mind would build a business or invest capital in a business that relies on a license that could be changed at any time with or without notice?

Quote from: Mistwell;374137Almost ANY free license works that way.

Take this one for example that we are typing on right now, vBulletin.  Right from their TOU: "We may modify these Terms from time to time and such modification will be effective upon posting on this Site. You agree to be bound to any changes to these Terms when you use this Site after any such modification is posted. It is important that you review these Terms regularly to ensure you are updated as to any changes made."

When you get a FREE license, usually it comes with a string attached that the licensor can change it at any time without notice.

No, not true. First of all, there's a difference between a product and a service.  vbulletin isn't a free product by the way, it's commercially licensed...  A given forum using vbulletin may be free to use, and it's that forum (not the software) that has those terms of use.   A service, like a Web site you use, has terms of use that normally are subject to change without notice.  That's somewhat unavoidable.  (Note that the vbulletin.org terms of use have nothing to do with the terms of use of some random other forum that happens to be using vbulletin software.)

Products, on the other hand, are distributed under a certain license.  In most free product cases (GPL, Apache, etc.) the license that the product is distributed under is the license you use.  If the producer chooses to distribute the same product (or a later version) under a different license, you can still use the version you had under the license you had.  This is the benchmark for an open license, and why they crafted the OGL to work that same way.  The OGL isn't revocable.  

Normally, "free products" meaning software and whatnot use an open license where no one can take what you have away from you.  They may decide to move later versions to another license, where you have to make a decision whether to upgrade and be subject to the new license or not, but that's it.  

Commercial service terms of use are usually also "we can change this at will with little/no notice," it's not something specific to free services.  However smart companies at least allow some notice - Amazon Web Services, for example, has 60-day change clauses in its standard contract, for the exact same reason of "would you really use it if it could change the next day?"  

Most commercial software suppliers don't try to limit their licenses beyond the obvious "you bought this for X servers/users/CPUs/whatnot", when you buy the software you own it and if you stick to your current version, you can use it forever.  Some companies, driven mad by profit motive, try to license their software to you for a limited time, but that's usually a removable layer of greed (at our company we don't accept that, so we wave money at them, then sic the lawyers on them, and the clause goes away).

Anyway, short form is don't confuse terms of use with a license and free licenses are usually not alterable (with or without notice).

Quote from: Nicephorus;374044It's not just the GSL, it's the fact that it was preceded by the OGL.

Which does not make it "all about the OGL." I understood that he felt people were upset with the GSL because of their experiences with the OGL, but, as I said, that doesn't make it "all about the OGL." It maybe makes it a little about the OGL, but a whole lot about the GSL.

Regardless, if it really were about past experiences with the OGL, folks would have something to say about a license that restricts them in ways the OGL did not. However, they're stone cold silent about Paizo's license, which also restricts you from doing whatever you'd like with their IP, has termination clauses, etc..

In short, if there are two similar licenses in the same post OGL era and people are only upset about it, it's not the licenses themselves that are causing the upset.

Seanchai