Post originally by C. Demetrius Morgan at 2003-05-05 15:20:44
Converted from Phorums BB System

Greetings,

In point of fact there a lot of games, especially on the web, that publish under some variant of the/an OGL.

Here I'm referring to OGLs- Open Game Licences- in much the same way as Xerox has come to mean anything that is a copy of an original. (No pun intended.) Too, there are quite a few OGL compliant or related licenses that either adapt the basic premise or use it as a guide. The Open Gaming Foundation site alone lists 5 such variants!


For instance:

Dominion games has a "DRL" license. Very OGL.

EABA (Put out by the folks that do/did CORPS?) was also a OGL type system, I do believe. As are a number of "universal" or "generic" systems.

Too, "Fudge" allows for a similar sort of publication process whereby what you produce has to have a disclaimer appended to it. But you are "free" to do so. Not sure what, if anything, they call their license. It may be more of a limited grant to use a "TM License" sort of thing, sort of ala the "Simply Roleplaying!" Plainlabel Game System, or the earlier license under which the Action! System was "open" for use with.

Then there is the FDL, which is related to the GNU GPL. Similar but possibly not quite OGL. There's about half a dozen systems out there publishing on the Web under this, maybe more. Thus D20 is really but one branch of the OGL family tree.

All told just because things might not be advertised doesn't mean they aren't out there. (Wow, triple negative, or something.) They may not be easy to find in a Google search under "OGL" or "Open Game License" but if you've ever downloaded a game that is "freely available" on the web then odds are there might be a OGL type license buried in the file somehwere.


Kind Regards,

CM