01 February 2008

This is open, but don’t share it

John Kim’s taking heat for freely tweaking and hosting open content. John Kim’s RPG Blog: The Ethics of Open Content: “However, they [Green Ronin] have stated that they are opposed to free sharing of their open content” “The response from Chris Pramas was no—they did not want any of their open material ever being shared.” While I generally like Green Ronin and Chris Pramas, I’m completely baffled by such a cognitively dissonant (...ouch—that adverbial phrase was pretty dissonant itself...) statement. Here’s a free tip: If you don’t want content shared, don’t share it! Don’t publish it. Don’t call it open. But most definitely don’t slap a license agreement on it that gives people the right to share it. John, you’ve done nothing wrong, & you shouldn’t waste your time defending yourself against such lunacy. Edit: I should be clear that neither GR or Chris are the ones giving John heat over this. The opinion they gave was only given when asked. (Although, honestly, this blog is just thinking out loud, and is clearly labeled as such. If someone reads too much into anything I write here or forms an opinion on an issue I write about without looking into it themselves, that’s their problem.) I still think it’s a silly opinion though. (^_^) Which is the real point. The stuff about Jim’s situation was just context for how it had come to my attention.

2 comments:

Nikchick said...

I feel this misrepresents the issue. Neither Chris as an individual nor GR as a company has ever tried to interfere in any way with his project. When asked how we felt about an SRD, we said that we had no intention of producing one ourselves and that we were not keen on the idea of projects from others that merely packaged our open content and offered it for free to our potential customers.

We never questioned anyone's right to do it, have never interfered with any such projects (providing they are correctly using the OGL and not infringing on PI or trademarks), we have never raised a stink, never launched a protest. When ASKED what we thought, we answered and that was the end of the story (some two and a half years ago now) or so we thought until someone decided this was some sort of an issue and decided to dredge up the whole dead thing.

Robert said...

I edited the post to be clear that it wasn’t you bugging John about this.