It's helpful to study the 'formulas' behind games in order to understand them better. I was reading this very insightful post about monsters over on Jeff's Gameblog, and also reading the intro to the D&D4 Essentials DM Guide on 'what D&D is.' In essence, D&D is a traditional fantasy agglomeration, with a couple D&D 'staples' added to it to create the D&D 'feel'. Let's consider what these staples are, and try to break things down a little.
It is probably easy to see most of D&D's 'staples' are mostly items not covered under the OGL (trademarked and product-identity), and a couple that are loosely, but strongly identified with D&D. The drow, beholders, carrion crawlers, color-wheel dragons, Lovecraft-borrowed mind-flayers, Grayhawk gods, Faerun, fireball/sleep/wish spells, vanician magic, and a bunch of other staples come to mind. Toss in D&D4, and you get world-specific creations such as the Shadowfell, Faewild, along with a bunch of other races, places, and things.
This is similar to Microsoft's software strategy of 'embrace and extend' although applied to a fantasy-fiction setting. D&D likes to be the everygame, "Yeah, we've got that too." The next thing that usually happens is, "Oh, and have you seen this new D&D specific baddie? It sure is cool!" The same happens with Paizo's Pathfinder, it has all the traditional fantasy staples, then teases with world-specific bad guys, modules, organizations, or other content not under the OGL. With Microsoft software, they will take an open standard, and then enhance it to the point where the Microsoft solution is the de-facto standard.
It is not a bad strategy, and it presents players with a lot of value-added content in terms of product support and player familiarity. Where it falls short is in longevity and openness. When the D&D4 books are resigned to the shelf of history, and D&D8 is out and the hot new thing, all that content is versioned away, unsupported, and locked into books that will most likely never be printed or used much again. The supported proprietary content that made the game 'cool' is no longer supported, old, and locked up behind a license that makes it unsupportable by third parties, even under fair-use in many cases.
The OGL helps, and is a good thing for the most part (but falls woefully short in terms of electronic fair-use, etc). At least items under the OGL can be resurrected and used in new forms, bet then again, the OGL is a printed text-only license, and this limitation restricts games and other interactive entertainment. It is a good solution, but only goes halfway. We simply don't know how RPGs will evolve, how they will be played, and how creators will share content in the future; and supporting a license that restricts distribution holds the evolution of RPGs back in a way. The current OGL games are fun, cool, well-done, and craetive - but they don't advance the evolution of how RPGs are played, so they are holding back innovation.
In SBRPG, we banned using copyrighted content for a reason - we wanted you to create your own IP, and license it any way you wanted. If you wanted everything to be free and open, so be it, hop on over to Creative Commons and grab a license for your stuff, and create away. The SBRPG game itself was closed-source, it's the best we could do at the time when we wrote it. The ideas you create with it are yours however, and you could share them in any way you wish.
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