Once a Hobby is Captured, It Goes Corporate

Wall Street will never allow free hobbies to exist.

In fact, they will encourage hobbies to be taken over by extremists and ideologues, to later set the corporation up as the "savior" of the hobby.

As long as you pay.

This is the point where they sell out on all the useful idiots they encouraged to take over the hobby. They will kick them all to the curb for the almighty dollar. You see this same sort of tactic in revolutionary movements, where an underclass of energetic youthful dreamers is ideologically captured, and then they are the first to go when the elites backing the movement decide, "we have had enough dreaming" once they have taken control.

The record is skipping and playing the same old song, again and again. This is why they never want history to be taught. The same old trick needs to be kept fresh. 

People think this is left versus right.

They are idiots.

This is a battle between the free, and the paid for.

The DLC.

The season pass.

The different paid levels of support.

The digital collections.

The paid cosmetic items.

The pay to win models.

Versus open and free sets of rules that belong to the world, to every and any creator, to build games off of and share them freely with whoever they choose. This is the power of the creators who put their games in the Public Domain and give them to the world as a gift for everyone in any future generation to enjoy. Not just the Creative Commons, but in the Public Domain.

This is why the OGL was huge.

It was a moment that struck like the signing of the Deceleration of Independence. Telling the elites of that long-past world one word, and that word was "no."

The OGL was a Trojan Horse. When we first wrote SBRPG, we hated the OGL back in 2005 and saw it as ideological theft, a licensing of the free and open models we already had under the Gnu, GPL, LGPL, MIT, Apache, BSD and other widely-respected licenses. This stuff had already been worked out by the open-source community. We could already share "source code" and "software" back then, how was a game any different? Games are built off of rules, which is little different than a software's source code.

Product identity was a ruse to slip in a kill switch. Companies build proprietary software off open-source code all the time. This should have been no different.

This is why you should care about software licenses and the ideals of the open-source movement. So a whole hobby doesn't build its foundations upon sand.

Fatally flawed licenses are often very permissive and "great to use."

Go back the first sentence for the answer why.

And we are in this age where AI is infecting every creative work, and nobody knows who owns it or what license they are using to build something. Wake up.

But, to be honest, and let's be real...only a very few handful of countries on the planet even support the concept of the idea of public domain, or will defend open-source licenses. People died, and will still do so, to protect those freedoms. To give up their life for an idea and an ideal. For a dream of freedom. Most authoritarian regimes will step all over open-source enforcement, take it all for their elites, and tell you that you can't have things which the world decided benefited humanity.

Very few countries protect the future rights of freedom for those who have not been born.

Please, get on the right side of this fight. Otherwise, you are just being their tool.