It seems to me, having just read the Open Gaming License (particularly the rights of selling work that incorporates the work of Contributors), that if you release a game, supplement, or what-have-you under it the license specifically allows Hasbro/WoC to take your work and sell it under their own imprint. If it's a successful game, all the have to do is strip out the art, poems, and other specifically excluded items, slap their trademark logos on it, and given their advantage in money and marketing muscle, they eat your lunch. They have to give you an acknowledgement in the Appendix, but that's it.
In fact, unlike the GPL, by segregating chapters of products into Open Gaming and non-Open Gaming sections (which the license gives them the right to do), any work that they do on top of your work can be put in a "trademark poisoned" section, and they can avoid giving back the enhancements to you or anyone else in the community.
I can't say that I'd be eager to release anything under that license.
I think most of the people who are responding to this with observations about GNOME/KDE and X are missing the point. Not once in the article does the author talk about GUIs as such; he talks about user interfaces. Even a command line is a user interface, and some command line interfaces are better than others (or why would people have such strong preferences about, e.g. the shells that they use). Nor is it a Microsoft vs. Open Source/Linux thing either; many people who take User Interface design and research seriously think that MS products have huge UI design problems. Dialog boxes that say (in effect) "I've just made a huge unrecoverable internal error, click OK to complete your humiliation. OK?" are rampant in the MS Windows world, and are an abomination from the point of view of UI design. (So, for that matter are the "Click OK to indicate that you really meant to click OK" boxes.) I suggest instead of accusing him of not being clued in on how cool GNOME and KDE are, or saying "GUI? We don't need no steenkin' GUI!", people might try reading Alan Cooper's About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design to see where he's coming from.
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In fact, unlike the GPL, by segregating chapters of products into Open Gaming and non-Open Gaming sections (which the license gives them the right to do), any work that they do on top of your work can be put in a "trademark poisoned" section, and they can avoid giving back the enhancements to you or anyone else in the community.
I can't say that I'd be eager to release anything under that license.
I think most of the people who are responding to this with observations about GNOME/KDE and X are missing the point. Not once in the article does the author talk about GUIs as such; he talks about user interfaces. Even a command line is a user interface, and some command line interfaces are better than others (or why would people have such strong preferences about, e.g. the shells that they use).
Nor is it a Microsoft vs. Open Source/Linux thing either; many people who take User Interface design and research seriously think that MS products have huge UI design problems. Dialog boxes that say (in effect) "I've just made a huge unrecoverable internal error, click OK to complete your humiliation. OK?" are rampant in the MS Windows world, and are an abomination from the point of view of UI design. (So, for that matter are the "Click OK to indicate that you really meant to click OK" boxes.) I suggest instead of accusing him of not being clued in on how cool GNOME and KDE are, or saying "GUI? We don't need no steenkin' GUI!", people might try reading Alan Cooper's About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design to see where he's coming from.