Thread by @hexcrawl

Don't use the BRP OGL. #IANAL

1. It's not an open license. Clause 10 allows Chaosium to close the license at any time.

By definition, that means it's not an open license.

2. Chaosium's spokespeople are making legally dubious claims everywhere they go (for example, claiming that the WotC OGL is "invalid"), suggesting they have no idea what they're doing.

3. Unlike the WotC OGL, they prevent anyone else from designating Prohibited Content, which means anyone using this license can't protect their own trademarks and IP.

Anyone using this license would be strongly encouraged, legally speaking, to make a declaration of "open" content that consists strictly and only of material found in the BRP SRD. Anything else would be incredibly risky.

4. The language in Clause 10 that grandfathers in existing products is so poorly written that it actually makes the license worse: If you publish material under the BRP OGL, you are required to ONLY publish it under the license in the future.

This is not how open licenses work usually work: Although you grant other people the right to use material with the license, you don't give up your legal rights to do so outside of the license!

5. Clause 10 gets even worse: It appears to infect even the material you DON'T place under the license.

Ignore for the moment that "thirty percent" and "content" are completely undefined (word count? pages with revised content? what if I just swap out all the pictures? what if I just change the title - is that a new work or a revised work?).

Focus on the fact that they're stating that any revised WORK (not Open Game Content) can only be published under the license.

Simple example: You publish a book using the BRP OGL and BRP Open Game Content. Then you pull all the BRP OGC and mechanics and replace them with different mechanics. You no longer need to use the license, right?

Wrong.

You've revised the WORK and are still required by the license to publish it using the BRP OGL.

Which they can modify at literally any time to prevent you from doing.

Example: You publish a game using the BRP SRD. Chaosium modifies the license to say, "Any works published under this license must be published by March 30th, 2020."

So now you can't publish any new supplements.

So you revise the game for a 2nd Edition using different mechanics.

Whoops! 2nd Edition = Revision. You have to publish that under the license and the license says you can't publish anything!