I remember they said they'd release it with the same license as 5E when they had time. Then they fired a bunch of people and I never heard anything about it again. Did they change their mind or are they just silent on the matter hoping we all forget or what?

Also, if they did release 3.5 as CC what does that do to everything downstream? I would think they could would have the option to also go CC (if) they had no other content from other sources that had not gone CC, otherwise they'd have to stay with the OGL. Of course most other products have probably moved on and wouldn't bother to update a 3.5 product.

wotc and promises are like like snake oil salesmen and cure-alls.

Any congruency with the truth is purely accidental.

Quote from: Ruprecht on March 04, 2025, 07:43:14 PMI remember they said they'd release it with the same license as 5E when they had time. Then they fired a bunch of people and I never heard anything about it again. Did they change their mind or are they just silent on the matter hoping we all forget or what?

Also, if they did release 3.5 as CC what does that do to everything downstream? I would think they could would have the option to also go CC (if) they had no other content from other sources that had not gone CC, otherwise they'd have to stay with the OGL. Of course most other products have probably moved on and wouldn't bother to update a 3.5 product.

I want to say that they claimed they would release all prior editions eventually but obviously 5.5e would be the priority and they explicitly said that would come out a few weeks after the MM 2025 edition.   That still hasn't happened either and I'm guessing that would be on the top of their list as the active license that might actually benefit them indirectly.   To be honest, I expect them to draw out the other edition CC releases ad infinitum now that the hubbub of the OGL debacle has mostly blown over and the permanent damage is done.

Quote from: Ruprecht on March 04, 2025, 07:43:14 PMDid they change their mind or are they just silent on the matter hoping we all forget or what?

My money's on: 'or what?'...

Given all the recent turnover at the top of WotC, they have likely have completely forgotten about it themselves.

Hasbro and wotc are notorious for forgetting they actually own a whole library of games and have in the past let several slip through their butter fingers.

Pathfinder 1E actually does have all the core text freely available.  I don't think WOTC ever full reconciled that whole license revoke incident. They just let it die once they realized they had no idea what they were doing.

WotC said that they would be releasing the OGL once the three books were out.  The monster manual is out for like a week or two now?  So it's probably too early to assume that they forgot about this- we'd expect the text to be released, under creative commons, sometime in the next 1-4 months.  After that they would be pretty delinquent with their own statements.

When Hasbro stepped away from trying to burn the industry down by claiming the OGL was able to be updated with a neutered form of itself, they never actually issued an updated OGL that could be upgraded to and that was not revocable by them, nor did they ever release everything under creative commons (only the 5ed SRD stuff).  This means that older SRD stuff, which were used as a reason to assume you could print a spell named magic missile without worries, is still covered by a license that Hasbro believes can be revoked at any time.

This is why there's been a flurry of OSR products renaming core stats and concepts to silly names, most of which aren't ever explicitly entered into public domain or creative commons.  The most open response, the ORC, replaces a lot of what everyone thought the OGL was supposed to be up to all this time.

Now obviously Hasbro's reckless claims were never proven in court; but their behavior still has a bunch of lasting negative consequences even if they release the SRD containing the core 5.5 rules into creative commons.

I MISREAD OP

I thought it was about the promise to release the 5.5 stuff into creative commons (that window has just opened).  Instead, he's referring to a non-existent promise to release the OLDER stuff into creative commons (such as the 3.5 SRD, the main one that needs to happen). 

But here's the release:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1717-2024-core-rulebooks-to-expand-the-srd

And here's the quote from WotC:

QuoteWhat about the SRDs for previous editions?

Because we still need to complete reviews on those materials before they're released into Creative Commons, we made the decision to wait until after the 2024 rules revisions were released to begin reviews of those documents.]

THEY NEVER EVEN PROMISED IT

They could simply say tomorrow "we reviewed the documents and determined releasing them would be problematic", no promises broken.

On the other hand, the point I made above- that they are just entering the window to release the 5.5 documents (the "2024 rules revisions" aren't released into creative commons yet)- also means that since their implied timeline was to not even START reviewing older stuff until the 5.5 game's SRD is under creative commons, they are definitely not in any manner of window of violation of even an implied promise.