Actually Paizo said they planned on releasing some 4e stuff next year. I'm thinking the WoC weren't interested in letting them do both.

To my understanding, Paizo is releasing 4e materials under their Necromancer Games imprint, and releasing 3e materials under whatever their Pathfinder imprint is.

General consensus that I've seen elsewhere is that this is acceptable under the new terms of the OGL.

WotC appears to be making third-party publishers make a decision about whether they are publishing 3e or 4e, and forcing them to pay for both if they want to do both.

Cool. Pay a fat fee for a "license", and get totally cut off for all development on 1st, 2nd, 3E and 3.5.
The SRD that doesn't do anything at all...
"The Bugbear(see the MM, and have fun finding it, and make up your own damn stats) swung his morningstar."
Jeesh.
T$R all over again.

You don't have to pay anything for the GSL, I don't know what you're talking about. Would you complain if you wrote a program, and someone took your program, rewrote a few parts, and started selling it? I don't see why there's all this outrage. In the code analogy, Wizards has created a way for third party publishers to write extensions for their program.
Are you saying that you believe anyone should be able to play D&D without paying for books from WotC?

Its like saying that somebody had to buy the rights to code in Python, and afterwards all they could use their computer for was to code in Python.
Its lame.

I don't think they should be able to revoke formerly given rights when people have done work on 3rd edition in good faith. Beyond that, it's their perogative to license the new stuff how they see fit. Monopolistic practices don't make many friends though.

From the OP.
I'm supposed to be happy from going from 95+ percent access to the core game from system reference documents and things like that to nothing but oblique references, and even then an oblique reference might be illegal?
Yeah, thanks a big doughy pantload, WOTC.

You can release anything you want in any other system you want, as long as you don't simultaneously release material under the OGL and GSL. It's really not that restrictive.

And you haven't answered my question. Do you think you should be able to play D&D without paying WotC for the books?

What do you think I did with the OGL srd for going on 3 years?
And it isn't a be-all end all. I still wound up buying a TON of their merch outside of core. If it weren't for free core I wouldn't have even started with D&D. Which led me to play Magic:The Gathering, which made them at least 3 times what the books did. If OGL was such a screwup why was WOTC one of the most profitable(if not the most profitable) parts of Hasbro?

Anyone who produces intellectual property for the express purpose of making money from it has to examine whether they are actually doing so as effectively as they would like. Hasbro didn't acquire the property rights to D&D in order to fulfill someone's desire to play a game for free; they acquired it to command market share and make profits.

Clearly they have evaluated the OGL and SRD introduced with 3.0 that allowed them to command that market share and have decided, at least at this time, to not be so open with 4.0. If a publishing house wishes to use 4.0, they have to ascribe to the terms of the OGL. If they happen to also want to publish 3.x material, they have to pay for rights to both.

What is so eggregious about this? It's standard business practice, and presumably both parties are in it to make money. If a publishing house doesn't think it can make money whilst subscribing to two D&D licenses, they should focus their efforts on one or the other.

I don't understand how the OGL affects an enterprise like Myth-Weavers, which is probably more on topic for this thread. Obviously, this is a community resource and not a for-profit entity, and it would be nice if OGL conditions were relaxed for this sort of enterprise. Maybe they will be in the future, if they aren't already.