[Forge-main] FRPGC Freedoms and Licensing Issues

[Ricardo Gladwell]

Hi All,

Happy New Year All! Hope you all had a good time over the holidays :)

I'd like to use this opportunity to start the ball rolling on several 
topics. I'd really like to see the FRPGC take-off this year. So without 
further ado:

FRINGE
------

I'd like see a final, first edition of FRINGE Basics published by the 
end of the year, along with a basic version of FRINGE Fantasy. With this 
in mind I will be publishing a release calendar and a 0.1 version in the 
very near future. Afterward I will be looking to initiate some play 
testing groups to test the FRINGE rules and help with the overall 
development.

Licenses
---------

I would like to resolve the issue of licensing ASAP. With this in mind 
it is my intention to switch to the GPL as our official content license. 
This is done for a number of reasons: foremost, the issue with Invariant 
Sections, but also because the FDL is GPL-incompatible and any rules we 
publish would have to be re-license under the GPL.

This will probably not affect anyone else outside the FRPGC and we will 
continue to link to and support projects published under the FDL. 
Unfortunately, FDL-published documents that use Invariant Sections 
cannot be considered 'free' by our standards.

I've begun to notice that many of the licenses the FSF considers to be 
free do not fit our own definition of 'free content'. mainly, many 'open 
content' licenses do not require that a 'modifiable' version of the 
content be distributed with the content/document. Primarily, content 
published under the Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses or the OPL can 
be considered 'free' by our standards.

I apologise in advance to those projects this policy now excludes.

Regards...

--
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
address@hidden