After an earlier history of legal action against 3rd party publishers (TSR essentially bullying competitors to bankruptcy)[0], D&D's core rules were released under a license called the "Open Gaming License", which includes a license update provision reading "Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License."
The promise of that license built an ecosystem of people making and publishing their own content compatible with the official D&D rules.
WotC recently declared that they were switching to an updated version of the license, and that they were deauthorizing the previous version.
The new license included rules such as revenue sharing, limitations on how the rules can be implemented in software tools, and giving WotC the ability to revoke your license to the content. People are largely not happy about this change, especially with WotC's plan to retroactively cancel the current license and replace it with this worse one.
This has led to Paizo announcing their own open license with many other publishers on board [1], and a lot of D&D's vocal fanbase talking about moving their games to other systems with more favorable licensing.
Pathfinder 2, Paizo's competing system, apparently sold out what should have been an 8-month supply of their printed books in the last two weeks [2], and that's a system that puts all the official rules content online for free.
This announcement today of the SRD being released under CC-BY-4.0 is means WotC is canceling their plans to only license their system under the proposed OGL revision, since the CC-BY license more definitely can't be revoked once you've licensed content under it.
I should add, they're currently working on a new rules edition (playtest titled "One D&D", as 5E was "D&D Next"). Remains to be seen if this will be called "5.5E" or "6E" or what, and we don't know what they'll do with its licensing. Maybe it will be under a newer more restrictive license, maybe it won't be.
That's fine by me, they can do what they want with One D&D licensing and people can make their own decisions on how they react to it going forward.
But trying to pull the rug out from the existing OGL for current and previous editions was a real dick move.
The promise of that license built an ecosystem of people making and publishing their own content compatible with the official D&D rules.
WotC recently declared that they were switching to an updated version of the license, and that they were deauthorizing the previous version.
The new license included rules such as revenue sharing, limitations on how the rules can be implemented in software tools, and giving WotC the ability to revoke your license to the content. People are largely not happy about this change, especially with WotC's plan to retroactively cancel the current license and replace it with this worse one.
This has led to Paizo announcing their own open license with many other publishers on board [1], and a lot of D&D's vocal fanbase talking about moving their games to other systems with more favorable licensing.
Pathfinder 2, Paizo's competing system, apparently sold out what should have been an 8-month supply of their printed books in the last two weeks [2], and that's a system that puts all the official rules content online for free.
This announcement today of the SRD being released under CC-BY-4.0 is means WotC is canceling their plans to only license their system under the proposed OGL revision, since the CC-BY license more definitely can't be revoked once you've licensed content under it.
[0] https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2021/04/bols-prime-the-many-...
[1] https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v
[2] https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2023/01/pathfinder-sells-eig...