____                                      _ _         
 / ___|___  _ __ ___  _ __ ___  _   _ _ __ (_) |_ _   _ 
| |   / _ \| '_ ` _ \| '_ ` _ \| | | | '_ \| | __| | | |
| |__| (_) | | | | | | | | | | | |_| | | | | | |_| |_| |
 \____\___/|_| |_| |_|_| |_| |_|\__,_|_| |_|_|\__|\__, |
                                                  |___/ 
    _                                  _   _                               
   / \   ___ ___ _   _ _ __ ___  _ __ | |_(_) ___  _ __  ___    ___  _ __  
  / _ \ / __/ __| | | | '_ ` _ \| '_ \| __| |/ _ \| '_ \/ __|  / _ \| '_ \ 
 / ___ \\__ \__ \ |_| | | | | | | |_) | |_| | (_) | | | \__ \ | (_) | | | |
/_/   \_\___/___/\__,_|_| |_| |_| .__/ \__|_|\___/|_| |_|___/  \___/|_| |_|
                                |_|                                        
 ____                             _____ _ _           
/ ___|  ___  _   _ _ __ ___ ___  |  ___(_) | ___  ___ 
\___ \ / _ \| | | | '__/ __/ _ \ | |_  | | |/ _ \/ __|
 ___) | (_) | |_| | | | (_|  __/ |  _| | | |  __/\__ \
|____/ \___/ \__,_|_|  \___\___| |_|   |_|_|\___||___/
                                                      

Explaining an open source RPG to the community has been a challenge. Sometimes the misunderstandings are obvious. At other times, not.

Systems already have no copyright, so RPGs are already open source.

The mistake here is quite plain - this person has got mixed up between the rules and the rest of the RPG. This kind of comment often comes with the follow-up:

The rules are what matters, so we don’t need the rest.

I don’t know what kind of madness has overcome people making this kind of comment, but I’m sure they don’t have a shelf full of system reference documents (SRDs) printed on A4 from .txt files. They have real RPG books, with images, but somehow failed to recognize their own values.

You have the text from the document, so the rest is trivial.

I have personally copied a system from the text, and remade the typesetting, footnotes, page references, et c. Rewriting White Wolf’s rules[i] took over a month. I doubt anyone working without vim, LaTeX, and tesseract could do it in the same time.

We already have open source RPGs!

This comment always comes with links to books which have no source files available, and a bunch of legal stipulations about how you may reference the book. The heart of the problem seems to be licences which say ‘open’ in the name (such as the ‘Open Game License’); people seem to think this must be the same ‘open’ as ‘open source’.

[i]