That's all it is, really.
"Oh, we'll allow people to make 5e content unimpeded forever! Have fun, my children!"
Followed immediately by:
"Look, everybody! It's One D&D/6e! We're not doing physical releases because those are polluting and bad for the environment! So subscribe to DND Beyond to have full access to all the new books from the comfort of your own phone! It's the new hotness, with perfect balance and fantastic, all-inclusive character options! You'd be a fool not to play it, and it's fully compatible with 5e! Oh, what's that? You want to publish content using the 6e label? By all means, just sign here. Oh, pay no mind to the lines in the contract saying we reserve the right to accuse you of insulting a tranny in 1989 and then take all your intellectual property for ourselves! It's all just legal mumbo-jumbo, we would never do that!"
And once they have their new edition out they'll do their hardest to completely smother other VTT platforms. Revoke/refuse to renew Roll20/Foundy/FantasyGrounds' D&D licensing deals, crack down harder on sharing websites, pressure chat and social media services like Discord to start deleting servers due to piracy, etc, etc. Hasbro wants a ton of money very quickly, and the only way they can make D&D generate that much money is to push everybody as aggressively as possible towards their subscription system.
From what I understand:
A sizeable portion of investors were asking "What the ever loving fuck did you do?" as this hit the mainstream news and news of massive cancelations of D&D beyond. This caused Hasbro higher ups to find people inside wizards who were against the changes to say "how do we unfuck this?" and the answer was to basically give up no more than they already had given up. As good of a decision as this is was, remember that it hasn't cost Wizards anything (5.1SRD) that is hadn't already cost them. They have technically lost some rights to the SRD5.1 via CC-BY but but that is already a write off since D&Done is where all their energies are going.
The thing is I think 6E might run into 4e problems where the community might not want to switch and Wizards will have limited leverage to make them. That's why at launch 6E will be 5E compatible on launch, but will include a roadmap for microchanges.
That's why they were trying to legally scare everyone into signing the NGL;
Not only does it stop you from releasing new 5e content under perpetual license so people can't just stay in their comfy 5e ruts, but when Wizards changes "Race" to "Preferred Gender Identity" they can say to all publishers "Update all your modules to use only Xe/Xer pronouns or its deauthorized and you 30 days pull it from the market"
The endlessly iterative nature, the "RPG as a service" of 6e is a utterly fucktarded nightmare of an idea. And the only thing stopping Wizards from realizing it is the fact publishers can look at the 6e NGL, decide this is utter dogshit, and keep pumping out 5e content. They are trying to make sure the switch to 6e doesn't create another "Pathfinder" scenario - how things were supposed to go, 5e would be a dead brand by the time Wizards started twisting the scews and making big changes.
tl;dr:
Remember that the goal of the NGL is to kill 5e and force everyone to 6e, while also killing any competing VTT or tools sites. That's very clearly still the plan, they just need to find another way to make it happen, so expect shennanigans once the coverage dies down.
CC-BY was a worryingly good decision - its as open as you can via Creative Commons get without hamstringing the ability for anyone to make money on their products.
I'm not sure what can be released of the d20 SRD onto a CC license without having to cancel OGL 1.0a, and that's been shown to be a hard no with the community, but I suppose they could do 4th because few people would care about that license but nixing that right now is poking the bear when it's finally calming down a bit.
the OGL1a and CC-BY are not mutually exclusive (as 5.1SRD release shows). They are allowing both, you just publish under your preferred license.
Honestly I'd like to see 3e and earlier just CC0'd. (and I guess 4e but the 4e SRD is dogshit)
OGL to a private entity isn't really a necessary issue.
Being they already tried to cancel it, I don't think that any future WotC management will be any smarter or more trustworthy.
While the attempt had no legal standing it, you'd still potentially need to fight WotC/Hasbro's legal team, and they have nothing but billable hours. They should CC-BY everything.
White box/Basic/1st/2nd/BECMI is a convoluted can of worms that I'm not sure is worth untangling.
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I'm happy for them to make money, I just don't like being lied to by dickheads like Cao. This isn't like Magic where it's a huge base 10 years beyond sunk cost fallacy who will consoom everything no matter what, but there should be some respect given to a core base who have been very loyal through some very low points with terrible business practices.
anything before 2e is simple enough, and devoid of copyrightable content (since they made everything generalized when they ripped off Tolkien) that its pretty much just game rules and thus easy to rewrite and then fall squarely into SCOTUS protected territory.
When you get into the C of BECMI is when the IP starts to be very difficult to unspool.
I will keep going back to the Golden Goose analogy over and over.
They had a great and mutually beneficial relationship with creators. They gave up practically nothing they didn't already have to give up, and in return got a a huge community of creators to support their product. Everyone including WotC was benefiting.
and they burned it, not because they were losing money but because they thought they could screw everyone over and make more.