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Wizards of the Coast, who own Dungeons and Dragons, have been in the news lately because their OGL 1.1 was leaked. The OGL was an open source-like license, originally from 2000, which allowed people to create D&D-related works and which was supposed to not be revocable, as confirmed by its drafters. WOTC is trying to revoke it by using a clause referring to "authorized" versions of the license and claiming to have de-authorized the earlier license. The new replacement license requires giving 25% of your revenue to WOTC, makes you send a copy of your content to WOTC which they can then publish for free, and they can revoke it at any time making all your products instantly unsalable.
After backlash from fans, WOTC officially released a 1.2 license instead, which has similar problems, but worded a bit more subtly.
The culture war element comes from this clause:
I hope the problems with this are obvious to everyone here. I absolutely don't want a world where people with the wrong political beliefs can be barred from producing game materials. But every objection I've seen to this clause by fans has been a twenty Stalins objection: WOTC has produced discriminatory material in the past and can't be trusted to do this properly. There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal. Just, take it out because even people with unpopular opinions should be able to put them in games? No, nobody believes that.
(Links are trivial to google, but it's hard to find a site that has everything correct all at the same time, and is up to date as well, and also engages in trustworthy journalism in general. This EFF post at least covers part of the initial controversy, though you'll have to follow links to see what's in the license.)
This is exactly the kind of thing that happened with Codes of Conduct across the programming sphere. Demand a CoC, accuse the project owners of being incapable of properly policing it, point to a panel of hyper-progressives who you recommend to administer it instead, and use it to ban all dissent. Bonus points for making sure to put in that even the project owner is not immune from being removed under the CoC, thereby assuming total power.
Tons of well-meaning idiot programmers fell for it and a few were even ousted from their own projects. Let's see if an actual big company has the sanity antibodies to tell them no. If they don't, I won't feel sorry for them -- this is the audience they wanted, after all.
In this case it's clear it didn't start that way. WOTC created a new license and the objections to that license were genuinely because it was going to screw everyone over. Nobody demanded the hateful conduct clause before WOTC put it in.
But now that it's there, it's blood in the water regardless. So yeah, they might have just handed that crowd a gift apropos of nothing, but it sure sounds like they're leaping on it now it's there.
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