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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.)
The OGL predates the Creative Common licenses by a few years. Most companies were content enough with the OGL, even though people had been saying for years that the OGL was mostly unnecessary, since game rules aren't subject to copyright in the United States, and a number of things are "licensed" under the SRD and OGL that WotC probably doesn't actually have any IP rights to. Basically, it did its job for 23 years, allowing companies to be reasonably sure they wouldn't be sued by WotC for violating their IP, which was a major concern coming out of the highly litigious TSR era.
Paizo is now spearheading a true libre license, called the ORC license, and a lot of major publishers are getting behind it, so it is likely this will fill the niche of an open license for the RPG community. However, many games are just going with a Creative Commons license, and in WotC's new regime they're actually licensing about 50 pages of the old SRD under a CC BY 4.0 license, which is a mostly meaningless gesture given copyright law (even if it does allow the use of D&D-specific terminology with zero risk of being sued), but might open up the avenue for people with lawyers to carefully fill in the actual content of classes, spells, feats and monsters to make a full Creative Commons fork of D&D. (Even if not, Kobold Press is working on an ORC license fork of 5e, and the Basic Fantasy Role-playing people are making a new Creative Commons version of TSR-era D&D - so large swaths of wider D&D hobby will be covered by non-OGL, libre games. Though we're still missing a non-OGL, libre version of 4e and 3e.)
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