I will strongly recommend people interested in open licenses look to the existing, more mature licenses, Creative Commons in particular.
The “unresolvable problems” that Paizo ran into with CC are actually very resolvable. If you don’t want a sticky, viral license, use CC-BY. If you do want a sticky license, but not for your whole game, split out a separate SRD and put that under CC-BY-SA.
Yes. We have a license to replace the OGL. It works. There is still no viable argument to use ORC over OGL other than to remain in complained with specific existing 3rd party licenses.
My understanding of their desire is to be able to hold onto rights related to their settings and characters (and by extension you hold onto your own settings and characters) while forcibly sharing (SA) mechanics and to do this in a single license.
This is a goal that CC (BY) (SA) can’t solve simply due to the one license requirement. The intent was (though the execution failed) that you’d say ORC everything but <these names> and the result would be people could borrow the ORC mechanics and any improvements could be backported if it was good.
That said, I haven’t been following ORC very hard as I have no real interest in it. My own work I’m perfectly happy with CC-BY-SA on everything.
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