Chief Technical Officer
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In light of the Pathfinder 4E thread, one thing that is interesting is the counterfactual situations.
From my remote vantage point in the whole period building up to 4E there was a window of time in which Paizo was still seriously aiming to write for 4E, but because the GSL hadn't been released, and because of publishing schedules, it simply wasn't tenable to wait any longer.
Because of that my impression is that if WotC had quickly announced that 4E was using the OGL license then we wouldn't have a Pathfinder RPG at this point.
There were a lot of things going on at that time. In addition to us needing to figure out what system we were going to be using for a 6-month long AP that we were about to start work on, we were trying to learn whatever they would reveal about both the license *and* the system. Both of those things ended up taking longer than we could wait for, but at the time we had to make our decision, we already had very strong indicators that neither the license nor the system were going to be exactly what we were looking for. In short, even if they had told us before our deadline that they were going to use the OGL as-is, the clues we had about the 4E system were *also* leading us towards the path that became the Pathfinder RPG.
