The one thing I hate more than anything else is seeing people get the blame for something that they didn’t do because the people in charge are ignorant about technology. No, wait. Paper cuts. I hate paper cuts more than anything else. But that whole “travesty of justice” thing – very close #2.

This (possibly true, possibly not, definitely plausible) story from The Daily WTF had me ticked off. “Cam” – apparently a pseudonym - had set up a Web cam so he could prove to his bosses that he was working from home instead of just saying he was working from home. But on that day….

During a quick lunch break, Cam got a panicked call from his boss's boss, Ron. "Cam, do you still have your webcam on?"

"Yeah, wh-"

"Turn it off. NOW," he said in all caps over the phone.

"Uh, ok." Cam flicked the switch on the webcam off. "So, why exactly is it so urgen-"

"Can'ttalknowbigproblems-" *click*…

See, it seems that there was a brief but major hiccup in a router somewhere between the bank's data center and their T3 provider, causing a dramatic slowdown in outbound network performance, which rippled out into hundreds of branches and affecting thousands of online banking customers. In the troubleshooting process, the lead network engineer caught wind that Cam had been "streaming live video" over the network, and was going to tell! He complained loudly to Ron that Cam had caused the issues and lost some revenues for the bank in the process. Adding to this theory was the fact that the issue had apparently resolved itself close to the time that Cam turned off his webcam.

One week later, Cam is sitting with his boss Joel to discuss the issue. "Cam, I'm going to need you to sign this disciplinary action report before we file it with HR," Joel said weakly.

Appealing to reason, Cam began, "Joel, you know exactly what happened. You know that all that was coming across the network was a static web page with a new image every so often. I never had more than five HTTP sessions at a time. It would take thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users accessing my web site at the same time to consume the bandwidth that it says I consumed on this report."

"I know," he said as his expression sank. Clearly, he'd fought for Cam and been overruled.

"Besides that," Cam continued, "I'm hosting my site at my house. My upstream connection is capped at 360 kbps. There's literally no physical way that anything I did from my house could even make a dent in our massive T3 lines, even if my upstream connection was 100% saturated!"

"I know," Joel said as his face slipped into his hands. At this point, it dawned on Cam that he was lucky that all that was happening to him was a writeup. It sounded as though upper management would prefer to see him hanged. Still, it was absolutely unfair that he'd be made to take the fall.

"Furthermore," Cam pressed, "what about our QoS policies? Surely internal users browsing external web sites have lower priority than-"

"I know," Joel said again. "Look, I've fought them on this. You know I trust you, and that I know you wouldn't ever — that you couldn't ever — do something like this. I'm saying this as a friend; you're better off just signing this. It's not just you; management is pissed at me now, too. It's not fair, but it's how it is."

In the end, there wasn't much Cam could have done.

Of course, the network engineer who latched onto the “streaming video” theory should have gotten the blame for misdiagnosing the problem using the same kind of “If she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made out of wood and therefore a witch!” logic that can destroy the best laid plans of IT.

Maybe, if the moment the router started having huge performance problems, there was some sort of alert delivered to the network engineer – one detailing the problem, how bad it was, and where it was originating from, that might have helped. Someone might want to look into making something like that. Or – or, bear with me - if there was a way to look at the traffic patterns and Netflow data to see exactly how much bandwidth the Webcam was taking, providing exculpatory evidence for Cam, that might be nice. Someone should get on that.

In the meantime, I’ve just set up my own Network Performance Daily webcam to give you an idea of what my job is like. Hope you enjoy it!

The Network Systems research group of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems recently published a cool little online tool called Glasnost. It tests for BitTorrent traffic manipulation.

I’m not providing a link to the tool mostly because the institute – recently popular from Slashdot – seems to have been hijacked by malware that is causing pop-up windows to appear. Some of the pop-ups are pornographic – so I wouldn’t go checking out the site at work. Still, the basic idea is pretty damn cool.

In addition to testing for BitTorrent blocking, you can also get a pretty accurate bandwidth and latency reading. I have no idea if this program can be modified to keep WAN service providers honest and get a real measure of latency on a WAN, but the source code has been released to the public and anyone can use it.

But most people will just use it to check to see if their ISP does any BitTorrent traffic manipulation.

There is a bit of irony to the project as well; Glasnost is named after the well known economic and political reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and de facto last ruler of the Soviet Union. He opened up Russia to criticism from within.

The Planck Institute’s Glasnost has been gathering data on which ISPs are blocking or throttling BitTorrent transmissions. A copy of a map on which that data was plotted is found below – the black dots are tested connections that have no throttling, the red dots are tested connections that have throttling. I think I’ll just let the map speak for itself. (Click on the map for a larger version)

The raw numbers on the site confirm what is on the map. 889 total ISPs were tested. 14 of those had some sort of BitTorrent blocking. 10 of those were located in the United States. That’s 10 out of 199 – or a little over 5%.

The only other countries that have any sort of BitTorrent blocking ISPs are Canada (1 out of 99), Ireland, (1 out of 7), Malaysia (1 out of 2), and Singapore (1 out of 6). All the countries that were part of the former Soviet Union, and tested, came out with no blocking whatsoever.

Glasnost seems to be an appropriate name.

By Ben Erwin

Even the WAN optimization vendors are starting to realize that WAN optimization’s utility is diminished without visibility into the network.

Riverbed’s recent announcement shows that they, (and other WAN optimization and acceleration vendors), are recognizing the dependency between better network management and successful WAN optimization projects. The partner vendors mentioned in the announcement all provide some level of network management capabilities, from network configuration to application delivery monitoring. These partnerships are part of a growing trend since network management capabilities are critical to understanding WAN optimization’s ROI and impact on network performance.

In addition to third-party partnerships, WAN optimization vendors have also developed their own technology to improve integration with network management vendors. Riverbed, Juniper, Cisco, and Blue Coat (Packeteer) have all developed traffic flow export capabilities within their WAN optimization appliances to help customers better understand WAN optimization’s impact on application flows. For example, a large insurance brokerage company exports traffic flow records from Riverbed appliances to NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to help visualize changes to volume, rate, and bandwidth utilization for every application on the optimized link. This flow export alongside ReporterAnalyzer provides the customer with continued visibility across the link for future troubleshooting, traffic analysis, or capacity planning efforts.

While traffic flow and per application bandwidth utilization information is critical to managing application delivery, it’s only part of the story. The other part is measuring latency of mission critical applications between remote sites and the data center – a more tangible metric of WAN optimization’s ROI and impact on the end-user experience. This measurement can be nearly impossible to obtain since WAN optimization appliances obfuscate application transactions between clients and servers, breaking up the TCP stream.

In order to get around the broken TCP stream problem, we at NetQoS entered into a partnership with Cisco to provide unique technology which measures end-to-end latency over Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) optimized WAN connections. By integrating our NetQoS SuperAgent technology, WAAS users can get client and server-side data collection and reporting capabilities.

To our knowledge, Cisco and NetQoS currently provide the market’s only solution for accurate latency measurements for client and server communication over optimized links.

WAN optimization is all about improving application delivery. Collecting volume, rate, and bandwidth utilization on optimized applications is only part of the solution. Truly understanding ROI on WAN optimization requires accurately measuring network latency and the end-user experience.

Ben Erwin is technical marketing manager at NetQoS and on Tuesday, May 27, 2008, he will be presenting a Webinar on Building Performance-first Application Delivery Networks with Cisco and NetQoS.

Editorial
by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Today (May 6, 2008) the House Telecommunications subcommittee is meeting to debate network neutrality legislation; the ramifications of which are likely to be far reaching and quite controversial no matter what the conclusions are.

Neither this blog’s editorial stance nor the position of NetQoS is to endorse or denounce any particular piece of network neutrality legislation. But that does not mean that there are not deeper issues that the debate over Net Neutrality is part of, nor does that mean that where aren’t some more fundamental truths that we cannot agree on.

Richard Stallman at MIT
--Credit: Sam Ogden

The only problem with this is that this isn’t a software development blog – we deal with networking. So I wrote an essay to him about what I felt were the moral issues behind the network neutrality debate – something I personally feel has a moral component.

I’m printing some of our conversation below. Now, this is not a debate in the classic sense – we agree on many things and disagree on others; and what I am trying to do is not so much to convince our readership of a position, but rather to convince our readership to think about this issue philosophically, and to join into our conversation – whether via the comments section here or elsewhere.

EDITOR BRIAN BOYKO: …Just as you believe that free software is a moral right, I happen to think that effective and efficient networks are a free speech issue. Throughout history, improvements in the quality of life – whether through technology or social activism – have been proportional to the abilities of people to communicate. Europe suffered 1000 years of the dark ages until Arabic scrolls allowed them to recapture the lost wisdom of the Greeks. Technological development booms with every innovation in communication; the telegraph, the telephone, the Internet.

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system; I believe that Metcalfe’s law can be applied to humanity as a whole – that the value of us as a species is proportional to the square of the number of us who are in communication with each other.

For these reasons I believe that open and effective communication is a fundamental human right. Now, as I believe communication is a human right, the only limit one should have on their ability to communicate should be when that communication harms someone else’s right to communicate.

RICHARD STALLMAN’S RESPONSE: It is hard for me to accept that, as stated, because it would imply that until the 1990s all governments were acting unjustly no matter what they did. That cannot be justice.

I think it that the term "human right" can only properly apply to matters of not hurting other people. Thus, it is abuse of language to speak of the "human right" to have food to eat. I think states have a duty to provide food to the hungry, and more generally, to operate a welfare system to help the poor and disadvantaged. Perhaps we have reached the point where wealthy states also have a duty to provide broadband to everyone. But that is a different kind of duty from that of respecting rights.

It is easy to imagine a situation in which there is insufficient supply of food for everyone to eat. But there cannot be an insufficient supply of freedom of speech to go around.

BRIAN BOYKO: But bandwidth is a limited resource. It is entirely possible for some types of traffic to overwhelm others, and this is not an exaggeration; at NetQoS we see this happening on corporate networks all the time.

Right now, Network Neutrality proponents believe in the idea of a “dumb” network. Yet, this does not reflect the realities of the situation; if UDP traffic (VoIP, Gaming, Streaming Live Media) is on the same pipe as TCP traffic without some sort of limitations on the traffic in place, the UDP traffic will eventually overwhelm the TCP traffic entirely, blocking it out.

The scenario that Net Neutrality opponents trot out of heavy users degrading the quality of communication for light users is entirely plausible. Overhyped, to be sure, but plausible.

On the other hand, this does not in any way make the anti-neutrality position in any way correct. Neutrality detractors often argue for solutions that are worse than the problem. Some want to block certain types of traffic – BitTorrent is seen as the perpetual scapegoat – others want to limit the amount of data that people can download, or charge them more for more data. But data is unlimited. Given enough time and enough reliability, I could download a GNU/Linux distribution over a 2800 baud modem. Data is not the issue; bandwidth – or the amount of data that anyone could download at any one time – is.

RICHARD STALLMAN: I think it is legitimate to give small transfers priority over big ones. I do not understand why UDP traffic would overwhelm TCP traffic, but I have no objection to giving TCP priority over UDP if that is useful -- because anybody could, feasibly, use either one to talk with you.

I also see nothing wrong with charging you as a client more for more bandwidth.

What I object to is that your ISP privileges some sites over others when you, as a client, access them -- either explicitly, or indirectly as a consequence of something else. If your ISP does that, it is not working honestly for you.

As mentioned above; this is not so much an endorsement of any position as a hope that we can start talking about these philosophical issues openly. (If you have any problem with the CAPTCHA, feel free to e-mail me directly at brian.boyko@netqos.com and I will be happy to publish your comments.)

Here's the keynote presentation of Carl Duhnoski, CIO of PSS World Medical, from Symposium 2008.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released their 2008 report comparing countries around the world in broadband access, speed, and price; the United States comes in at 15 out of 30. 

Every year since 2001, the United States has fallen further behind in broadband access.  We are now being beaten by Australia.

Last month, we released an editorial entitled: “U.S. falling behind in broadband; enough is enough.” We ended that column with the following words:

What I’d like to see are articles talking about how Americans are trying to solve the broadband problem – not articles dwelling further about how bad things have gotten. 

I don’t have any panaceas, but if you know of something – or have an idea, feel free to leave a comment below.

The report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation actually does propose a number of solutions to increase broadband adoption in the U.S.  Here are some takeaways from the report:

• The United States poor performance is roughly about 25 percent to blame on poor policy, about 75 percent on environmental issues like the distribution of homes in suburbia and exurbia, as well as the very long copper loop lengths that such an arrangement necessitate.


• The culture of Wall Street also plays a large part – Japan’s NTT faces less pressure to continually post quarterly profits; as such they can plan on a more long-term basis.  The United States focus on quarterly performance discourages investment in infrastructure that will not show a profit in 90 days.


• Support at the highest levels of government for broadband correlates positively to broadband adoption, speed, and low pricing.


• Competition between providers both inter and intra-modal usually correlates positively to  broadband adoption, speed, and low pricing – but not always.


• There is an upper ceiling on broadband penetration in the U.S.; as only two thirds of American households have computers, the maximum broadband penetration can be is 66%. 

And here are some of the recommendations:

To encourage the development of broadband infrastructure (supply) in the United States, we recommend that U.S. policymakers take the following steps:

1. Enact more favorable tax policies to encourage investment in broadband networks, such as accelerated depreciation and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation.

2. Continue to make more spectrum, including “white spaces,” available for next-generation wireless data networks.

3. Expand the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service Broadband Program and target the program to places that currently do not have non-satellite broadband available.

4. Reform the federal Universal Service Fund program to extend support for rural broadband to all carriers, and consider providing the funding through a reverse auction mechanism.

5. Fund a national program to co-fund state-level broadband support programs, such as Connect Kentucky or North Carolina e-NC Authority.

6. Promote the widespread use of a national, user-generated, Internet-based broadband mapping system that would track location, speed, and price of broadband.

7. State and local governments should take action to make it easier for providers to deploy broadband services, including making it easier to access rights-of-way.

To encourage the growth of consumer demand for broadband, we recommend that U.S. policymakers take these steps:

8. Support initiatives around the nation to encourage broadband usage and digital literacy.

9. Fund a revitalized Technology Opportunities Program, with a particular focus on the development of nationally scalable Web-based projects that address particular social needs, including law enforcement, health care, education, and access for persons with disabilities.

10. Exempt broadband Internet access from federal, state, and local taxes.

11. Support new applications, including putting more public content online, improving e-government, and supporting telework, telemedicine, and online learning programs.

What are your thoughts on these recommendations?

NetQoS and Network Instruments polled attendees at Interop yesterday; to try to find out the network’s greatest management challenges. Close to 80% of attendees are either using virtualization now or planning to use virtualization in 12 months, and a plurality of respondents – 38% - said the virtualization presented the greatest monitoring challenges.

What’s interesting about this is the idea that virtualization may simplify application development and hardware maintenance, but it complicates network management greatly. Keeping track of the traffic between Server A and Server B isn’t enough, now there’s Server A, Image 1, Server A, Image 2, Server B, Image 1, Server B, Image 2 and so on. So there’s the A-B traffic, the A1-B1 traffic, the A1-B2 traffic, and the internal traffic of A1-A2 and B1-B2. You get the idea.

Considering that virtualization is one of the key themes of this year’s Interop, the poll simply puts an underline for emphasis under virtualization’s widespread adoption.

This is not to say that virtualization is the only challenge facing IT groups in the present and near future. 24% of those polled said that unified communications was going to be challenging to monitor, and 14% said the same thing of MPLS.

Of course, just because this year presents new challenges doesn’t mean that challenges that were new last year have gone away; 67% of companies surveyed have rolled out VoIP, and 42% have WAN Optimization of some sort.

By Brian Boyko,
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Right now, some of NetQoS’s best and brightest are at the Interop conference in Las Vegas. (Our booth number is 1853, and that should be easy to remember – it’s the same year the Crimean War started.)

I’m not with them. Not so much that I’m not one of the best and brightest here, but after casually mentioning offhand at last year’s Interop that I seemed to prefer Atlantic City for my entertainment/gambling needs, the entire town of Las Vegas grabbed their emergency pitchforks and torches (stashed conveniently under the baccarat tables) and ran me out of town.

Other than that, it was a pleasant trip.

The thing that gets me about Interop is that it’s a trade show, yes, but it’s more than just a networking trade show. The conference really revolves around the massive network set up on-site. It’s an interesting trial-by-fire where different network vendors get to find out in a real-world environment exactly how well their products interoperate (hence the name) with others.

Douglas Gourlay at Cisco, who has been to many more Interops than I have, talks about the Interop spirit, if you will:

Back when Interop started no one was certain which protocols would win, whether bridging or routing was the way to go, whether it would be Ethernet, ATM, Token Ring, or FDDI/CDDI to the desktop, etc. What Interop did was force multiple vendors to work together to build a network to support the show floor in a matter of days. There were also interoperability tests of new protocols and such between multiple vendors hardware, software, protocols, etc. In the end it became a gathering place for 20,000+ network professionals to see what worked, what didn't, hear about the latest and greatest…

And watch forklifts get driven into McAfee’s booth.

One of the things in IT that baffles me is the intense emphasis on security.  Don’t get me wrong, I can understand the psychology of it.  We, as human beings, fear loss more than we appreciate gain. 

But security seems to be one of the primary overriding concerns of networking, with entire magazines, trade publications, etc. devoted to the subject of locking down your network tighter than a snare drum.  It’s not surprising that these things exist.  What is surprising is the sheer number and percentage of “mindshare” that security takes up in IT. 

And even security professionals are beginning to notice this – and the “security fatigue” which is settling in.  Bruce Schneier at Wired writes about his experience at the RSA Conference, the largest information security conference in the world, in “Prediction: RSA Conference Will Shrink Like a Punctured Balloon.”

Talk to the exhibitors, though, and the most common complaint is that the attendees aren't buying….

No one wants to buy security. They want to buy something truly useful -- database management systems, Web 2.0 collaboration tools, a company-wide network -- and they want it to be secure. They don't want to have to become IT security experts. They don't want to have to go to the RSA Conference. This is the future of IT security.

There are something like 800+ IT security vendors out there, and they fill the market with gobs of confusing variations of messaging.

I asked him whether he walked through the show floor, looking at the company's competitors to see if there was any benefit to switching.

"I can't figure out what any of those companies do," he replied.

The people making purchasing decisions are less interested in the details and more interested in what the product will enable them to do.  It doesn’t mean security isn’t important to buyers.  It just means that they don’t want to have to think about security as a separate idea.  They want products with utility – that are also secure. 

There are many other industries where security is a big part of the business – and yet, security remains taken for granted.  Banking – the walk-in kind, not the online kind – is one of them.  When you deposit money in a bank, you know that they’ll keep your money in a big safe that presumably can’t be picked with a bobby pin.  (If the bobby pin is being wielded by a spunky team of “spunky girl adventurers,” however, all bets are off.) 

But what you’re not interested in who made the lock, how many pounds of pressure it can withstand, whether it’s steel, titanium, an alloy, and the component makeup.  You’re interested in what it can do – interest.  The bank is interested in what it can do with your money – lend it out and charge interest. 

You can have an extremely secure network that doesn’t actually do much, and focusing on security without focusing on the core competencies and getting more done with the information you have seems to be a bit of a  “biggest lock on an empty chest” mentality.

Recently, there’s been some discussion on Slashdot regarding MySQL in the past few months, after MySQL (the company) was bought out by Sun Microsystems.  MySQL (the company) has announced that they will be developing some proprietary add-ons to the backup capabilities of MySQL (the database) which will only be available to MySQL’s (the company’s) customers of MySQL (the database) enterprise edition, and not to MySQL (the database) community edition. 

This has been blown a bit out of proportion.  (The headline, on Slashdot, “Sun may begin close-sourcing MySQL” was misleading at best).  We e-mailed Steve Curry at MySQL (the company) and he pointed us to some information clearing up the situation.

· Anything that has been released as open-source under GPL continues to be released as open-source under GPL. Sun and MySQL (the company) are not going to start “closing” the open-source MySQL (the database,) and it seems unlikely that they will be able to legally do so even if they wished to.

· Improved backup capabilities are being planned in MySQL (the database) 6.0 for both the open-source community and open-source with proprietary add-ons enterprise version. 

· Proprietary add-ons are being added to the Enterprise version of MySQL (the database).  These add-ons are not core critical, they are essentially added-value for paying customers, which add compression, encryption, specific native drivers – things that a particular business might need but which aren’t critical to the core functioning of MySQL (the database.) 

· The decision to do so was done before MySQL (the company) was acquired by Sun Microsystems. If anything, Sun has been very open-source friendly, with Star Office forming the basis of OpenOffice.org, and Solaris and Java both open-source now.

· There is nothing preventing people from forking the MySQL (the database) source code and producing open-source versions of the proprietary capabilities.

The use of proprietary add-ons to an open-source system isn’t even all that rare.  Click N’ Run for Linux systems adds proprietary software to the open-source Linux; MacOSX is based on the BSD-licensed Darwin, a BSD-like distribution.

We also note the irony of a number of proprietary Web applications running off of LAMP stacks, where the L, the A, the M (the DB) and the P are all “free software.” 

There are a number of proprietary Web applications running with MySQL (the database) – and a move to “close source” MySQL (the database) would have messed with the business models of many companies – including NetQoS.  NetQoS uses MySQL (the database) Enterprise edition in our network monitoring and reporting products and we’re customers of MySQL (the company).  So we’re glad this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. 

I tried to think of a prominent case where someone successfully “closed the source” of a flagship product after it was open-sourced - but couldn't until I went much, much farther afield.  There is a company “closing the source” on its major flagship product.

That company is Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro.  And the flagship product is “Dungeons and Dragons.” 

Wizards (the company) makes Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing, computer-less tabletop game where you play knights, elves, and powerful wizards (the characters) – a game that has a history of being very attractive to the technology-oriented crowd because of our love of math and power fantasies.

What makes Dungeons and Dragons particularly interesting is that a while back, Wizards (the company) released an “Open Gaming License” (OGL) which allowed third parties to develop additional content for Dunegons and Dragons, and, in fact, create entirely new games in different settings and genres using the rules established in Dungeons and Dragons 3^rd edition.  If you were a third-party company, you could publish supplements to provide traps, monsters, or new spells for wizards (the characters) to cast.  And many did.

This had numerous benefits all around; players needed to learn how to use only one system, and they had tons of D&D supplements to choose from, game companies found they had an audience in D&D players that they might not have otherwise had, Wizards (the company) found a sea of “developers” for their system which made ownership of D&D’s “core books” more valuable, and while it may not have resulted in a rebirth of the roleplaying game industry, it sure propped it up for a little while longer.

Because game players only had to learn one set of rules to play, the roleplaying game industry standardized quite a bit and the system used in Dungeons or Dragons (known as “d20”) became quite widely used, dominating the RPG field for a time. 

D&D “version 4.0” will soon be released, and many game beta testers believe the system has been radically overhauled and improved.  However, this new system will not be released under the OGL.  It will however, be released under the “Dungeons and Dragons 4^th Edition Game System License” (GSL). 

The GSL license has not yet been made public, but there are rumors, speculations, and concerns, fueled by online posts made by the brand manager and licensing manager for Dungeons and Dragons, and relayed by the lead writer of third-party publisher Necromancer Games that the GSL will contain a “poison pill” clause – that is, in order to use the GSL, a game company must not publish anything under the OGL.  

This would be like Microsoft saying that developers for Windows Vista are forbidden from publishing anything under the GNU public license.  And the upshot is now that developers have to choose between not developing games with the improved system or destroying their back-catalogs. 

Even if you don’t have a huge interest in D&D – in which case, I envy your normal social adjustment and relatively less awkward adolescence – it pays to keep up with this developing situation to see how a fight to close an open-source software product might actually go down.  Will Hasbro fail in its efforts to dominate the RPG industry, either shrinking their portion of market share or shrinking the size of the entire market?  Or will Hasbro succeed with this business plan, and the publishers of Monopoly (the game) end up with a de facto monopoly (the economic term) on this niche industry?

Update: On May 2, 2008, a week after this article's publication, Wizards of the Coast released an FAQ about the 4th edition licensing terms. The FAQ states:

Q. Can companies still produce 3.x products under the OGL?
A. Yes, but we anticipate that interest in the 4e GSLs will be greater.

Q. Can publishers release new products under both the OGL and 4E GSL?
A. No. Each new product will be either OGL or 4E GSL. If a new product is published under the 4e GSL, it cannot also be published as 3.x product under the OGL; and vice versa.

Q. I have multiple product lines. If I update one product line to 4th Edition, do they all have to be updated?
A. No. Publishers are able to choose on a product line by product line basis which license will work best.

Q. Will there be a different license for other lines, such as d20 Modern?
A. The d20 GSL will allow for other genres of roleplaying games.

Q. Why are there two different licenses?
A. The D&D 4e GSL is specific to the Dungeons & Dragons brand. The d20 GSL allows for non-fantasy genres. Both licenses tie to the 4th edition rule set.

Q. Do I have to give up my right to publish 3.5 OGL products in order to publish 4e compatible products?
A. No. Publishers are free to print product lines under either the OGL or 4E GSL. We would love to see our industry colleagues convert their entire product offerings to 4E, as we are doing, but we do not expect or require entire companies to convert to the new edition.

Q. Can publishers update their previous publications from older editions to the D&D 4th Edition rules?
A. Yes. Publishers participating in the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition GSL will be allowed, and encouraged, to convert their publications from earlier editions to the 4th Edition rules.