Originally Posted by
Bidmaron
For many years, WotC would not even sell PDFs of their 3.x materials. They believed that the existence of 3.x threatened their 4th edition. Now that they moved on to 5th edition, they seem to have gotten over that. However, it could be that they don't want to license older materials because it would compete with their current 5e production efforts. Kind of makes sense. They can't unprint their earlier material, so they might as well enjoy the revenue stream selling PDFs. But they CAN prevent anyone from making new material using their old edition by not issuing licenses and limiting 3rd parties to whatever open gaming license the edition had (which was not much prior to 3e).
This very thread is proof of their thinking. The OP will either go to the effort of entering all his old stuff he has (since no license means no purchasable product), or, more likely, he will eventually tire of taking all that time to enter stuff and move on to 5e (or some other game in active development). Or he will go back to pen and paper with his old stuff.