Also, Open means "there is no NDA preventing you from sharing your thoughts and screenshots", whereas Closed Beta (and the beta cycles before that, yes there were non-Cryptic people testing this game long before Closed Beta) was Closed because it was bound by NDA.

As one of the moderators of Cryptic's official IRC channel for this game, I was darn glad to see that NDA go; most of my job is banning jerks, but NDA enforcement required punishing nice people. That's not fun.

Actually, PE did license some of their code out; to Bioware, who's using it in Star Wars: The Old Republic. All Cryptic got from them was some concept art, which they did use.

Yeah, because it's not possible for programs to detect they're running in a VM...

I'll be bookmarking this and referring people to it for a very long time. Oooh, look, project re-use! :)