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Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company
It's a movement of mostly older gamers which uses older--like, pre-AD&D--editions of D&D
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It includes the first edition of AD&D. Those who eventually called themselves OSR really started with AD&D and pushed further and further back. Two of the earliest efforts using the OGL were OSRIC and Castles & Crusades, both based on AD&D.
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mostly about killing things and taking their stuff rather than more complex plots, but on purpose this time rather than operating in the framework of pioneering an entirely new genre of gaming in the 70s when none of us really knew what we were doing.
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Despite its internal battles, the OSR's overall philosophy is that the designers and those who gamed with them in the '70s
did know what they were doing and did it intentionally. Most adherents to the OSR would say that "killing things and taking their stuff" is at best a poor way to describe what their sort of gameplay is all about.
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It strikes me as being somewhere between nostalgia and an attempt to create what us older gamers now like to think we could have experienced back then.
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A lot of it is nostalgia, but a lot of it is a reaction against heavily-ruled games. The early forms of D&D relied heavily on the principles of Free Kriegsspiel, in which the job of the judge is not to process rules but to decide what happens when players do things, and a lot of people honestly do like this sort of game better.
Unfortunately, the OSR is also full of fundamentalism, historical revisionism, sock puppets, and internal political bickering. Blood-feuds erupt over whether Arneson or Gygax (or someone else) gets the credit for inventing D&D or RPGs. Propaganda gets published and criticism gets suppressed. If you engage in the OSR, do it purely as a consumer of their gaming products, not as a designer or forum participant!