Mon 5 Nov, 2007
So, I was hanging around [ #freegamer ] last night, and, Kiba ( Founder of [ LibreGameWiki ] ) seemed to mention a general dislike of artists, and expressing what I’ve seen mentioned before, sadly, that artists are often more “selfish” than coders in general. I tend to disagree with Kiba with most things, and, of course I disagree on this.
I must admit, being an artist, I am somewhat biased on this matter.
I know that a lot of artists have issues with commerical distribution, and some even rabidly defend their work from “Art Thieves” (Real or Imagined), to the point of putting great big copyright labels in bright colours all over their works.
This is not universal, however. And, I believe, it is possible for artists to be encouraged, and, have their fears of open source overcome. I sincerely hope that the people mentioned above do not taint the view of the Free Software community against those of us who do contribute in our own way to the cause.
What do the greater body of Free Software Coders think of Artists? I honestly don’t know. I know some are, indeed, supportive of our efforts, and are willing to help us to help them. I don’t know how wide-spread this is, I’ve been involved with mostly supportive projects, but, I’ve not worked with that many different projects.
I think the best project I’ve been involved in.. is [ StressFreeZone ] the guys there are great, and really make doing art for them a lot of fun, you get to be creative, when things don’t match their needs, they do their absolute best to explain (constructively and nicely) what they’d like changed. They’re a pleasure to work with, too. I still have a bunch of things I’d like to do for them, and, I look forward to finishing those things up, and, hopefully, continue to contribute to their project.
I think I’ll wrap this one up here for now, I may see some more things to add, later.
Steve says:
I’ve always been genuinely curious why a lot of FOSS games still have tight licences on their artwork. Why the difference?
Kaelis Ebonrai says:
I’m not certain, to be honest. I happily contribute anything I do under the GPL (specifically v3 or later). I personally disagree with the choice of many projects to use essentially non-free art. I suppose the eventually need to use what they get. And, I do agree on one point with Kiba, culturally (these days) artists seem to be more copyright-crazed. I think, it would be of use to the free software community.. If some campaign were to be launched to do what Richard M. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation did for programming, for coding.
The sad thing is, the group that is trying to do that now.. Accepts essentially non-free licenses under its banner. The group I mean, is the Creative Commons project. I tend to avoid creative commons licenses where possible, and in all but the most direly needed of cases, I refuse to contribute under the Creative Commons licenses.
The worst part is, to me.. Is that RMS doesn’t support the Free Art movement. He does not believe that it is necessary that art be Free. He says that Software needs to be Free, for the sake of culture.. Yet.. Art, historically, has been the driving force of culture, and, up until recent times, it has indeed been free. Now, it is perhaps as chained as software, or even moreso!
I hope that explains some of my views on the situation. I might write this up as a full entry, sometime soon, also.