[Clipart] Questions about licenses and formats of artwork needed

[Alan Horkan]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004 Sigmascape1 at cs.com wrote:

> >> I concur with your opinion Bryce on waiting until the repository is
> >> mature. Yet again, this is another discussion that needs to be added to
> >> our group memory, aka, the wiki.
> >>
> >> I think it would be a great idea however to compile a list of possible
> >> companies to solicit for free images. I also think that this project is
> >> going to need a significant image campaign to get people interested and
> >> to help them see the benefits of this system.
> >
> >Maybe, but my own personal experience (via WorldForge), is that there
> >are some _extremely_ talented and prolific artists out there who are
> >desperate for outlets for their creativity, and crave opportunities to
> >work in a community with other artists to learn from and show off to.
> >
> >Some may be looking for opportunities to build a portfolio and spread
> >word of their skill, others simply want to exercise their skills and try
> >out cool new tricks, and others will mainly be motivated by contributing
> >to a cause they feel to be important.  I have a feeling that if we can
> >just find the right way to tap the vein and communicate the vision, we
> >should not have too much trouble.  Like you say, we may simply need a
> >good campaign to get folks interested.


> I am a new subscriber to the mailing list.

Welcome!

> I am finding that the artwork needed is material dedicated to the public
> domain.

That is the plan so far.  Public Domain seems to be the prefferred choice
of license as it makes everything a lot simpler to manage.

Rather than public domain I would think that a license more like the
Academic Free License that retains copyright (and I think copyright should
be pooled and given to a group like freedesktop.org) and explicity
disclaimes liability might be better.

I mentioned that people might be interested in a license less easily
exploited by selfish commercial interests but I am not sure one exists.  I
really must do some reading of the various licenses and see if I can find
one that i think would give more control to the group but without adding
too much additional complexity over plain Public Domain.

> Are you also looking for other content licensed in, say, the Creative
> Commons or other types of licensing?

This has not yet been considered in detail.

For your convenience a link to Creative Commons website
http://creativecommons.org/
and their Licensing page
http://creativecommons.org/license/

> Also, in terms of formats, SVG is the primary format needed?

The interest groups that make up this project so far are from SVG based
projects and SVG is definately the planned file format.

My personal opinion is that we should try to accept other formats,
expecially vector formats and do what we can to convert them to nice clean
SVG.

> What about bitmap content?

This does not seem to be part of the plan but may be included later.
However some people might be interested in converting the raster graphics
to vector graphics.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan