Encouraging Coporate contributors? [was Re: [Clipart] Contributors and moderation]

[Alan Horkan]

I was reading through a computer graphics magazine and noticing the
advertisments for clipart (backgrounds, textures, and similar add-ons for
graphics software) and considering the royalty free images that are
sometimes provided on the magazine coverdisks.

Surely if Gnome can convince Bitstream to provide fonts for use by the
open source community then it would be worthwhile for us to start asking
graphics company if they might provide some small selection of their
clipart.  Of course I dont expect these companies to do something for
nothing, we would have to do this in such a ways as to get wide exposure
and public recognition for them and that it might serve as useful
advertising and as some of these companies alreday seem willing to give
away a sample of their collection for a graphics magazine it is not a huge
jumpt to think that they might be willing to do the same for us and the
open source community.

So do people think this is a practical idea?  (Seems like a longshot to me
but might be worth exploring)
Should we ask the Gnome Foundation for help and should I strat trying to
make a list of companies that sell Clipart?

> Graphics must be Compliant SVG (1.0 or 1.1)
> ===========================================
> - AUTOMATE: We can check each submission for compliance automatically
> right?
> - We need to decide what level of SVG compliance will be asked for. I'm
> thinking 1.1.

SVG is good, if we could keep to a subset such as Tiny SVG/Mobile SVG/SVG
Basic it might be even better.
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile/

While I think the packages we ship should only be SVG I dont think we
should reject good clipart just because it is not in our prefferred
format.  It seems likely that someone will offer clipart in WMF (Windows
Metafile) format, EMF or possibly some variety of Postscript.  We might be
able to get people who are like myself not as creative but would be
willing to convert files to SVG (if the graphics are not raster it should
be possible to convert to SVG and only need to chain together one or two
pieces of software).

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/