Blog

A picture from OpenLab in London where they “make art and music using open source/free software”

I’m looking for a social centre where people can meet and learn more about computers, such as a Hacklab. There is/was a hacklab collective down in London who usually occupy the rampART social centre. A new centre opened in Birmingham recently, but I wonder if there’s a hacklab there?

Reading Floss+Art really has got me wondering if art should be free. By free I don’t mean public domain, but rather in a way that ensures the work stays free, such as releasing their work under Creative Commons or some similar Copyleft licence?

When I approached this question I split it into two questions, should art be free and should design be free. To clarify, I see art as something more aesthetic, more pleasing to the eye. I don’t think it strictly is there to answer questions, but more to raise them. It’s like a fiction book, which isn’t there to provide facts, but to entertain.

I see design as something that solves problems. Need to push something up a hill? Design created the wheel. Need to make a mark on a paper? Design created the pen and pencil. It is true that there is some artistic (as I’m defining it here) concepts that went into it’s design, but primarily I see it as design.

Overall, of the two I feel that it is design that should be set free, especially when it can benefit so many people. On the screen a UI design may make a program easier to use but on a wider scale it sets the scale for other programs. If all other/similar programs followed the same design principles those programs in turn would become easier to use and everyone would benefit. However, too often I read of stories where companies patent whatever aspects of their program they can. Doing this does give them the upper hand over their rivals, but it prevents others from improving on their work and benefiting the users.

I’ve been wanting to start an open source art project for awhile now but the most confusing aspect of all of this is which licence to choose! I’ve already discovered that the GNU GPL doesn’t really cover art, and since I have stumbled upon three different licences that I could choose. Before I reveal them here’s what I intend to do:

I want to allow people to upload their original ideas onto a website and have those open for modification, whilst still crediting the original, and all subsequent authors/editors. Once an image is created I want the image itself to be available for modification and the original file i.e. the psd, xcf, svg etc file also available. All of these would remain free and not be allowed to be used for commercial work.

I thought Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 would do the trick but it doesn’t mention source files. I then came across the Free Art License 1.3, which seems to cover most things but there hasn’t been widespread adoption of it since early 2000’s so I’m questioning the validity of it. Finally I’ve come to the Open Art Source Licence, which is still in the draft stages but is more up to date, so possibly addresses more issues.

Can anyone provide any input?

Here’s the last in my daily pictures for this week. I’ve a busy weekend of parties and more parties, so I’ll do a whole week of drawing another week.

I’ve spent most of my day feeling a little bit ill and learning how to use Blender, so this is more of an experiment than anything. I used a tutorial by istarlome to create this. I found that if you check the Colour option under the Trace tab it will attempt to colour the image as well. Using Inkscape to create halftones could well be a powerful way to do it and gives you many options for editing and customisation.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this week of pictures!