h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the Free Software world, we have at our disposal a whole host of very useful tools; everything from operating systems to web servers to music applications.

Something that is troubling to me is the way in which Free Software gaming is conducted. In some instances you have games which claim to be open source but really aren't (Eternal Lands), some nice but broken Propritory games (A tale in the desert III) and some rather worrying licensed games where the code is open but the content or server isn't (Planeshift).

Now I don't think any of these game projects really understand the whole point of Free Software or Open Source. I don't think they understand the clarity of standard licenses, the value of sharing and the difficulty that their odd licenses and even odder notions play out when it comes to free software development.

If we for a moment forget the code, we have lots of coders and lots of programmers that grok free software. Let me concentrate on content.

When it comes to models, graphics, textures, sounds and other interesting content which can be reused in very different ways; I see absolutly no reason for all of this content not to be Creative Commons or GPL Content licensed. At the moment we have so many artists working to build the same tree model, the same rock model, the same grass texture and the same arrow swift sound. What is the point? are we honestly, hand on heart saying that we hate the human race that much we would rather see each other suffer than take a benefit from our hard works?

A lot of this is to do with the transition from the old ways to the new ways, there just isn't the education in place to help some of these projects mend their ways.

For instance planeshift has a particularly dangerous and selfish content license where everything a VOLUNTEER does is given whole sale for free to the planeshift 'non for profit' org. To me as an artist I would never do that, in fact I consider is rude, deceitful and incredibly ignorant to even suggest such a radical move for content.

What i would like to see is some of these linux game sites actually provide places where artists and content creators can create a library of content under free licenses so we can spur on greater game development for operating systems such as Linux.