Hello all,

I apologize if this has already been posted here, but while I was drifting along the tides of the internet, I found something quite interesting.

You see, I saw a reddit post asking about an online dress-up game linked as https://tool.bz/webapp/chara/ and--being the public domain & free licensing nerd that I am-- immeadiately recognized the style as something I saw on Wikimedia Commons user's snow64 contribution page. I went to go search for it and lo and behold, it's there.

In the sources section is a link to khmix.sakura.ne.jp, particularly to it's downloads section at  https://khmix.sakura.ne.jp/download.shtml (warning:I sincerely don't reccomend you wander outside of this section for...reasons. my eyes need scrubbed now). Anyway, this is all to say that this appears to be  a sprite/avatar tool whom's assets are fully public domain (or, at the very least, very permissive with no requirement for attribution).

Back to the WMC page, the permission section of the page lists a paragraph of text...that doesn't appear to be in this version of the page (nor in the files of the program itself), but there is something very similar (and if I'm to believe the machine translation of the former, more clearer):

 > 同梱素材を利用した画像について
  同人、商用、アダルト / 可
  著作表示、リンク等 / 不要
  改変可、媒体問わず
  自由に使っていただいて構いません。

In an email preserved in the Lemma Soft forums, We can see that it translates to this:

> Concerning image resources provided with the application
Producing Derivative, Commercial and Adult Work is OK
There is no need for attribution and links to the homepage
You may freely edit them in any way and on any media you want
You can freely use them in any way you want

Cross-checked against a basic machine translation, we can see that this is most certainly accurate. Addtionally, the work on the WMC page (and the permission paragraph accompanying it) was verified to be a release to the public domain by license reviewer Techyan*, which is why I brought up the WMC page in the first place.

Now that verification is out of the way, I'd like to talk a little more about the program. It's very old (windows 7 old) and very tiny at a almost unbelievable 3.7 megabytes large. As you can probably gather from "Windows 7 old", it's primarly a Windows program**, so I can't test it myself/can't be bothered to set up WINE for this (if you'd like to give it a go, I'd reccomend that you use a VM, as someone did report that virustotal flags it as a trojan. This might be a false positive from it being ancient and all that, but it's better safe than sorry!).

The author is Hirukiya Kirin, which is why the website/the program(? at least informally) is named K.Hmix. It seems that they were planning to create a modern, completely rebuilt version of the program in 2018, but considering the websites completely abandoned, I don't think that ever came to fruition. Looking under it's informal name, it seems that it was very popular in it's time in japanese and weebish circles, spawning many mods for it (remember the email a few paragraphs ago? that was from the creator of moltenlava, a project using the assets of KHmix!). It even seems to get some use today, as in my research I found pixiv arts featuring it (albiet it is few and far between). This is exactly why I prefaced this with an apology, as it's very likely this was brought to this forum's attention a while ago!

...It seems i've bit off more than I can chew, and now I have no clue how to end this. Check it out, it's pretty cool?

Footnotes;

*For transparancy's sake, I must tell you that Techyan did get globally banned from all Wikimedia projects somewhere in 2021. Due to WMF's policy on privacy for this sort of matter, we don't know why. It might be copyright related, it might not be. All I know is that they were a trusted license reviewer during  the time of this verifcation, and I'll put my faith in that.

**There is a linux/mac version at https://sourceforge.net/projects/charactermanaj/ (info site at https://charactermanaj.sourceforge.io/#english_translation) , but that's from a different creator (seraphy). You have to put in the image data yourself, which you can easily grab in the K.Hmix zip file. An added bonus is that this program is clearly licensed under The Apache License (ver. 2.0). I would check this one out, but I'm currently a bit tired. Perhaps later.