It's been painfully clear to me as I've set up this site that by far the most confusing aspect of art in Free and Open Source games is licensing. There have been innumerable discussions about it all over the big wide internets, and the only real consensus is that there are just too many of them.

That said, licenses are a necessary and good thing. As a creator of content (be you an artist, writer, developer, etc), you have a right to stipulate the manner in which your work is used. Maybe you just want to see it spread as far and wide as possible without condition. Maybe you want it to be free, but you don't want some company to pick it up and use it, then try to sell it back to you without contributing something back. Maybe you'd like to make money by selling your creations. As an artist, it's the ability to control how your work is used that motivates you to create that work in the first place. It's this variety of needs and motivations that gives rise to the many different licenses that are out there. It's not too much of a logical leap to say that if there were no licenses, there wouldn't be as much art.

Of course, this proliferation of licenses leads to some serious problems. As an artist who doesn't understand how licenses work, which of the myriad licenses do you choose? As a developer, which art licenses are compatible with the license you've chosen for your software?

The rest of the OGA staff and I have been discussing a way to simplfy licensing choices while still allowing people as many (or more) options as are currently available, and I believe we've come up with a good solution. The plan is to offer five licensing choices:

1. My artwork may be used in projects that are "libre" (open source).
* 1a. In addition, I am willing to license my art to non-open-source projects for a fee.
2. My artwork may be used in non-open-source projects, provided that any modifications to that artwork are shared under the same license.
3. My artwork may be used in any manner, provided I am credited.
4. My artwork may be used in any manner, no credit necessary.
5. I'd like to choose my own licenses.

The first four options will automatically select a group of licenses that fit the given description. The fifth, of course will allow artists complete freedom to choose whichever license they prefer. The only restriction is the one we have right now -- all artwork on this site must be safe to used in GPLed projects, which means every licensing choice we offer must be able to be bundled with the GPL.

Given that this may take a little bit of time to implement, I'd like to get some comments from the community before I start. If you have any questions or ideas, I'd love to hear them. Please feel free to leave a comment below, and I'll try to address them. If you're curious, I encourage you to read the licensing section of our FAQ.

Peace,

Bart

P.S. Reminder: The pixel art contest ends in 8 days, on August 1st!