Re: Policy on software used to create desktop theme?

[Vladimir Kudrya]

I do not think it is appropriate to label or rank artworks or their authors based on the tools they used. I would totally understand a warning about proprietary components on a software description page. But artwork is not software, it does not run itself, so there is no place for such warnings. If I understand correctly, all submitted works are compliant with the requirements, including licensing, so they are Free. No further questions about this should be raised. As for the tools: only positive messages and careful mediated actions would help promoting Free creative software. Any additional restrictions imposed on creative process would only hurt both the software and the process. The only way to do good in this area - is to showcase capabilities of the Free software in action, that would arouse the interest in it. Labels and restrictions are not the way to go when it comes to artwork. On 2016-10-27 19:03, Ben wrote: May I suggest a compromise:   Instead of making it a requirement to use open source software, encourage contributors to advertise that fact by including in the description some text like "This artwork was created with the following free & open source software: Inkscape, Gimp, [whatever was used]".  Contributors using proprietary software would not be allowed to advertise their software on the main list page. Maybe asterisk the FOSS-created ones to highlight on the voting form. Also, the FOSS contributors could be listed at the top to give them prominence, then underneath follow with "The following contributions were created with proprietary software: ..." This allows voters who really value FOSS to give their vote to those contributors, but doesn't shut out awesome contributions that come from designers that are not yet familiar with the open source packages. Personally I think it benefits Debian (& the FOSS community by extension) more to have awesome artwork to impress & attract the masses rather than getting one or two designers to try switching to an open source package.  PS: Nice work Juliette - I think it looks great and am looking forward to seeing it when we get to boot up Stretch!  -benski From: Lucas Nussbaum <lu...@debian.org> To: Cyril Brulebois <k...@debian.org> Cc: debian-desktop@lists.debian.org Sent: Thursday, 27 October 2016, 15:05 Subject: Re: Policy on software used to create desktop theme? On 26/10/16 at 23:36 +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote: > Onsemeliot <onsemel...@gmail.com> (2016-10-26): > > Politically it makes a big difference if we use artwork created with > > non-free tools to represent free software. It would be totally different > > if there was no free software available for doing this kind of work. But > > we have great tools and plenty of people who are doing amazing stuff > > with it. Therefore, what good reason could there be to further accept > > submissions done with proprietary tools for such representational > > purposes in the future? > > Conversely, what good reasons are there to discriminate against them? “You > suck, you didn't use the right tools!”? That's not what Debian is about. > > > If not even the free software community thinks using free tools for doing > > our artwork is the right thing to do: Who else should? > > You're missing the point, which I've highlighted already. I think that Onsemeliot's point is that it's a missed opportunity. You mentioned the Social Contract in an earlier message. What it also says is:   2. We will give back to the free software community   [...] We will communicate things such as bug fixes, improvements and user   requests to the upstream authors of works included in our system. What we are essentially doing here is communicating that using proprietary software provided a better result, and that the free alternatives appear buggy or counter-intuitive (quoting what you wrote), without communicating precise details about what's wrong and could be improved to upstream authors of the free alternatives. So we are clearly missing an opportunity to advertise the free alternatives, and to provide feedback and contribute to improving them. You might not value that goal very highly and prefer to remain pragmatic. But you can probably agree that it's a valid point. A similar situation would arise if the DPL was using proprietary tools, e.g. to prepare and give presentations about Debian. Lucas