Truly Public Domain Essential Building Blocks

[drummyfish]

Hello again it's me,

I've been thinking about a side project. What is it about?

Creating a set of completely absolutely public domain very essential resources such as fonts, soundfonts, palettes and so on. Resources that are perfectly legal proof and have no conditions at all for their usage to allow absolute freedom of creation.

Why? Because an "advanced" society apparently should have at least some completely unrestricted essential building blocks for art. Almost any """free""" font is distributed under SIL """free""" font license that still has some conditions, even such things as COLORS in a palette or a few character bytebeat formulas are too often licensed CC-BY-SA, which is absolutely laughable. Yes, I am aware it is probably legal to use palettes without giving credit, but you never know when laws will change and the fact alone that the author shows a will to "defend" their palettes are very discouraging to their use.

There have to be essential building blocks that are NOT """PROTECTED""" in any way. Resources allowing to be simply copy pasted, broken and sold without any fear whatsoever. These resources are like words for artists, and we need to let them speak freely.

I am now not saying every font should be public domain (even if I think so), but that there need to be at least SOME that reject the very idea of """protecting""" letters of text, colors of pixels or sounds of tones.

I've been keeping a personal list of such resources here, but many resources simply don't exist yet or have issues such as unclear sources and licenses/waivers. Therefore I've been thinking about creating some of these myself, the right way, and I would be glad if anyone joined me.

guidelines

The goal for these works is to be as much certainly public domain as possible. Therefore each resource should follow these rules:

1. Be made completely from scratch, not using parts of any other work, so that the sources are absolutely clear, which shouldn't be difficult as the resource should be the basic building blocks themselves. Being a derivative work complicates things legally.
2. Be made and signed by a single person to make the source and waiver absolutely clear. If there are multiple authors the probability of legal complications is greater. That means if you're e.g. creating a MIDI soundfont, you can't use someone else's sound recording even if they're CC0, you need to record your own.
3. Be very clearly released under Creative Commons 1.0. CC0 is a standard waiver for the public domain that should waive copyright worldwide. This waiver needs to be stated clearly, with full waiver name and an url, best if used in a sentence such as "I, <name>, have created all of this work myseld in <year> and release all of it under Creative Commons 1.0 (url), public domain." As CC0 doesn't waive other IP, you can use additional waiver alongside CC0. The evidence of the work's waiver should be archived, e.g. by saving a snapshot of the release page on the Internet Archive. You should state that you created everything yourself from scratch and also how you created it. This is again to make the source and PD status completely clear.
4. Be made with free software as proprietary SW sometimes has sneaky conditions burried in EULAs, which may impose limitations on works created with the SW (see e.g. Warcraft Reforged world editor scandal).

As a guideline, imagine the worst case scenario, i.e. that someone uses your resource commercially to create e.g. Nazi propaganda material and makes billions of dollars on it -- ask yourself whether he is still well protected from you winning a court case against him. The answer should be yes.

what we need

If someone creates a work for this project I'll add it here. Keep in mind that multiple resources of the same type are welcome, i.e. if someone creates a monospace vector font, you can still create your own -- it's always better to have more. Also feel free to suggest item types to add here.

• fonts
  
  • sans-serif
    
  • serif
    
  • monospace
    
• palettes
• MIDI soundfonts
• icons and other simple pictures (general symbols, OS icons, cursors, emoticons, avatars, ...)
• sound effects (clicks, success/fail sounds, ...)

[PeterX]

1. Generally this is a good idea.

2. I'm a big fan of "protected" (libre) code and art, but I see the benefit of PD for many cases. For example the fonts you mentioned, or for teaching purposes.

3. Good to know that someone cares to help the Nazis... (*sarcastic*)

Greetings
Peter

[Julius]

Generally cool initiative, but I will closely monitor the Nazi metaphors here

Almost any """free""" font is distributed under SIL """free""" font license that still has some conditions, even such things as COLORS in a palette or a few character bytebeat formulas are too often licensed CC-BY-SA, which is absolutely laughable. Yes, I am aware it is probably legal to use palettes without giving credit, but you never know when laws will change and the fact alone that the author shows a will to "defend" their palettes are very discouraging to their use.

As a side note, this shows a complete misunderstanding why some people (me included) prefer copyleft licenses. Yes sure, for such insignificant works it is neither very logical nor probably legally valid, but it shows the intend of the author that this work is *only* to be used in similarly open projects. This is a IMHO a valid choice and not "absolutely laughable" as it clearly communicates this intend purpose.

[PeterX]

Generally cool initiative, but I will closely monitor the Nazi metaphors here

Almost any """free""" font is distributed under SIL """free""" font license that still has some conditions, even such things as COLORS in a palette or a few character bytebeat formulas are too often licensed CC-BY-SA, which is absolutely laughable. Yes, I am aware it is probably legal to use palettes without giving credit, but you never know when laws will change and the fact alone that the author shows a will to "defend" their palettes are very discouraging to their use.

As a side note, this shows a complete misunderstanding why some people (me included) prefer copyleft licenses. Yes sure, for such insignificant works it is neither very logical nor probably legally valid, but it shows the intend of the author that this work is *only* to be used in similarly open projects. This is a IMHO a valid choice and not "absolutely laughable" and it clearly communicates this intend purpose.

Yeah, I second that. We (libre-fans) want to avoid someone showing up and simply taking the freedom away in derived works. Some but not all of us are totally against prorprietary software, but some simply don't want their efforts being wasted/misused that way.

But I think some basic stuff should be hassle-free and even be available for more close-sourced writers.

I hope Julius will not lock this thread

Greetings
Peter

[drummyfish]

Generally cool initiative, but I will closely monitor the Nazi metaphors here

Nazi metaphor is there because I am against Nazism to be clear, it is the "worst case" scenario

As a side note, this shows a complete misunderstanding why some people (me included) prefer copyleft licenses. Yes sure, for such insignificant works it is neither very logical nor probably legally valid, but it shows the intend of the author that this work is *only* to be used in similarly open projects. This is a IMHO a valid choice and not "absolutely laughable" and it clearly communicates this intend purpose.

Of course I understand the copyleft argument, this thread is not to be about copyleft vs permissive -- my point is, and I think we would agree, that while there are many standard/copyleft resources, there are generally extremely few to none completely public domain ones, i.e. there is a disbalance, lack of choice choice. I just want for the choice to exist and to fill the void.

[PeterX]

...while there are many standard/copyleft resources, there are generally extremely few to none completely public domain ones, i.e. there is a disbalance, lack of choice choice. I just want for the choice to exist and to fill the void.

1.) But copyleft is about NOT giving the choice. So convinced copyleft writers won't agree on your point of view.

2.) Would BSD or MIT license be helpful?

[Jastiv]

I'm generally a big advocate of copyleft, but I think when it comes down to fonts and very basic things like that public domain makes more sense, I mean we are talking about "fonts" here, and not something with a distinctive style that would be associated with a specific thing. Palettes is another thing, its just a collection of colors, they idea of even applying copyright to that is absurd.

[drummyfish]

1.) But copyleft is about NOT giving the choice. So convinced copyleft writers won't agree on your point of view.

Well I guess you may be right, some copylefters probably want to force copyleft on everything. I personally would want to force everything to be public domain. Anyway, if my intention here is in conflict with die hard copylefters, this is still a free game dev forum, not a copyleft game dev forum, so if anyone is not okay with my preference of public domain, all they can do is leave this thread. It's like with my suckless thread: this thread is for the people interested in PD, and it's okay if some people aren't interested.

2.) Would BSD or MIT license be helpful?

Nope, they have conditions.

Palettes is another thing, its just a collection of colors, they idea of even applying copyright to that is absurd.

I've seen sites with licensed palettes, their justification is that while sets of colors are not copyrightable, an ordering of colors can be seen as an artwork and you could be legally prosecuted for not following a license. Again, even if it is probably legal to use color sets as public domain, laws change all the time, copyright may get much crazier in following years and so it's best to have it covered, especially when it costs nothing. So I use waivers for my palettes. We need to give the artists the best guarantee possible that our resources are safe.

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For those interested in creating fonts: recently I have discovered that you can create vector fonts with Inkscape: you just create a new file with font template, create the glyphs and then save that as an SVG font. This you then import into Font Forge and export as TTF or OTF. You can create the font in Font Forge of course, but I think most people are used to Inkscape.

[PeterX]

I still think, as Jastiv, that some fonts and palettes should be usable hassle-free and for closed source products.. Yes icons are a good further example.

Also
- smileys/emoticons
- some generic synthesizer sounds
- symbols used for music notes
- maybe some textures (like wood, concrete, marble, ...) but that might be pushing the idea too far already...

I don''t know what soundfonts are.

[drummyfish]

Soundfonts are basically the sound samples that MIDI players play music with.

Yes, we need emoticons, will add that. Synthesizer sounds... I think these are basically programs that generate sound, so that would maybe fall under software. But maybe some basic sound effects like clicks, success and fail sounds -- will add these too.

Musical notation symbols count, but I think these could be seen as icons or even Unicode font glyphs.

I wouldn't cover textures, they seem like a level up, and with textures the situation is different, there are many CC0 ones. For similar reasons I haven't included bitmap fonts here: there are a ton of them already.