Attention, artists: FOSS community needs you!

[Killabong]

I'm writing this because I think there are a couple of capable artists here on the hive, and hopefully some of them will read this and hopefully start thinking about what I wrote.

The Problem
Sadly, many many FOSS (= free/open source software) games are only equipped with what we call 'programmer art'. One of the reasons for this is that coders seem to be more willing to share their work with others than artists.

The Solution
To help these developers by providing a place where they could get resources under licenses compatible with open source projects, OpenGameArt.org was founded. OGA is a community dedicated to creating art under "free as in speech" licenses.
We archive pretty much any kind of art which could be useful for games, from concept art over pixel art, textures, vector art, 3D models to sound effects, music and even (game design) documents.

How can I help?
If you have any old art lying on your hard drive that you aren't using anymore, why don't you do the FOSS community a favor and upload it to OGA?

Advantages of free/libre art

• As long as you comply with the license, you can base your work on art created by others under a free/libre license.
• Your work can be useful for a wide range of people, from indie game developers over FOSS game developers to other artists, which can learn from your experience and base their work upon your art.
• Based on your original work, your art can evolve by beeing adapted and refined by other artists.
• If your art is good enough, you might see it featured in a standalone FOSS game instead of a mod/map for a propietary game one day.
• If your art is of excellent quality, OGA might commission you for creating new art. Yes, you heard right, hard cash for your work on free art! This was already done several times, and it's likely to happen again!

Things to consider

• Every license we accept allows derivates and commercial use/resale. These are two of the key components of free/libre software licenses and all art for free/libre software projects needs to be compatible to these.
• Please don't upload any stuff ripped from games, because we will have to take these down.
• Before uploading something to OGA, please make sure your art is not based on work copyrighted by other persons unless you got their permission to use their work and release the derivate under one of our accepted licenses.
  ATTENTION: Statements like 'use this as you please' are not enough! Really make sure that the original author allows you to release your derivate under the specific license you want to release it!
  If there are any models you created from scratch but which use Blizzard's textures, just go ahead and remove the texture before you upload it - they might be replaced by free ones later on.

Licenses
This section is a short overview over the licenses we accept:

• CC0/Public Domain:
  By releasing a resource to the public domain, you waive all rights on this resource. Everyone can do anything he likes with the resource, and he doesn't even have to credit you.
• CC-BY:
  The Creative Commons - Attribution license allows everyone to redistribute your work, create derivates from your work licensed under whatever license the creator of the derivate chooses and use your work commercially as long as he credits you in a way defined by you.
• CC-BY-SA:
  Basicly like CC-BY, but every derivate of the work must be licensed under CC-BY-SA.
• GPL:
  Basicly it grants similar rights like CC-BY-SA, but the source code of the complete project needs to be licensed under the GPL.

A little present
Thanks for reading! I hope I was able to make you think about free licenses, and to draw some interest, of course ;-).
And as an example of how great free/libre art can be, here are some icons commissioned by OGA which IMHO would fit perfectly into any warcraft map, and which can be used under a free/libre license:
Painterly Spells 1
Painterly Spells 2
Painterly Spells 3