25 November 2005

OCAL in impasse?

Open Source games sucks. People argue this is because Open Source people are mostly developers, not artists and because artists are not very much into free sharing of their work.

I think the Open Clip Art Library proves this wrong: we showed is possible to get in less than two years over 10.000 images from several hundreds of people, producing something which is included in many FOSS and commercial projects. But we were not able to get enough developers doing a half-decent CMS for the website.

The upcoming release look like a bad milestone: over 10% of the submitted SVG files were damaged by the upload scripts. A bug reported a few days ago prevent uploading of zip archives (this stopped Gerald from submitting his set of 1400 images). All of this happens after we skipped a release because of security problems on our website. And we still don't have a plan on implementing features promised over than one year ago.

I wonder how many contributors or possible contributors were lost because of our broken website and what is our real potential, double, triple, more?

I have not made many new images from the last release (something around 80 files) but because of the brokenness, don't feel very motivated to create more or even submit them. Yes, I am a bit disappointed for the moment.

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