Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Sale of Libre-Software Artwork

[Michał Masłowski]

> I think that art made with Libre Software could be a worthwhile plan
> of attack for helping out the
> movement. Art can speak for itself, bypassing the problems of ideology
> and technical jargon. I can
> deliver a very simple and direct message to anyone who looks at one of
> my pictures: this work
> could *only* be created in an environment of software freedom. In
> other words, software freedom is
> an absolutely indispensable requirement for artistic freedom when
> you're talking about the way I
> produce art. If someone asks whether I could have made this work using
> Adobe Photoshop, the
> answer is a flat and simple "no." Period. End of story. Nothing
> complicated about it.

I don't know much about art and I don't see an obvious way to make such
nice random-like pictures as that one, wouldn't it be (technically,
after imagining something appropriate) easy to generate them using any
programming language and already available programs?  I think this
doesn't imply that it needs free software.  Certainly there are works of
art that cannot be done using Adobe Photoshop or GIMP due to different
ways of describing them (they aren't used for e.g. fonts or music, while
this doesn't imply anything about software freedom).

I was once interested in meta-fonts, Computer Modern could be quickly
adapted to make significantly different styles (e.g. a narrow sans-serif
typewriter font) by changing many parameters and adapting its macro
subroutines.  I believe this cannot be done without available and
modifiable source code for a program designed to be adapted by users.
Although fonts probably aren't a good example here, most people wouldn't
notice the difference and a similar single design could be practically
done from scratch.

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