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Comment by rgawdzik | Hacker News Reader

Question to anyone in the media industry:

Why aren't there a lot of open source media assets (that actually are as high quality as paid assets)? I remember trying to make games and such, and people required me to pay $1000's of dollars, seems relevant here as well, such as "10 movie clips" for $1500.

It puts up a barrier for individuals to use assets they haven't made, does it not? I think that was one of the main reasons FOSS was started; so a homebrew hacker doesn't require shelling out $2k for a text editor!

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The benefit of open source software is clear: If I open source my text editor it can be made better by other people contributing to it.

I don't see the benefit of "open sourcing" high quality media assets. The expectation of a media asset is for it to be completed and then used as is, not continuously improved like a software product.

The Free Software/Culture stuff is also about DRY, in a sense. Say I need a picture of a stream for a project. I get my camera and drive a couple hours to the woods. Batch process the set and finally decide on one picture to use. At the end of this, fairly expensive process, I actually have 10-15 pretty good, usable pictures that I no longer am going to use (at least not in the near future). The (modern) traditional ideology is to lock those away just in case I may need a picture like that in the future.

Makeing them free to others means they don't have to repeat the same process for basically the exact same thing. Now multiply this by the 100's or thousand's of other assets that could be used in a small project.

Picture doesn't work repeatedly. Same for design and other graphical element. It gets boring after the second use, annoying as hell the third and there's no fourth time. We want to experience "new" stuff. We can already seen those kind of complain with the light reuse of some stuff in video game and movies...

In my opinion, it's actually more about the happiness you feel when you give these things away. It's doubtful you'll use them again and so why not give them away.

It's just CC, not "open source," but there are plenty of places (i.e. Flickr) where you can share your assets for others to use. I've had people contact me about using some of my photos in books they're publishing (wasn't necessary, given the CC license, but gave me a warm fuzzy and was appreciated), and I've contacted photographers about using their work for a wedding invitation I was making. But many of the kinds of things that are actually useful have the kind of specific requirements that make them not fun to create and share for free, so Shutterstock makes lots of money.

In that realm, one example I've seen pop up a lot where some kind of video needs to be shown off is "Big Buck Bunny" [1], a project to build an open movie using blender.

[1] https://peach.blender.org

I think the problem isn't so much that there isn't good open source media assets, but rather it's hard to find/filter them. One site that comes to mind that has free assets is http://opengameart.org/

One of the greatest assets there come from Kenny at kenney.nl/assets.

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