pyalot

However not for legally sound derivation.

Wrong, legally you can't do anything with the content. You can't modify and you can't redistribute it or anything. You're gonna exist in a legal grey zone in which ID has the right to sue you at any time, this is not good.

You're comparing interactive art to painting, which is a flawed analogy. This isn't about cheap, or free, and it's only cursory about freedom. It's about that in order to curate digital history, you have to be able to redistribute it, and to be able to keep the software running.

What is it that you do not understand about freedom?

It does not miss the point. And I'm not looking for the game, it's not that the only use of assets+source in freedom form would be able to play the game (that is one side-effect).

- Curation history is crippled: Games are a piece of cultural history, and if you care about curating that history, then a complete release is important.

- Learning/Derivation is crippeled: Releasing works is about being able to learn and derive from them and to release what you've done with it. There are more kinds of people than coders, and there is more to a game than code. You can learn and tweak assets in many meaningful ways as well.

- Practice of Culture is crippled: Derivation is also about re-contextualization and remixing. Code can be remixed by programmers, and by programmers only. However sometimes remixes of content are interesting, for instance as a total-conversion of the code to something completely different (webgl for instance) or by re-contextualizing the assets entirely (you could make it props in your next CG movie).

It's not about getting something for cheap. It's about being able to make derivations and incrementally tweak things. It's about that not having any base tweak makes it quite hard for both Artists and Coders. It's about that there's many ways that things could be tweaked that would be fun, but if you're beset by a wish to do that you're gonna spend a year creating art for a total conversion. It's about that culture in games is not code, it's assets as well, and if the assets aren't released, they're lost and never to be derivable of, because of the perpetual copyright crap.

No assets released, which is a problem for the following reasons:

- Piece of history lost

- Makes it harder to boot up anything because not a complete, running application.

- Derivatives of the art are impossible

- Artists will have a hard time starting to tweak things, because there's nothing to tweak.

- Coders will despair trying to provide even a basic set of art (because we're usually crap at art) so they could start poking at the code.

Sadly, this "here you have the source, off you go" thing seems to be very prevalent, and it always irks the hell out of me.

If you don't want to release everything, alright, that's workable. But something, at least some basic art, say the first level or whatever suits you. I don't get it why that should be a bad thing. I also don't get why people seem to think that idea is bad.