New texture-sharing group on Flickr

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TexturesFolks regularly share textures in the various Google Plus communities, and I’ve long wished that there was a place I could go to look through them all, instead of having to download them the minute I see them because I might not find them again.

In particular, I want a place to share CC0, or public domain licensed, textures. That’s the license under which Linda Kellie released her work, and it’s the most useful for builders.

With other Creative Commons license types, such as CC-BY and CC-NC, you have to keep track of each texture to make sure that you don’t use them in violation of the license terms.

CC-NC content, for example, is only for non-commercial use. That means that you might not be allowed to use it in a way that could be construed as benefitting a commercial grid. And you certainly can’t use it for making content that you plan to sell.

CC-BY content requires that you keep track of the creator of the content, and make sure that the creator gets credit. That can quickly become a bookkeeping nightmare if you have lots of different CC-BY textures in your build.

I understand the motivation behind both of these licenses — creators who donate their work to the public sometimes don’t want to see it show up in commercial projects. And its understandable that creators want to get credit for their work.

Personally, however, I want to see OpenSim grow and develop, and that means making as much content available as possible. And that includes helping commercial creators make stuff for sale.

And just because you’re not using the CC-BY license doesn’t mean that you don’t get credit for your work. Lots of people are extremely grateful to Linda Kellie, for example. Sure, there’s plenty of content out there based on her work that does have her name on it. But plenty of people do find ways to give her credit in other forms, and the user-friendly license terms means that a lot more people can use her content without worrying about violating license terms.

New Flickr group: CC0 Textures

At first, I thought about setting up a photo section on the Hypergrid Business website, or waiting for one of the planned content sharing sites to come online.

But managing photos is a bit different from managing generic virtual content, and requires some specialized tools. Plus, there is already a great free platform out there for sharing images, with lots of searching and filtering tools already built in.

So I’ve set up a new public group, CC0 Textures, that anyone can contribute to, or download images from.

I’ve uploaded all of my own textures to this group, plus all the Linda Kellie textures I could find.

To add photos or textures to the group, please:

Under “Permissions”:

  • Allow anyone to see, comment, and add tags
  • Set the license type to “Public Domain Dedication (CC0)”
Maria Korolov
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