Hmm. While I don't have anything against the idea in principle, there are some practical problems I can think of. And some other comments:
ihentai wrote:
So, people : Can we, and most importantly, will we create a free (as in freedom) franchise in LGPL like style license ? I thing if we succeed it will be great ! And this is what many of us need !
Firstly: "free as in freedom" doesn't mean anything. "freedom" in itself is meaningless, we don't have "freedom", we have "the freedom to <perform activity X>". Freedom is the opposite of 'cost' in some cases and the opposite of 'restriction' in others; equally, those those two words have many different meanings (monetary costs and emotional costs are both costs, forbidding restrictions and conditional restrictions are both restrictions).
The LGPL is far from
absolutely free, it still has a number of important restrictions (e.g. that derivative libraries must also be placed under the LGPL), so what
exactly are you aiming for, here? As I understand it, an absolutely-free character would need no license, only to be placed in the public domain by the creator.
I gather by the LGPL reference and the rest of your comments that you mean a character which is absolutely legally-free to
use, but restricted when
modifying, such that any modifications you make to the character fall under the same license? Whatever it is you mean, it would need firming up and laying out in specific black and white terms before it meant anything.
ihentai wrote:
* VN especially ( and many game type actually ) is a story(or heavily relying on a story). Writing of a good story is a hard problem. AND develop a bunch of characters, is very rewarding, but a true LONG process. [...]
* The power of dojinshi is not used. Yes - that power exist
. How it's work ? Simple! What dojinshi authors actually do ? They write
stories using
existing characters. So actually
characters live not in only one main story, but get existence itself, existence of his own ! They became more ALIVE !
The problem I see here is that as you note, in the majority of cases, doujinshi works use characters
which have already been established. There's an uncountable number of Type-Moon-based doujinshi manga, but they all use the characters which were established in a series of ultimately-commercial original stories. The
Touhou games have spawned a massive volume of fan work, but again - the characters were all established in a series of original works. All the fan stuff plays on the details set up by the original creator.
The word 'character'
means that set of traits and habits and quirks which makes a person unique, and this is also what it means when referring to characters in fiction. So where does that definition come from, if we create them from scratch specifically for the purpose of using them all over the place? Memorable characters work well because of their dynamic with other characters; Touhou's Sakuya is defined as much by her blind devotion to her vampire mistress as she is by the fact that she's a maid - so where does this come from, if we're planning to make the characters re-usable? I worry that by creating personalities specifically for the purpose of being used in a number of different VNs, we would end up with flat, bland, forgettable characters which nobody really cares for.
It's a fine idea, and if this fundamental problem could be worked around I probably wouldn't mind donating effort to such a cause, but I think that what we would be left with wasn't a set of 'characters' as used by doujinshi authors, but a set of 'sprites'. And while character-reuse can be compelling because the reader already has an emotional attachment to that character stemming from the original work, sprite-reuse often just annoys most people.
ihentai wrote:
Anyway, ONLY A TRY FREE SOFTWARE MUST BE used. So all people can use it as base of its own work.
This is kind of silly. Save in open
formats, sure - but if I create a PNG in Photoshop you can open it in the GIMP just fine, it's a known format that everyone can read, so there's no reason to restrict the software it comes from. Especially since - frankly - most FSF-free software is notably harder to use than commercial best-of-breed equivalents. I know I for one would rather "just not get involved" than "use the GIMP for any protracted period of time".
ihentai wrote:
* Some backgrounds and world can be created for convenience of all creators. But this first world probably will be (in the beginning) a simple anime styled Japan school. Simply because Japan school is a anime/manga common denominator.
To me, this is integral to the definition of 'character', as I mentioned above. And remember that this also seriously restricts the number of things that you can do with the character.
This in turn makes works within this franchise less interesting to anyone who isn't directly involved with its creation, because they are less likely to see something new, and they have zero emotional attachment to the characters - they're not characters they recognise from that awesome anime series that was on last year or that great game they played last week. It also makes it less interesting to creators, because there's less space to assert their creativity without breaking the canon which has already been established. Again, I'm pretty sure most doujinshi authors write fan works
because they already have an attachment to the characters rather than because they have trouble coming up with their own. Outside of a story, a character is just costume design.
Basically, we come to a catch-22 situation - we would need a critical mass of established, powerful fiction concerning those characters before enough people would be interested in using them, and we'd need people interested in using them in order to establish the critical mass of fiction.
(Not to mention that often, once people have written and defined and fleshed out their characters to that extent, they're less willing to let them be used by other people because other people will necessarily have differing ideas about their babies. Which makes it harder to persuade someone to establish that critical mass in the first place.)
On this note, look at
Magical Boutique. Monele demonstrated how people could write new events for that, and asked people if they wanted to contribute, but generally the response wasn't that great. People prefer to work on their own projects. In the end, it turned out just being the work of two people, himself and DaFool.
ihentai wrote:
* The usage license should be LGPL or GPL llke. I.e LGPL: Changes in character, their development, etc, should be available to all. So if during _you_ story using _free_ chars you create a awesome char development twist - we all can use it. But you story is you story.
I think this just won't work. As I mentioned before, the character development
is the story
is the character development. You could apply such rules to new sprites, but you'd have trouble separating what in a story constitutes 'character development' and what in a story constitutes 'just the story'.
If I write a story about character X getting pregnant, and the troubles she faces as a result of this, then it's pretty obvious that 'getting pregnant' is a fundamental and pivotal part of my story. But it's not like it's something that she's going to forget a couple of weeks later, whatever the outcome - it's going to deeply affect her for the rest of her life, so it's
also character development. So are other authors using the same character supposed to totally ignore the fact that she was once pregnant because it's part of my story and the LGPL-esque approach means that that part belongs to me, or are they supposed to be able to use that notion freely, along with any new character traits she picked up as a result, because it's part of the character?
"Hey, Sakura, I've been meaning to ask - when I knew you a year ago you were happy and bubbly, and now you're all melancholy and brooding. What's up?"
"Oh, something that I can't mention due to licensing constraints happened to me last year that deeply affected me."
"Aww. Well, if you ever want to not talk about it, you know I'm here for you, OK?"
Bear in mind that the vast majority of doujinshi works
explicitly do not obey copyright/trademark/etc. law, which is how they get around this problem. Licenses such as the GPL and LGPL are based in copyright law.
ihentai wrote:
* A guidance/style(one or many) of graphics(manga/anime like, of couse !) should be developed for using as standart/main/general in this project.
A technical problem rather than a theoretical one - different sprites by different people will look different, regardless of whether you have a style guide. It takes a more skilled artist to imitate someone else's style than it does to draw the same character in their own. So a style guide is more or less pointless, really - no two representations of the same character are going to look similar enough that they could be used alongside each other without looking odd.
ihentai wrote:
* Commercial usage should be allowed - under GPL/LGPL styled license.
. . . commercial usage and the GPL don't typically mix. GPLed software can be sold, sure, but since the vendor is required to give away the source code for free nobody would buy it, so nobody is really going to try for any length of time. What sells in GPL-software-land are things like services based on the software, support contracts and custom development, which are pretty meaningless for a VN. The LGPL has the previously-described problem of separating character from story, only with the added problem that if the story part is a commercial interest the copyright holder is likely to be more difficult about sharing.
Realistically, I think you'll find that:
- People will be pretty reluctant to let you use any previously-established characters from previous games, for artistic-integrity reasons.
- People in this community will be less inclined to create new stories with existing characters than new stories with new characters of their own.
- Characters created specifically for the purpose of being reused will be dull compared to characters created for specific stories.
- Realistically, a better model - and one for which it's far more simple to define the boundaries of licenses - would just be a repository of free-to-use artwork... which everyone has known would be a Good Thing To Have for some time, but still few examples exist.
- People will be reluctant to get involved in such a project without seeing some evidence that it's feasible. (I know I'm in this boat myself.)
But, you know - good luck, if you carry on with it. It's a nice idea, I just suspect it needs a lot of fiddling before it's that feasible.
)
