Guus Sliepen

Open source games are even more open source if not only the source of the game engine itself is available, but also all the other assets, such as sprites, samples, soundtracks et cetera also have their source available. What is source in the context of multimedia assets? And how can we create those assets in a more source-like way?

In this talk I will briefly point out the importance of source code, and why this is also important for multimedia assets. I will show some file types, and discuss whether or not they are source, and if not what would be their source. Finally, I'll give a real example of creating music in the way a programmer would write C or Python code, and compile the source of this music with a makefile into an Ogg Vorbis file. I hope this will bring more awareness about the need for source code of multimedia to game developers, and hopefully it will inspire others, including programmers that think they are not artistic, to create those assets, to share them, and to be able to learn from and modify them.

Part of our job as package maintainers in various distributions is to ensure the binary packages can be built from the corresponding source code. This is often a requirement, either from a distribution's own policies (eg, the DFSG for Debian), or from the license of the upstream package (eg, the GPL). But although we are used to seeing .c and .py files as source, we sometimes forget that our packages are built from many other files for which we also must make the source available.

In this talk I will explain why we require source code in the first place; without the availability of source code, the whole free software ecosystem would not exist. I will also describe file types that we sometimes forget to see as source, or which are considered binary but we forget to include the source code for. This includes documentation, build scripts, files generated at build time by various programs, fonts, multimedia such as sound, music, images and even video. I will also describe various problems we can encounter when trying to determine what the actual source is, and that even if we know what the source is, that it is sometimes creates practical problems for distributions to include all of it.