Hiring Artists for Open Source Projects?

MikeFM asks: "What is the best way for an Open Source developer to hire artists to provide graphics, music, and other artwork for Open Source projects? I need to hire such people and I'm not sure where to go or how best to spell out the terms of the contract so that it's okay to release the works for hire as Open Source. I'm willing to pay but can't afford to pay a lot. It seems to me that providing artwork for an Open Source project sounds like great exposure to art students and artists still early in their career but how do I find these people? I've posted ads in the local schools and art stores.. what else can I do?"

Comments

Hiring involves Money

[Stone Rhino]

Even the starving artist needs food and money for said food sometime. If your artist is going to be producing "Works for hire," it doesn't matter if it's an opensource project or not--the copyright law is the same. If you're asking for people to chip in labor for free, then they will still own the copyright on their own work and have to be willing to hand it over to your project.

There are plenty of people here offering suggestions on where to find free labor, but if you actually hire someone, then you can do whatever the hell you want with the work they've done--opensource it, burn it, throw it to the dogs--it's no different from source code.

Re:The shortcut:

[sakusha]

Yeah, this is exactly the response they always get from employers who discover their job offer is listed on FTJ. Usually it's some asshole offers minimum wage for a job involving design, programming, and sys engineering, and when called out on it, they ALWAYS reply "I've already got a whole bunch of people who applied and are happy to find work at $5.15/hr with no benefits. If that's too low for you then there's always someone who will do the work for the price I want to pay."

What you are failing to realize is that anyone who can do your art and design work does not need to practice, they already have the skills. Your offer is known in the business press as "the race to the bottom" or "walmartization," you're trying to convince people that their work is worth less because there's always some guy who will do it cheaper. So go find them. Hint: try free clip art.

I disagree

[Tom7]

I beg to differ. You could level the same argument against computer programmers, yet there is a huge amount of free labor to be found from hobbyist programmers, even ones who are professionals and have loads of experience. Many people just like to be involved in fun projects, and some people feel a strong social commitment to "open source" or "free software" or even "free art."

Personally (as artist and programmer!) I prefer to work on my own projects, but if the project were cool enough, I wouldn't feel cheated to work on it for no pay.

OLA - Open License Art

[wcb4]

Perhaps some well meaning geek on slashdot could develop a site where people looking for artistic talent could list what exactly they were looking for (CG folks, musicians, etc), what kind of project (game or app), what type of compensation they can offer (fame?, or a few sheckles) and some details about what they envision, and "artists" who have registered with the site can just click a link and their details are emailed to the contact for the project, or even better, artists who register could receive automatic emails if a new project is entered that matches their skill set (pick list of your skills and type of project/compensation you prefer). I would not imagine that this would take longer than a good weekend.

Perhaps some OSS advocates with a server could even host it for free, I also can't imagine that it would take a particularly large amount of resources.