Software people love writing software to a degree where they’ll just give it away. You just won’t find artists doing the same at the same scale. Or architects, or structural engineers. Maybe the closest are some boat designs but even those are accidental.
It might just be that we were lucky to have some Stallmans in this field early.
Ego is likely involved. I love my babies, but what others think of my work isn't that important (which is good, because others aren't very impressed).
I make tools that I use, mostly.
I think this is because there are plenty of software nerds with an interest in typography who want to see more free fonts available.
Not sure how that happens with a painting, even a digital one.
But professional graphic designers, train to work in product-focused teams. They also are able to create collaborative suites of deliverables.
Most developers will find utility in the work of graphic designers, as opposed to fine artists.
But more importantly, most of them don't really care beyond "oh copyright's the thing that lets me sue big company man[0]".
The real impediment to CC-licensed creative works is that creativity resists standardization. The reason why we have https://xkcd.com/2347/ is because software wants to be standardized; it's not really a creative work no matter what CONTU says. You can have an OS kernel project's development funded entirely off the back of people who need "this thing but a little different". You can't do the same for creativity, because the vast majority of creative works are one-and-done. You make it, you sell it, and it's done. Maybe you make sequels, or prequels, or spinoffs, but all of those are going to be entirely new stories maybe using some of the same characters or settings.
[0] Which itself is legally ignorant because the cost of maintaining a lawsuit against a legal behemoth is huge even if you're entirely in the right
Another thing is that the vast amount of fan fiction out there has a hub-and-spoke model forming an S_n graph around the solitary 'original work' and there are community norms around not 'appropriating' characters and so on, but you're right that community works like the SCP Foundation definitely show that software-like property of remixing of open work.
Anyway, all to say I liked your comment very much but couldn't reply because you seem to have been accidentally hellbanned some short while ago. All of your comments are pretty good, so I reached out to the HN guys and they fixed it up (and confirmed it was a false positive). If you haven't seen people engage with what you're saying, it was a technical issue not a quality issue, so I hope you'll keep posting because this is stuff I like reading on HN. And if you have a blog with an RSS feed or something, it would be cool to see it on your profile.
OH MY FUCKING GOD THANK YOU. As far as I remember, I got 'disappeared' off HN right after some major upgrade in August, but it never got fixed, so I just assumed someone at YC was pissed off about something I said about (insert authoritarian dictator here).
Graphic artists are creating graphics editors (Gimp, Krita, Blender, ComfyUI, etc.) with tons of options.
