Social and technological advances make it possible for a growing part of humanity to access, create, modify, publish and distribute various kinds of works — artworks, scientific and educational materials, software, articles — in short: anything that can be represented in digital form. Many communities have formed to exercise those new possibilities and create a wealth of collectively re-usable works. *
This means to offer people the freedom to use your work and enjoy the benefits of using it, the freedom to study and to apply knowledge acquired from it, the freedom to make and redistribute copies in whole or in part, and finally the freedom to make changes and improvements and to distribute derivatives. As we highly encourage this concept, we are trying to structure projects around this principles, but in practise there appear immediate problems.
Problems?!
Most graphic design projects include copyrighted content like logos and therefore it can be difficult to release a work in its entirety under a free license. A similar problem is described when software prevents software from becoming Free software is explained as following:
Non-free software is any software that is not free. Its use, redistribution or modification is prohibited, or requires you to ask for permission, or is restricted so much that you effectively can’t do it freely. *
If you need to include logos of sponsors or something similar into a poster, you basically can’t license it under a free license. But because we deal here with modular media it’s not a problem to replace the questionable parts. Since most parts are free cultural work anyway we just need to make some substitutes. This idea is basically derived from the crosslinking of non-free libraries:
Can I write free software that uses non-free libraries?
If you do this, your program won’t be fully usable in a free environment. If your program depends on a non-free library to do a certain job, it cannot do that job in the Free World. If it depends on a non-free library to run at all, it cannot be part of a free operating system such as GNU; it is entirely off limits to the Free World. So please consider: can you find a way to get the job done without using this library? Can you write a free replacement for that library? *
Solution?!
To deal with these problems, we employ some of the mechanisms Lev Manovich describes as the Principles of New Media. First we take advantage of modularity, what means that works are structured in a way that their parts are still available as parts. We use markup language, style definitions, graphics and scripts that make up the final result and try to keep this singularities intact. The flat, undividable, static product is not the goal, but a outcome of the work. Second we try to apply automation wherever possible. Works are generated automatically, therefore it’s easier to manipulate parts, like replacing non-free graphics with free substitutes. That leads to the principle of variability, which simply means that the visual output is variable (within boundaries).
In Practise
As projects are structured highly modular it becomes easy to render free versions of works that normally incorporate non-free parts. We try keep the projects modular and make free replacements for copyrighted content.
As we separate the inputs into free and non-free we can easily separate the outputs into free and non-free by just changing a path variable before the generating process.