Building a database of free gamecontent?

[Hans de Goede]

Hi all,

I'm currently in the process of packaging abuse for FE. abuse's engine
is free, but its content is more problematic, there is a public domain
altenrative content set called fRaBs and the shareware data has been
released into the public domain (except for the sfx and music).

I've mailed the author and copyright holder of the sfx and music if he
is willing to release it under a suitable license, lets hope so.

But that has got me thinking, replacing the music shouldn't be too hard,
as we already have many games packaged under suitable license with some
quite ok music.

For example trackballs has a -music subpackage with some ok ogg's and
raidem too. Raidems are licensed under the Creative Commens By license
and trackballs are under GPL. Also i maintain quite a few games which
include some ok .mod's and .mid's (sometimes hidden in large package /
datafiles, but extractable).

Thus it might be worth to build a database with a list of free licensed
music for use in games, so that we can add music to games which lack it.

Much the same goes for sound effects and for textures. For example we
currently cannot distribute tremulous because it contains some non-free
textures, if we would have a database with free textures we might be
able to find some suitable replacements. In the mean time I'll try
mailing the author of those rextures again.

So is a free (game) content database a good idea? And if it is then does
anyone know some existing (preferably web-based) software to maintain
it? And if there is such software is anyone willing to build a website
with it for a free content project?

I wouldn't mind filling the database (a bit) but I'm not an
infrastructure type of person.

Regards,

Hans