[tde-devels] Re: Mascot Contest submission -- Tristian

In my humble opinion, a web form on the TDE website is the best option. It is an ideal way to organize the submission of proposals, it allows to establish mandatory fields such as real name and email (without being publicly visible) and to accept some minimum legal conditions (basically: that the person declares that it is his original work and has not been transferred to anyone, that this work has not been or is not used as a recognizable image by another initiative, project or organization, and that the person freely and completely gives it to TDE for free and without any condition beyond the cite of the original creator -the name or pseudonym of the author's choice- on the TDE website). (The real name is for legal reasons associated with the minimum legal conditions). An additional requirement is the format: Source or editable format (Blender .blend, Inkscape .svg, GIMP .xcf,...) must be provided, not only the export to image, because the mascot must be integrated with the logo and other artwork of the project, now and in the future.

I add (I forgot) Inkscape to the enumeration. Double benefits: * It opens the doors of participation to a much larger community. There are many people who have fun drawing with Blender/Inkscape/Krita/GIMP just for leisure and even if they are not TDE users they will be very happy that their leisure creation is useful for a free software project. * The advertisement itself serves as publicity for the project: it makes the project known to free software users who are not aware of its existence (or who assume that this KDE-3 fork must have died because years later it is not in the Debian repo). There will be people that even if they do not participate with pet drawings, they will be curious about this unknown desktop environment and it is possible that a percentage of people will even be encouraged to use it and/or make some mention or article in their circles. Although there are people who are very committed to TDE and who do it very well, the small number of people actively involved in its development is a danger to the medium-term survival of TDE. Increasing the number of people is good for TDE. I don't want you to stop being who you are, but more human power in TDE is good. For example, I have reported again in the "new" bug tracker (gitea) the historical quanta bug VPL with the accents in VPL, quanta is the best free HTML editor that exists and it is a pain when I teach HTML learning courses to warn the students to avoid the accents error in VPL, I have clear that fixing this bug pending for many years is due to the lack of people and time to do it but Slavek and company can only thank you for the voluntary work you do to keep this alive.

4) I agree. I suggest not to put additional conditions to the mascot design. Personally if someone submits a nice dragon, it probably will win my heart. But I think every artist should be free to design the mascot they want and the TDE community should be free to choose a mascot other than a dragon. Maybe the new mascot will be a bear, an arctic fox, a parrot or a frog (there are blue parrots and frogs if you care about color) and we will be very happy. If it's the name, there are already legendary dragons like the (Babylonian) Tiamat and the (Chinese) Tianlong, which we can affectionately call Ti ;)