You make no mention of licensing. "FREE!" =/= Free.

I don't want people to get the impression that non-open-source licenseing is a problem; that said, if you're asking people to do art for free, you might have an easier time convincing them (at least in this community) if your project is free and open source.

Just to be clear, while we certainly encourage people to open source their games, indie game devs are more than welcome here.  I would appreciate if people not imply otherwise in comments.

free == FREE

If a brewer gives you a free beer, you don't demand for his brewery.

I hope.

I got discouraged from joining some other gamedev community that is very FOSS oriented to the point of harassing people who use proprietary software to make their games...

Anyway, I like the art even as is :)

Freedom is not to ask for brewery, its asking how you brew that beer. That said, here we dont bash the brewer for distributing his beer for free without telling his recipe. But if we knew how its brewed, there is a better chance that we would help. Who knows, may be that beer is made from the blood of the assistants :)

There's free as in no cost, and free as in freedom - not taking a point of view, but it's important to note that these are two distinct meanings of the same word. Furthermore, "Free Software" (as a term in itself - note the capitals - rather than the literal meaning of software that's free) often refers to that as defined by the FSF (similar to "Open Source" being that defined by the OSI).

I agree with bart's first reply. There are plenty of Free art licences that allow usage with non-Free software (indeed, possibly most of them), so there's not really a problem. But there might be the practical point that some people on this site may be more willing to create art for Free / Open Source games.

@mainsworthy: free is ambiguous in English. Thats why libre term is getting popular. Its not about money, its about freedom, thus the saying free as in freedom, not as in free beer. Open source software is alot different from libre software in terms that the latter allow distribution and modification. Where as open source software can be restricted as you have stated. 

Its not about your case mainsworthy, its perfectly ok not to give away the code. I am just pointing out what a free software really is. 

PS: GCC, GIMP, Blender all are free. Ok, may be GIMP lacks a bit compared to Photoshop, but Blender is as good as any commercial 3D software and GCC is far superior compared to Visual Studio.

Yes, I don't think anyone is saying you should open your source.

Having said that though - noting you say "but when Ive finished and cleaned the code maybe I will open it up", I would say it is a good thing to release source if you've no reason to keep it closed. I know that one fear is that people will unhelpfully criticise the code - this used to be one of my worries - but I've never had anyone do this. It's a good thing to clean up source, but that's true whether it's open or closed, for your own benefit :)

Some of the benefits of open source are: allowing other people to more easily spot problems (if the people reporting bugs are also programmers); other people might port to other platforms; more interest from sites that cover Open Source games; being able to use various free hosting sites available for Open Source (e.g., Sourceforge, Google Code); easy backup for your source (the online source or repository is your online backup).

@cemkalyoncu: "Open source software is alot different from libre software in terms that the latter allow distribution and modification. Where as open source software can be restricted as you have stated. "

I don't think that's true. Both Free Software and Open Source cover more liberal licences like BSD - I think you're describing the difference between copyleft and non-copyleft. There is a difference in philosophy between Free Software and Open Source, though it's actually the Free Software Foundation that puts more emphasis on copyleft licences like the GPL (which they wrote) to preserve freedom for users; the Free Software movement also seems more focused on the ethics of software. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/276957/the-difference-between-free-so... for some discussion and links. In practice, the list of licences they each count as Free/Open seem pretty similar.

@mainsworthy: "open source isnt free, you may have to buy a licence even though its open source"

This would apply say, if it was a copyleft licence like GPL, but you wanted to distribute under different terms - in some cases, you can buy a licence with those rights (e.g., Qt is available under the Free LGPL, as well as a commercial licence). In other cases, you can't at all. Is that what you were thinking of? 

"where does it end though, The game and source code I could give away free, but the compiler costs money has to be bought! so free software also limits your freedom of compilers, and graphics software!"

The issue is freedom rather than cost.

Yes, it's true that one can produce an Open Source program that still requires a closed source compiler to build, or a closed source operating system to run. I think there are various answers to this:

* The Free Software community have provided a Free set of tools, including graphics software, compilers, and even a complete operating system. The FSF might prefer that people write Free Software purely with Free tools, for Free platforms, but I guess there's a pragmatic view that Free Software on closed source platforms is still better than closed source software on closed source platforms.

* For people who release as Open Source, either for the benefits I list above, or because they believe it's right, that doesn't necessarily mean they believe every software must be Open Source (this is closer to my point of view - I develop on Windows and often use Visual Studio - porting to Linux is more because it gets more interest, than out of ethical considerations). Still, there is the practical point of view that you'll probably get more interest if people can compile and work on the problem with free (as in no cost) tools. But then, even closed source programs like Visual Studio Express and Paint.NET are no cost :) (And these days, the compiler differences between VC and GCC are fairly small.) I don't know what language you used - is it something that people would have to pay to get a compiler for?