Won’t this get a lot of bad art/code into the archives or Free Software distro repositories?
Probably. But bad art abounds anyway. The focus is in getting all art conserved so historians and scholars of the future will be able to understand software art. The purpose of a Free-Software-Art project is not to make a canon, or to select “good” art and have that preserved. The purpose is to allow all Software Art to get produced, distributed and conserved, and let Art History sort the good from the bad. Your examples are not the ones I would use! I know of more canonical Software Art! Earlier drafts of this paper used the word “canonical” to refer to my examples (see Terms and Conventions). By “canonical” I never intended to mean “belonging to an artistic-historical Canon”. I meant “standing for all that share the same characteristics”. The main characteristic of the software packages listed, apart from their Software-Art-ness, is that they are under a Free license, and they do not depend on non-free code. Many works of art could be released under a Free license but still not be fr
