Everyone is familiar with the concept of an entertainment franchise -- Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Dr. Who. But what if there was a franchise that belonged to fans? That is the concept behind ROSECODE and the Open Franchise for Creators (OFC). ROSECODE is an interactive cyberpunk thriller created and produced by a small team of writers, artists, and programmers. Our goal is to create a new blueprint for collaboration between technical and creative competencies.

Whether you are talking UI, UX, sticker design, logo design, theming, or just plain design, it is a truism that right-brained competencies are in short supply in the FOSS world. This is is also often true in the world of open source games. Many programmers would love to work with talented artists and creatives, but creatives often find that the pickings are slim. They are brought in too late, to do too little, and they find they are unable to produce a design or user experience that lives up to their own standards of quality and workmanship.

Built from the existing Creative Commons framework, the Open Franchise for Creators provides an alternative model where technical and and creative collaborate from the get-go, to produce stories and myth of stunning quality and originality. The goal is to expand the existing FOSS repo model to encompass contributions such as character descriptions, plot lines, continuity checks, story arcs, illustrations, video, animation, and incidental music. Currently Creative Commons provides licenses applicable to all of the above, but it is designed as a framework for individual artist contributions, rather than collaborations. The tiered model presented in ROSECODE is a simple, yet practical way to establish a "repo for artists" (and programmers) that allows the original creative team to widen and reach out to new contributors as the project matures and evolves. The OFC model is compatible with a variety of funding structures or no funding at all; the model's greatest strength is that new people can join over time and become stakeholders.

See "Why Code Makes Money and Content Doesn't", published in Hacker Noon, for an in-depth discussion of this paradigm.