Comment 4 for bug 386797

To quote: "To me the nr 1. challenge/problem is that “we” the open source people more or less cracked the problem of distributed code development. It's all text based and a lot of focus and effort has been put into that “way” of working. But it's different for content, as you cannot “diff” a picture or a blender file. Distributed content development is a pain in the ass. Spring has loads of content but it's very difficult to get a distributed team to work on integrating all this into one style that can compete with commercial games.

There is progress, the creative commons licenses makes it easier to do things as the GPL and other traditional licenses are to much focused on code. Broadband internet makes it easier to send around large binary source files. The 3D drivers for Linux are improving.. Gimp actually starts to get useful so artists are more open to the idea to look beyond Photoshop for a second. Wings3D is stable enough and useful enough to get people modelling. And Ton is finally committing himself to a gui rewrite for Blender. All these things used to be big blockers but it's still not practical to start a distributed content development project.

The only real successful open source content projects are “Elephants Dream”, “Big Bug Bunny” and “Yo Franky!”. But that involved getting 10+ people together for 6 months to work on a project. And even then they had problems managing the content files. They were using svn but had to use a small webapp to keep track who was editing what files.
A service like launchpad would need “a lot” of work to make it practical to develop content in the same way as it's possible to develop code. Your constantly running into/pushing the envelope. Dpkg repository's are not designed to cope with "source" files of many gigabytes. "