How Do You Open Source Animation and code?

danmm asks: "Recently, I've been trying to combine clip-art-style illustration with animating code into GUI components within Macromedia Flash (for distribution as an .mxp file via the company's Exchange site). Now, I'd like to start open-sourcing some of these things -- but this is a matter of curiousity: how does one open-source an amalgam of creative (art) content and software code? How's it different from pure code? If anyone is curious, my project is located here"

Re:Give the art, GPL the code

[danmm]

BBK -- thanks for the response. But when code and visual communications become entwined, you can't just chuck the art and keep the code. You can't just gut the bunny and steal the energizer. The two are mixed up too closely. A command to "raise arm" inherently involves just as much visual instructions and creativity as code instructions and creativity. And that gets to my point: as visual assets become more complex in their representation and responsiveness over time (thanks to embedded code and a creative decisions on how those visual assets use communicate information from that code and from a user), they start to look like a new form of programming. We're not talking linear artifacts like a disney animation. Heck, already people are dragging-n-dropping variables to table columns without nary a keypress or line of code, relying only on information communicated via a particular widget's blink-and-change. A coder makes a java module that manipulates data in a certain way, and then, with an OSS spirit, releases it and allows others to modify the code, or inherit and extend it. An animator/developer creates a visual icon with a bunch of methods for communicating certain information based on programmable internal and external states, and then releases that artifact for others to modify and extend -- others can manipulate the graphic way of expressing information as well as the internal expression. Granted, my icons just do stupid stuff. But someday, batman. Someday. I guess I just want to know what it would look like if you had a set of code-rich widgets and you decided to inherit from one. How would you modify the visual as well as the code? Do you have access modifiers for each way a visual artifact operates?