Freebies textures business in Second Life

For the texture hunters the Internet is a huge treasure. If you know where to look you will find tons of good textures, backgrounds, wallpapers no restriction to use.

That made  some people in SLvery happy. They hurry up to make money by reselling internet freebies.

Some of them have the decency to put only the upload price, but others sell them up to 5 or 6 times the price. So instead paying 10 Lindeni for a single texture - that is the price to upload an image in SL -, you pay 50 L; and because are not sold as single textures you have to buy an entire pack and spend more money.

For example, the "Grayscale natural grunge" pack you see in the image bellow contains 6 textures and it is sold in SL for 300 L, that is more than 1 dollar.

The same textures you can download for free from the site webtreats.mysitemyway.com - see the second photo.

Actually, one SL merchant kept the title and the content, changing only the logo and the author name, and  wrote in the description that you can not share them or resale them as textures. He is wrong. Actually you can do that because the textures and the patterns from webtreats are "free to use in both personal and commercial projects", as is clearly specified in "Usage and attributions".

This SL merchant - you can easy find out who he is browsing Marketplace - sells a large selection of webtreats textures, especially grunge - and is not the only one. Two other merchants sell both the same Medieval cottage textures taken from Genetica site and another big Photoshop backgrounds collection.

One SL seller has downloaded his products from http://www.heroturko.org/ and other sites. Compare the "Dark & sweet" pack for sale on Marketplace and the Collection of gothic backgrounds for Photoshop on heroturko.org and you will see that many are identical. At least this merchant does not charge you more than the upload price and does not put any restriction to use. Pretty fair.

I'm not 100% original neither. I also use photoshop resources made by others, like brushes, patterns, shapes or even textures, but I integrate them in my work. They are meant to be used for creating original textures, like textures are meant to be used in a build. Between a brush applied on a layer and the final texture it is a long way, and what you see at the end express me and nobody else.

In SL are some great professional textures designers. I respect them and I admire their work. Buy from them and browse the Internet for little treasures. Soon you will be very rich.

This is my treat, a Gothic Valentine card for all who love the dark side. Click on and save it.