For the tl;dr crowd–rest assured, I'm not having second thoughts about giving away my skin PSDs, especially now that Sezmra's also doing it. I'm just on a too-much-coffee rant
For everyone else who's still reading...
Annyka Bekkers's comment Sezmra's blog has totally been echoing in my head the past few weeks:
Quote:
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I would hate to see yet more legions of "Instant Skin Business-Just Add Water" popping up like mushrooms all over the grid. Its tough enough making an honest go of it as it is.
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So I've been going out of my mind on how to fix this "Instant Skin Busness-Just Add Water" problem without hampering everyone else who doesn't want to just make some quick L$ off my PSDs.
One possible solution is some sorta economic "
scorched earth"–where I'd stagger the release of my skins (for free) in-world before the release of my PSDs online by a period of several weeks to months. Ideally, this would make future sales (over L$0) of any identical or minimally-modded skins in-world economically infeasible.
Alternatively, I've been thinking about switching over to only distributing my skins in AI format
via GitHub. This introduces two barriers to entry: git and Adobe Illustrator–both of which require some technical know-how and effort before you can get something that's usable as an in-world skin.
The problem is I really don't like either of them, because ultimately they both still hurt everyone else who isn't looking for a quick business opportunity. Additionally both solutions only add more "ingredients" to the "Just-Add-Water" aspect (time in the former, technical details in the latter).
So I'm just wondering if anyone's got any advice, insight, or ideas?
(P.S. I've already considered the alternative dismissive arguments as well: (1) I've already opened Pandora's box with my earlier/existing PSDs and there's nothing I can do now... 
(2) can't please all of the people all of the time)