Open Source Emoji Project Wants Money For Icons 156
Kagetsuki writes "There's a project on KickStarter for a Free and Open set of emoji [the graphical emoticon glyph set which has a block reserved in Unicode]. Currently there are no full sets of Emoji that are completely free (as in beer and and freedom), so if this project gets funded it will be the first and only set of emoji that can, say, be distributed with FLOSS Linux/BSD/GNU systems. Not to mention anyone will be able to incorporate them into any project without any restrictive conditions."
And lest you think emoji devoid of literary value, reader coondoggie points out that the Library of Congress has just welcomed (or at least allowed) onto its vaunted shelves an all-emoji version of Melville's Moby Dick, created with the help of translators working through Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Crazy (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a reason there isn't a Free Emoji. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the Japanese.
The Japanese are incredible copyright grubbers. When they let lose their pictures of the moon, when they tried to recreate the Apollo pics, they had JAXA and NHK copyright notices on the pictures so big they actually detracted from the pictures. I've worked with documentation handed to me by Japanese clients that was so water-marked I could barely read the poorly written instructions contained on it.
The overall Japanese mindset is the opposite of the Free and Open Source community. If their own people would put the effort into making an actual Emoji set for their own language it would take less work to get others on-board with making these toy versions.
Re:i dont know WTF is this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Aw jeez. Maybe should pitch in and find these guys some jobs.
You want to support the free exchange of information online? Give your money to the EFF instead where it can do something worthwhile.
Bloat (Score:3, Interesting)
Every so often something like this comes along to remind me of just how ridiculously bloated UTF-8 is. If you open up a character viewer and browse through the character sets you will quickly find a load of completely miscellaneous symbol sets that are restricted in use to very tiny niches. Wtf is the point? Who decided that just because UTF-8 can represent a large number of characters it should be filled with every character that's ever been used by more than 5 people?
Go on, explain to me why it's reasonable to use up character slots for parenthesized numbers and letters (0x2474-0x2487, 0x249c-0x24b5) or why you need multiple snowflake characters (0x2731-0x274b). It's just bloat that requires fonts to implement extra, useless symbols.
Restrict the standard to characters in officially recognized languages and provide escape sequences to switch to embeddable encodings for niche characters that most of us will never even see. It's meant to provide a universal character set for writing text in different languages, not serve as an anthropological archive of humankind's digital semiotics or a toolbox for people with too much time on their hands to try to be cute.
Someone press the reset button so we can start over without all of this extra crap. And then get off my lawn!
What about autism? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if literary works with emoji glyphs in them such as the mentioned Moby Dick would be helpful to people or children with autism.