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.
Re:i dont know WTF is this.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I have another idea (Score:3, Informative)
U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO
The best part of the scam... (Score:5, Informative)
How we'll use the funds
We're calculating work time at roughly $20 per work hour for Tohyama, which is lower than what we usually bill him at. Even then half of that rate will go to paying Scroll Ninja lead developer Iwakawa so he can continue working on Scroll Ninja... since we didn't get funded but want to continue anyway
So half of your money won't even go to the project!
Re:There's a reason there isn't a Free Emoji. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Emoticons are already free and open source. (Score:4, Informative)
> The point of emoticons are that they are simple ASCII text
And they date back even further. The Ascii ones were derived from the various Teleprinter emoticons (Baudot code, etc),
which in turn came from the Morse equivalents ("HI" for hilarity, 73, 88, etc).
The "boom boom" used in comedy shows, possibly came from the "dit dit" used by Morse operators for exactly the same purpose.
No doubt bored Semaphore operators invented their own variations as well.
Re:License (Score:4, Informative)
Three licenses because there's different ways to distribute it - as source (SVG, scripts), as images (heavy implied copyright) and as a font (f*ing insane restrictions because people who create fonts are evil bastards). The three licenses gets rid of the restrictions despite how you use it.
If there was one license that covered all coditions I would have used that.
Re:There's a reason there isn't a Free Emoji. (Score:4, Informative)
This is a glyph set, they are not full emoji. The difference is that these are a true font - the only information is outline and fill, they are not multi-colored images.
Re:Hows that a scam (Score:2, Informative)
Scroll Ninja is open source (source available on github) and we believe it failed because we didn't build up enough PR - and part of that is because we didn't have enough of it completed to show off. We'll be re-launching it but we want to have it more completed before re-launch. Figuring doing in OSS project for a flat rate would be something people would approve of we did this.
You are correct, the rate will be roughly $10 an hour for each of them. Consider that this is well below market rate and that there will not be any residual profits off of the emoji.
We are trying to be honest in how we will spend the money and that's why we wrote exactly how we would use it. Would you rather we said "hey, we're spending all the money just to pay Tohyama to make these" than "we're going to give everyone something for free and in exchange we're trying to cost-effectively build ourselves a future". Either way you're getting high quality graphics for below market rate.