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.
Emoticons are already free and open source. (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I understand that I'm old and grumpy, but . . .
The point of emoticons are that they are simple ASCII text that convey basic emotional context. Emoji are not "emoticons". They're just tiny pictures. Are you seriously telling me that a tiny picture of a whale is in any way related to an emoticon? You know how you can tell these have no relation to emoticons? Because their ultimate stretch goal in the kickstarter is to create more than 800 of the little images and I'm pretty sure there aren't 800 emotions on which to base emoticons. Let's just call them "tiny little pictures for children to use on their phones and in forum messages to be obnoxious".
I'll help fund a kickstarter that aims to eradicate every form of chat of these annoying things. I used to have forums where people would use these constantly. Since I didn't include them by default, they used these idiotic services that let them embed emoticons on any website forum, as long as you also spammed their banner while you were doing it. I quickly wrote some code to filter all of that out, too.
License (Score:1, Insightful)
Our licensing model will be the same as the Font Awesome project which is a combination of the SIL Open Font License, MIT License and the CC 3.0 License.
Seriously? You can't pick one simple license, its got to be 3?
You guys and you're "freedom". It does not mean what you think it does. More freedom pretty much explicitly requires LESS license, not more.
Software licenses are the opposite of freedom. They define a list of restrictions.
If you want it to be 'free', then just BSD license it (MIT is fine since its in your list) and fucking stop.
Multi-license crap is only for when you're trying to deal with some retarded license like GPL and its purpose built anti-compatibility/virus license being included in your project.
If you think you need three license options to define freedom you do not in any way understand the meaning of freedom and you're just warping it around to mean restrictions.
Re:License (Score:2, Insightful)
You guys and you're "freedom". It does not mean what you think it does. More freedom pretty much explicitly requires LESS license, not more.
licence, n - 1. a certificate, tag, document, etc, giving official permission to do something [reference.com]
Less licence = less permission given = less freedom
Software licenses are the opposite of freedom. They define a list of restrictions.
Copyright law defines restrictions, licences relax those restrictions to a greater or lesser extent.
Hows that a scam (Score:2, Insightful)
So half of your money won't even go to the project!
That is not a scam that is business model [in fact its most business models]. My favourite example of this is Apple make no iPhones...not one; zero; zilch; nada. They get about 40% Net profit on their phones....Foxconn who do the building make 2% profit.
The reality is if they are not dependent on one stream of revenue...both projects are more likely to succeed.
Re:Hows that a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
If the project was desired it should have been able to get funded on it's own. To force it on an unrelated project to me seems dishonest.
I know we don't like it when Congress sneaks things in like that, and I know that if I spent half my work time or budget working on a project that was canceled that I just really wanted to see finished anyways, it wouldn't go over to well either.
The slippery ninja should be able to stand on it's own two feet, not ride on the back of something they feel might have a (better) chance of succeeding after it wasn't successful on it's own.
It could also cost them investors, and ruin their chance to get this project funded. The two are completely unrelated and someone who wants cute smileys might not want a previously failed ninja side scroller.
It also makes me wonder if they are paying them $10 an hour each or $20, and how much the icons really cost.
Is the source code or binary of the game going to be released for free as well, or are they going to sell it and make money off a project for a free product?
Cheers!