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Open Source Emoji Project Wants Money For Icons
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.
Can I pay money so that they don't do this project.
F**king emoticons.
..therefore, it sounds entirely supportable.
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.
They want 40$ per icon with the majority of elements reused between icons... Even if Emoji made sense as a thing (and I'm not convinced it does) their asking price is way to high.
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.
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Everyone wants to get paid to doodle little icons. It's the American dream. I fully support this overt waste of time a resources.
Is there a KickStarter to make these go away?
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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!
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.
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.
How about you stop quoting Fear and Doubt, over a license that does not directly benefit your preferred mega-corporation. Its kind of sad. I'm glad BSD rescued Apple I do, but seriously its depressing, we all know why Apple choose BSD for their limited [often one way takes] from open source projects. The reality is GPL was designed to protect itself from the very abuse of the license you want, and I for one am grateful for that. Seriously Apple has enough cash, seriously there is no need for subterfuge any more.
How we'll use the funds
We're calculating work time at roughly $20 per work hour for Tohyama, which is lower than what we usually bill him at. Even then half of that rate will go to paying Scroll Ninja lead developer Iwakawa so he can continue working on Scroll Ninja... since we didn't get funded but want to continue anyway
So half of your money won't even go to the project!
I really quite like this project, but love the use [not overuse] of emotions I am actually quite taken with the example Emoji, the examples are all based on a circle [for a simple face] its true, but if you look http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji which covers Tansport/Maps/Symbols and Pictographs. I'm confident I could do a smiley face...but a Pine Decoration or Trumpet not so much. Personally I'd love this project this project to succeed simply because it contains the symbols hot beverage & shortcake.
So half of your money won't even go to the project!
That is not a scam that is business model [in fact its most business models]. My favourite example of this is Apple make no iPhones...not one; zero; zilch; nada. They get about 40% Net profit on their phones....Foxconn who do the building make 2% profit.
The reality is if they are not dependent on one stream of revenue...both projects are more likely to succeed.
They want 40$ per icon
If that is really is low, you could undercut them. Kickstarter would be an incredibly safe way to do so.
is another mans treasure....II have finally found reasons for Unicode...the Backward N in Nine Inch Nails; The Lightning in AC/DC my MP3 collection is finally complete
If the project team has multiple projects, and its fixed costs can be shared amongst them great, if they manage to produce the final product below the cost of production great...that is profit its what kickstarter is about.
If you truly believe they are being dishonest [I personally believe what they are doing is a great idea] then to undercut them, is trivial.
I'm a little concerned that your talking about congress [they have one source of income you] and funding unrelated projects [hey they have multiple kickstarters]. Its you that looking dishonest.
There are quite a few serious potential pitfalls from running simultaneous projects at once for a small team, but you are not highlighting them simply demonising them.
If Apple was going to take half the cost of your itoy (or perhaps double the cost of it so they could make the Apple Lisa the success it should have been, would their investors be all for it?
Things fail for a reason.
Your quote is Ironic for a couple of reasons, Even Apple has a diverse portfolio [iPod, IPhone, IPad, Advertising, Selling Content, Selling Search Defaults, OSX [other software], iMac], but its investors have wiped 35% of its value in the last 6 Months because its too reliant on its iPhone.
1990 called, It wants it's Wingdings back.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Android does not appear to have a standard set of emoji, which is what prevented my wife and I from switching from iPhone to Android. We enjoy texting those funny little pics to each other, which are quickly accessed from the keyboard. Rather than responding "K" I can send a face blowing a kiss, or something equally charming. It would be great to be able to text the same exact icon from any device. The creator of this project knows it will be appreciated by many in the future if all devices can standardize on a common set of emoji.
If you follow Japanese culture as well as you can from the west, you notice a radically different approach to copyrights. Take "porn". The Disney corporation has cracked down on pornographic parodies of cultural icons it didn't even create. Meanwhile pornographic parody doujins can be sold openly and legally in Japan.
But within shows, I have noticed far less cross-over. The almost mandatory american sitcom episode where they do an old series seems to be missing from Japan. Or I simply never seen it but in Anime at least I get the feeling that in commercial production, it is not done to touch another show.
But the real reason you see little OSS from Japan in the west is the gigantic language barriers. The Japanese grasp of English is piss poor. So is the average Americans grasp of English but the Japanese are ashamed of it, so they tend online to either hide to avoid shaming themselves or seclude themselves in corners of the net and not come out.
And this is NOT limited to the Japanese. Try Europe, there are countries that are far more visible then others. England for its 60 million citizens, some of whom can speak English are not as visible on the net as say the Dutch, a far smaller country whose citizens grasp of proper English is truly shockingly bad (guess where I am from). But we are Dutch, we know we are the largest people in the world and it got nothing to do with our height or waist measurements so we hold our heads tall and don't give a shit. Don't know the difference between where and were? Fuck it, I am Dutch, have some weed and relax.
Add some country flag plugin to your bittorrent client and look at where people are connecting from. You can see that the number of users from a country have little to do with the size of said country.
But you have come accross some examples of websites from Japan that block access to your US IP? Yes... they exist... and the same in reverse BUT you would NEVER see them.
But remember, dear American, almost ALL your content sites, restrict access to foreigners. Netflix, Hulu, CNN, ABC etc etc all have popups "this content not available in your region". Who are the copyright grubbers again? But of course, an American would never ever see them. Do you know that "adult" content on ebay is restricted to the rest of the world despite the majority of the rest of the world havving less restrictive rules? Bet you didn't know if you are American because you never ran into it.
But you DO notice a Japanese seller on Ebay who refuses to ship outside Japan. But hey, I ran into sellers who refused to ship from Germany to Holland and we are right next door with the same currency.
Basically it is the old "white male never notices the existence of racism/sexism until affirmative action affects him".
Let us remember in which country centuries old folk stories are owned by a company that waited with the release of a movie so they wouldn't have to pay for the copyright but have themselves been instrumental in extending copyright into infinity and beyond. In which country parts of century old songs are copyrighted (5 golden rings) and in which singing "happy birthday" commands a royalty payment.
Copyright grubbers? I would mention something with a pot and a kettle but no doubt some Yank copyrighted it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I use Unicode (non-ISO-8859-1) characters in software I write.
When writing comments I stick to things I can easily type, i.e. characters accessible using the Compose key — essentially only arrow right/left, double angle brackets and bullet, , , , , . I think "childparent" is easier to read than "child->parent".
I also use Unicode in interfaces. I need a little warning symbol, it takes a few seconds to go to shapecatcher.net, draw the symbol, and paste it in: . Grepping my source code for Unicode, I've used tick and cross marks, 10 kinds of arrow, the handy "undo" symbol, a clock face ("wait"), and some shapes (triangles, squares). The alternative is a poorer interface, having to draw these things myself (and frequent image elements make HTML harder to read) or finding icons on the internet (© problems?).
(Oh look, Slashdot ate everything except © and —.)
But the real reason you see little OSS from Japan in the west is the gigantic language barriers. The Japanese grasp of English is piss poor. So is the average Americans grasp of English but the Japanese are ashamed of it, so they tend online to either hide to avoid shaming themselves or seclude themselves in corners of the net and not come out.
I spent two weeks on holiday in China, and found it very difficult to talk to people. I made a small effort with Mandarin, but couldn't be understood (beyond some numbers and greetings) even when pointing at the words I was reading from the phrasebook. Adults would talk to me when it was necessary — at hotels, restaurants and so on. But elsewhere, they were really shy. Their children were willing to talk. Several times toddlers walked up to me in the street, "hello, how are you?" "I'm fine, how are you?" "I'm happy!". There'd be a parent watching, having sent them over. I'd ask the parent, "how are you?", and they'd just shy away, embarrassed. Parents of toddlers weren't much older than the teenagers who also spoke to me, but something made it unacceptable for adults to try, but OK for children.
I wonder if it's similar in Japan, which hasn't had the anti-western (anti-white) propaganda the Chinese have.
By the way, can you tell where I'm from? You can make an informed guess based on my language, and the time should narrow it down.
England for its 60 million citizens, some of whom can speak English are not as visible on the net as say the Dutch, a far smaller country whose citizens grasp of proper English is truly shockingly bad (guess where I am from).
That's citizens' ;-). (And the UK or Britain has 63M people, England has 53M. Compare Netherlands / Holland, which plenty of British people confuse.)
Anyway, I wouldn't be so sure about that. There are lots of British people on Slashdot, but they're harder to spot. I can tell you're not a native speaker from tiny mistakes ("I simply never seen it") that are different to badly-educated native speakers, and correct bits most native speakers get wrong ("some of whom"), but telling a British person from an American requires a spelling difference (colour/color, -ise/-ize), some slang, a regional expression, occasionally a date (24 Feb/Feb. 24) etc. The time of the comment is also a clue, it's 9:22 here but 1:22 in San Francisco.
There was once a time when people just did this kind of stuff without begging for money. The open source community was founded by people who often didn't have the money so they created stuff themselves and now every idea that spawns needs to be funded.
Now git off'a ma lawn
People used to do this sort of thing for free and he wants, at a minimum $5,000 for supposedly creating from scratch images that are a copy of something that has already been done a thousand times over for free. This sounds like a kid's kickstarter project to avoid having to get a real job.
Since "Emoji Dick" doesn't seem to be available as Kindle or any other eBook format (so far) this is perhaps a moot point - but do any of the current generation of eBook reader hardware and file formats support emoji properly?
Now Kegtsuki seems to be using this Emoji project as a means to raise funding so he can continue Scroll Ninja development anyways.
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.
Is it still ok to call Shenanigans on things? If so, Shenanigans!
$50,000 to to build a set of smilies, and half of that doesn't even go to the smilie thing at all. Kickstarter should shut this one down.
No matter how many previous versions there are freely available, freetards will still submit money to this because the summary contains all their feel-good acronyms.
Even more dishonest, they are planning on using some of the money for food! Who knows what their workers will do with the big bucks after they get paid? Maybe go to a movie?
They say that if they get the money they will make the emoji. They are also saying they will do other things too. If you don't think the money will be well spent, then don't support it.
I think they made an error in detailing exactly how many hours they are expecting people to work and how much money they are going to pay them. They should probably have just said: "Toyama is going to make these emoji and we're managing to pay him a bit less than we would bill him out for to other clients for this project - thanks Toyama!"
I admit the U.S. corporations are horrible copyright grubbers, and stupid laws like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act don't help. The offset that we have however is a huge community around creative commons, OSS, and support of things like the Blender Project (mostly European I know) and The Humble Bundle.
At least Japan did release a Japanese Language version of Nectaris and MegaMan vs. Street Fighter for free.
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This will raze conciseness
So, which emojis does Pidgin use? Those aren't free?