Open Source Emoji Project Wants Money For Icons

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Open Source Emoji Project Wants Money For Icons

Posted by timothy on Saturday February 23, 2013 @11:38AM from the and-your-weird-little-grimaces dept.

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.

7 of 156 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:i dont know WTF is this.. by cgimusic · 2013-02-23 12:45 · Score: 3, Informative

Kind of. It goes beyond the scope of a usual font because the emoticons are actually images that can be displayed in full color but they can be manipulated like a character in regular text because they are stored as a Unicode character.
Re:I have another idea by Anonymous Coward · 2013-02-23 13:23 · Score: 3, Informative

U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO
The best part of the scam... by EETech1 · 2013-02-23 13:29 · Score: 4, 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. by yincrash · 2013-02-23 13:40 · Score: 5, Informative

Actually, There is a free version courtesy of Google. Android has an ASL available version. preview image and github link
Re:Emoticons are already free and open source. by Ozoner · 2013-02-23 13:56 · Score: 3, 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 by Kagetsuki · 2013-02-23 15:20 · Score: 3, 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. by Kagetsuki · 2013-02-23 15:28 · Score: 3, 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.