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.

Comments

Re:I have another idea

[greggman]

Learn to have some cultural sensitivity. You do realize that Japanese input systems all insert these characters right? You don't have to go to some special menu or select some special option. Type in the sound for "house" (because that's how you enter Japanese, by sound) and press "convert" (to get the various characters that fit that sound) and along with the various kanji for house the emoji appear as well. Same for cake, lightning, strawberry, watermelon, birthday, gift, smile, beer, drink, food, etc., etc. Not only does this work on every cellphone in Japan it even happens on OSX. The point is IT'S PART OF THEIR EVERYDAY USE OF LANGUAGE. Telling them they're second class citizens of the net because their culture has been using these things for > 10 years but in your opinion they shouldn't be included sounds pretty racist to me.