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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.
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.
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.
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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Yes. Please send us a check for $699 for a single-CPU license. Make checks payable to "Darl McBride".
Aw jeez. Maybe should pitch in and find these guys some jobs.
You want to support the free exchange of information online? Give your money to the EFF instead where it can do something worthwhile.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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!
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
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.
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.
You guys and you're "freedom". It does not mean what you think it does.
I don't think that sentence means anything at all... unless you meant "your freedom" ;-). But anyway, the 3 licenses (in Font Awesome anyway) are for 3 different parts of the project and kinda make sense (being licenses specifically designed for these types of works).
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.
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!
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.
Fun fact: The backwards N is a Cyrillic "i", it makes the "i" sound. So you are technically writing NII.