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Open Source Emoji Project Wants Money For Icons

Posted by timothy on 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.

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. I have another idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can I pay money so that they don't do this project.

    F**king emoticons.

  2. Emoticons are already free and open source. by Seumas · · 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.

  3. Re:There's a reason there isn't a Free Emoji. by yincrash · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, There is a free version courtesy of Google. Android has an ASL available version. preview image and github link