Planet Open Clip Art Library News

Why Share Source Discussion Slides and Priorities

2008-11-13T06:40:07+00:00

Here are my slides from last night’s presentation at the BLUG. I continue to be amazed about how interested some people in Beijing are about FLOSS, Network Services, and guangxi! We had a good discussion about why some people contribute to open source. Similar to many trends with FLOSS communities, most people were into contributing because they wanted to learn more. Some said they were interested in meeting new people while a couple of folks mentioned how their contributions got them a job — something recurring with many of my friends (myself included).

Why Share Source & High Priority Free Culture Projects Beijing LUG 2008

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Technology General culture high

I then drilled down and started a discussion about what are possible priorities for FLOSS, then Free Culture, and then Autonomo.us network services. This then segued (not the nerd chariot) into a discussion about what the attendees top 3 priorities are and what the top priorities are for Chinese FLOSS communities.

Some stated that translation and localization are critical for Chinese FLOSS communities. However, we are not talking about just change some strings. What Chinese users prefer is a localized interfaces. CEO of Mozilla Online, Li Gong, told me this as well the other day — Chinese users prefer their own cultural interface.

Then I met Peter Junge, who organized the OpenOffice.org conference last week and sponsors the BLUG free beer through his employer Red Flag. I learned from him that Red Flag does just this by creating their own positive fork of OpenOffice.org called Red Office, which provides a cultural interface. Try it out, Clayton Cornell, from Sun said it is an interested usable interface.

The most interesting and tangible should be priority for Chinese FLOSS communities came from a fellow named Anthony Wong who said there is no good quality FREE (as in CC BY-SA or GNU FDL) Chinese dictionary for FLOSS. Currently, most people use proprietary dictionaries with StarDict. We discussed this further and what it would take to get this to happen and came to the idea that its:

A great tangible project
Should integrate with wiktionary and provide some filters for converting to StarDict and other formats
Could take advantage of Chinese Public Domain rules to slurp in dictionaries
Great project for those learning Chinese (like me!

There are still some other issues which need to be investigated such as pulling Traditional Character dictionaries from Taiwan or Hong Kong and/or other sources and converting the characters. Regardless, the goal is to make a Chinese Dictionary for free culture that anyone may contribute to to make better. Hopefully, no sensitive words will be filtered either! NOTE: Please, if you know more about this and/or have resources which can disprove the need or corroborate the need for this project, please do post a comment on this post.

Then, just yesterday I met up with Prof. Wang Chunyan, who is public project lead of Creative Commons Mainland China, along with new buddy Zafka, Handong and Stephen from CC China. We discussed all things CC China, how great their 2nd Annual photo competition is going with some 2000 high quality entries thus far, their upcoming CC B-Day in December, and what are the rules for Chinese Public Domain Status of creative works. I will save that for another post, but sounds approximately like works are in the public domain prior to 1957 in China right now. Then, government documents, official news, legislation, case law, and all official translations are uncopyrightable, with one caveat. Uncopyrightable works must have a form of attribution to the government in the form of a legal citation.

Overall, great last few days increasing my guanxi points while all you guys are checking your twitterrank asking if you are the real spamking As I started to outline in a previous post, the main things I want to follow up on with this discussion of priorities is for us in FLOSS, Free Culture, and Autonomo.us worlds to develop a list of top 10 priorities for a year which give contributors nice goals to work on. I really wish a project (which I won’t name here publicly but has an i and c in the name) could have taken this on to catalyze development and collaboration between FREE communities as the FSF has modelled so well with their high priority project list. However, we (myself included) are not ones to sit on our haunches and wait for a list of priorities! We hack for fun and incentives!

If anyone finds this interesting, please do post up what you think are priority projects for FLOSS, Free Culture, and Autonomo.us Network Services. If you have insight into China, please post that as well. I will brew this some more and come up with some summary of some collective priorities for associated communities.

The other take away is that it sounds like this Chinese Dictionary project, unless some pre-established work is done on this, is a good new project to build up with my Chinese colleagues

New tutorials on inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com

2008-08-25T23:10:55+00:00

I just posted 2 fresh tutorials on the inkscape tutorials blog! be sure to check them out and give them a go!

Playing with Spiros and Path Effects by Andy Fitz

Creating a Coffee Cup using inkscape by Peter Anglea

Launched Creative Commons Case Studies Project

2008-06-24T06:35:43+00:00

Poster by Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0

This is the next 30-45 days (okay a month) of knocking out all kinds of projects I’ve had in the queue for months, literally. The first of these is the Creative Commons Case Studies project. Seriously, this one has been touched by so many people for countless months now.

I remember when Mike Linksvayer wanted me to push this one out and TVOL and I sat in a room looking at each other like what the hell is this vague task Mike just gave us Well, it coalesced at the CC Taiwan

It also now helps me feel like the information side of Creative Commons infrastructure is pretty solid. I won’t say complete, but at least up to par with most projects of this size. To go along with this release, Alex and I shuffled around some of the /projects page at creativecommons.org and there is now a section called “Information” which is useful for all those seeking out about why use CC. Please all, feel free to use these sections.

Joi just blogged a chunk of the Case Studies blog post I did over at CC’s blog, which I’ve sourced below:

Creative Commons Launches Global Case Studies Project
Jon Phillips, June 24th, 2008
Brisbane, Australia & San Francisco, USA — 2008 June 24

Today Creative Commons (CC), in association with Creative Commons Australia, officially announced the release of the Case Studies Project, which is a large-scale community effort to encourage all to explore and add noteworthy global CC stories. Creative Commons provides free tools to allow copyright-holders to clearly show rights associated with creative works, and now this project shows how notable adopters like author Cory Doctorow, web video-sharing company Blip.tv, and open film project “A Swarm of Angels” have successfully used CC licenses.

And, Joi had this to say about the project:

This is a very important initiative and I hope everyone will contribute and use this resource. In order to make CC ubiquitous, we need support from businesses to get it integrated into the tools and the infrastructure. We need to prove that CC is not only good for society and culture, but makes business sense too. These case studies will be very important to help drive home the fact that sharing is good for business in addition to being “the right thing to do” in other respects.

This also helps make the case to creators that you sharing makes sense for professionals as well.

The next big projects to focus on are the Metrics project, PDWiki Projects (Open Library with CC/PD integration and PDRegistry.ca). No links you say! Well, they are mostly out there in the ether so you can do investigation to find out what these cool projects are that I’ve been working on for a couple of years, seriously!

SIDENOTE: For all you friends of Open Clip Art Library and ccHost, a few of us will be heading to Berkeley to meet at Mudrakers Cafe at 2 PM this Thursday, June 26, 2008 until whenever (~5 PM) to hack with legendary hacker, Victor Stone on ccHost 5.0, the engine behind ccMixter.org, Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library. I want to do some code fun and not just my talky talk I do mostly these days.

creative commons salon 2

2008-06-05T01:40:59+00:00

The creative commons australia is hosting the next ccSalon au at the state library of queensland.the followinf is an excerpt from the ccau invite:

creative commons australia (CCau) invites you to the second ccSalon, a showcase of the creative commons in australia.

the ccSalon is a public exhibition/performance/expo of how artists are using creative commons licences and material worldwide. the ccau event features creative commons licensed material by a range of australian artists, including a CC Film and Video showcase and an photo exhibition drawn from Powerhouse Museum, Sydney’s Photo of the Day series. Then get into the groove with music by Sydney performer, Yunyu and Andrew Garton’s Terminal Quartet.

ccSalon is a public event.

for more information and the program of events for the eveing, check out the ccau website.

the photos used in this flyer are from Powerhouse Museum, Sydney’s Photo of the Day series on flickr.

ccHost 4.5 Out and Liblicense 0.7 Too!

2008-05-18T08:54:12+00:00

Mike blogged about the ccHost 4.5 release for all you to update your sites to for stability right before the massively updated 5.0 arrives on the scene. If you have forgotten, ccHost is the engine behind Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library (which both need developers). More info below:

Two new releases of ccHost today, the remix-oriented media hosting software that drives ccMixter:

4.5, the final release from the 4.x tree. 4.0 was released March 6 last year.

5.0beta is the code that has been running on ccMixter for several months (5.0alpha was available in February.) The missing piece needed to make 5.0 final is updated administrator documentation.

The software is licensed under the GPL and downloadable from sourceforge or our source repository.

Also, Asheesh packaged up liblicense 0.7 which is useful for all wanting to add licensing to your application. I want to get liblicense into a couple of applications like Eye of Gnome and something else fun. Any ideas open source developers? There are resources to help work on this at Creative Commons if you are interested in something fun:

I just released liblicense 0.7.0 on SourceForge. It fixes the Python bindings. They’ve been broken since the 0.6 release, it seems. Some functionality in them probably worked between 0.6 and 0.7, but (read on for more)…

LL_LICENSE and other constants were “extern const char” arrays before. Now they’re just lousy old #defines. This way, even though the strings might appear more than once in memory, it’s very simple for the IO modules like exempi.so to refer to those constants.

Before, due to dynamic linker loading order issues, if liblicense.so were added to a process’s memory memory map at runtime, if liblicense then tried to dlopen() its modules, the modules wouldn’t be able to find those constants. What a drag! That broke the Python bindings’ ability to use the modules.

Now, I guess that’s still true, but the modules don’t need actual symbols from liblicense anymore.

I noticed this issue in the process of creating and testing RPMs for Fedora. I had to bump the SONAME because this removes symbols from the library.

You can grab it on SourceForge, and perhaps soon in Fedora Rawhide.

Yes, Use CC to Free Your Stuff IANAL

2008-05-18T08:43:19+00:00

Yes, I do get paid by Creative Commons, but I’m speaking in a personal capacity in response to the post on i, quaid about using CC licenses.

My answer is yes, using CC is better than using nothing where anyone would have to ask you for permission to use your work which is locked by default in many jurisdictions, including U-S-of-A. And, if you want to contribute to the solution you and others seek, use something like CC Attribution or the CC Public Domain dedication. New things like CC Zero coming down the pipe are good to with a system in place to encourage social solutions per community (called “social norms”) rather than legal solutions, like the NC, SA, ND conditions, which I have been super excited about for some time and pushing hard, because that is what we have been doing with Open Clip Art Library for ages by using PD and encouraging attribution.

I shouldn’t tell you what to use, but I do personally think that the NC condition is a gateway into the free universe. Without it, you will get a situation where less people will use more free licenses. And, in my experience as well, individuals are the ones using the NC condition more than businesses, which often times select the CC Attribution or the CC Public Domain dedication for all content submitted to their site, like Digg.com (look at the bottom of the page). Please do conjecture about why this is, as I’m curious to why others might think this is the case.

With that being said, IANAL

Fedora 9 Released

2008-05-13T20:25:46+00:00

Yes, it it true… Fedora 9 has been released. I am downloading via bittorrent as we speak.

digg fedora 9 here!!!

Thanks to the Fedora Project, LGM Goal Met

2008-04-28T07:04:07+00:00

I wanted to send a big thank you out to The Fedora Project, Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg for their support of the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland, May 8 - 11!

Dave Neary wrote a good overview of the state of the massively successful fundraiser we put together with Pledgie.com (try it out if you want to raise money for your cause!).

It is still not too late to donate money (you can use paypal with the previous link which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world

Issue 1 of ‘Code:Free’ - an Art Magazine for FOSS artists

2008-04-21T22:28:01+00:00

chrisdesign has launched a new PDF magazine entitled ‘Code:Free’ and it is loaded to the brim with awesome examples of artwork created using Free Software. As can be expected, the majority of the art was created with Inkscape and the GIMP, but there are also some nice Open Clip Art remixes thrown in to mix it up a bit. Chrisdesign also writes some tutorials (some of which i have featured on the inkscape tutorials weblog) so be sure to browse his blog.

Be sure to check it out and support the growing number of artists using FOSS to create stunning works!

inkscape wallpapers / desktop backgrounds

2008-04-16T07:34:07+00:00

here are some inkscape wallpapers that i have put together from the sticker designs that i did a few months ago for the inkscape sticker contest. The SVG’s are available from my deviantart site that the thumbs below are linked to.

Support the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland

2008-04-02T03:45:43+00:00

We are trying to raise USD$ 20,000 in the next 16 days before Friday, April 18th in order to support the conference and travel from so many Free and Open Source software developers to attend the 3rd Annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) conference in Wrocław, Poland May 8 - 11 - the premiere event bringing together free and open source creative software application developers for a productive international conference (emphasis on productivity!).

This is really a big community drive for all you users, supporters, and companies to donate money so that all us free and open source developers may get together to have a productive face to face meeting. The last two LGM’s have been invaluable to coordinate, consolidate and create the future in a free and open source way.

For the next 16 days, we want all the supporting projects to put a note about this pledge drive right on their front page of their website! You can use the badge below as well to help us raise money!

You can also help by spreading the url to our pledgie campaign: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/613

And, don’t forget to digg this story: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Support_the_Libre_Graphics_Meeting_2008

Inkscape 0.46 Fully released.

2008-04-01T23:27:19+00:00

Even though the Linux versions of the newest version of Inkscape have been out for a few weeks now, the release of the OSX and Windows packages means that everyone can now enjoy the feature packed 0.46 version of Inkscape.

Make sure you digg the release of inkscape 0.46

Following is a blurb from the inkscape release announcement:

The Inkscape community today is announcing the release of the newest version of its open source vector graphics editor. Inkscape 0.46 is a major update that introduces native PDF support. The implementation of PDF support in Inkscape provides an easy, open source solution to editing PDF documents.

Tons of new features and performance improvements are included in this release. Dialogs now have the ability to be docked to the editing window. Gradients can be edited completely on-canvas. The new Paint Bucket Tool fills bounded areas with color. A new 3D Box tool helps create perspective-correct drawings. A new Tweak tool provides an intuitive method for editing paths and painting objects. The new Live Path Effects feature can create “brushes” and various organic effects on paths. Improvements to color management include support for color spaces other than sRGB. Most SVG filters are now implemented, and a new powerful UI is provided for editing filter stacks.

Inkscape can be downloaded for free from the inkscape website:

http://inkscape.org/

Inkscape 0.46 Released

2008-03-26T08:56:11+00:00

Download the latest copy of your favorite editor everone!!!

On a scale of evil from 6660 to 6666

2008-02-28T15:50:18+00:00

I know the real "evil" number is 666, but the 666-th upload to the Open Clip Art Library was long ago, so the best I can do is to try a surrogate, a replacement something looking close to it. So I uploaded another milestone:

I am not sure what is "more evil", 6660 or 6666 or if they are evil enough to count, so I uploaded both the image number 6660 and image 6666 (both were imports from the old website), hope this make me sort of evil:

As Johnny Automatic noted on the mailing list, about February 2008: "this month has seen more submissions than any month since we began tracking them", we were up to something this month and still have one more day to go:

What's next? I still have a lot of files from the old site to dump into ccHost, so I will continue my share of increasing the monthly uploads for a while. And I'll continue to be evil (or at least try to).

Tons of clipart: openclipart.org daily snapshot

2008-02-20T14:30:54+00:00

Quite late, a couple of years late, the 0.18 release of the Open Clip Art Library got packaged for Fedora and is expected to hit a Rawhide near you (thanks lkundrak for that).

But that release is ancient, in the meantime we changed the site infrastructure (and lost the ability to do formal releases), gathered thousands of new images from hundreds of new users. What to do, lots of people want the images, we have them but no easy way to bulk download?

I present you the daily SVG snapshot: a large tarball containing all the SVG and SVGZ files from our ccHost installation. Today's (the first) snapshot is 156 MB (tar.bz2, it extracts in about 600 MB) and contain over 8.000 images (all of them released as Public Domain).

As a downside, it does lack meaningful structure, the files are grouped in folders by authors, not by topics/keywords/tags and we don't have keywords metadata inside SVG, so searching is a daunting task. But this is the best I can do, provide at least the content.

Note that this does not replace the old 0.18 release, is complementary and contain mostly images submitted after that release (even if this is changing at a glacial speed as some of us re-upload by hand images from the old site to the new one).

I forgot something? Yes, the link to the tarball, of course, the most important thing :D Go to the Open Clip Art Library downloads page and get daily_SVG_snapshot.tar.bz2 (no direct link from my blog as I'm not sure if it's a good idea do for a 156 MB download).

So use the clipart, enjoy it and maybe contribute back!

Pac-Man baddies with Inkscape: clipart, tutorial, screencast and challenge

2008-02-05T11:17:54+00:00

My not so secret Pac-Man project is finished, the clipart images are available on my collection as well as on openclipart.org, the tutorial is on the tutorials page, a screencast too, so now is the time to talk about them.

Ladies and gentelmen, here are some Pac-Man bad buys and bad girls:

The idea started months ago, when I made a silly cartoon about Fedora Games and I quickly realized the potential: is easy and fun (at least I think so), anybody can create such graphics and a tutorial is obvious and quick enough to be covered also by a screencast.
It got stuck in my head for a long time, screaming to get out waiting for me to get in the right mood for that. And in the end I gave up.

I started by doing a screencast (as I said, is based on a concept I was already familiar with), sorry for the Flash abuse, it is made with Istanbul in Ogg Theora and I have the original, but until fedoratv gets usable, its temporary home will be on YouTube.

Then I made in Inkscape the base shape, taking at each step screenshots for a future tutorial.

When done the next step was to create various derivatives, changing either the texture or the shape, there are many of them I like, for example the ninja-pirate duo (who would win in a fight?):

or the textured stripes and camouflage:

The original plan was to create 9 distinct images but the ideas came over and over so I jumped first at 16 and ended with 25 images (and still have a lot of ideas, but enough is enough).

Then I uploaded the images: both in a pacman gallery of my clipart collection and to the Open Clip Art Library (check the arcade tag).

After that, crop the screenshots, combine them, put together in a HTML, add some English text and the Pac-Man baddies Inkscape tutorial is made. Translate everything into Romanian language (yup, I write in English first), put everything online, including the screencast and I am almost done.

The last step is this: blog about them and throw a challenge: look at the gallery and find one baddie representing you. If you can't find one, read the tutorial and draw one yourself. Enjoy it. Show it to the entire world. Maybe upload it to the Open Clip Art Library.

And with that, enough for me with clipart for a while...

Inkscape at SCaLE and Inkscape Stickers.

2008-01-30T07:24:09+00:00

Inkscape is going to have a booth at the Southern California Linux Expo and the inkscape community of artists have been invited to contribute by designing stickers that will be handed out at the conference. This is an awesome idea, and it demonstrates how much inkscape is a community based project that not just developers can contribute to. For details on the sticker competition, check out the journal entry at the inkscape deviantart page

ScislaC (an inkscape developer and artist) will also be presenting 4 one hour inkscape classes at SCaLE (two beginner and two advanced.) No doubt he will showcase some of the upcoming features in inkscape 0.46, like Live Path Effects, Filters, 3D Box Tool, the Paint Bucket tool and the Tweak tool.

How it's made: my map elements with Inkscape

2008-01-29T17:00:19+00:00

I imagine such a preamble is not very inviting, but it is the preamble of the latest article from my tutorials website:

It's been a while since I wrote a tutorial (in fact quite a while, as "wrote" != "published") and that was for good reason: I was not able to come with a tutorial fitting the rest of my my tutorial site and did not want to break the tradition . So it was a hard decision to write this piece, which comes as a conclusion to my quest to create a RPG tileset of over 50 clipart images, a decision I made mostly because I already was asked about how I made the images and expect even more questions in the future.

It is not really a tutorial, more a "how it's made" for my map tileset (available also from the Open CLip Art Library), it describe the process I used in creating those images, a very short sketch of the workflow (described in more detail in the article) is like this:

[read more]

Of course, there is available as usual a Romanian translation.

And now I can really consider this topic closed.

Quest complete: RPG map tileset

2008-01-23T18:27:15+00:00

I can consider complete my quest for a RPG map tileset, 50 images are done (outline and full color), uploaded to my clipart collection and to the Open Clip Art Library (look at the cartography tag).

Now is the time to sit back, relax, upload some samples in various places (like here), annoy people with that and maybe think at the next step, which should be something different. Or should I do more pieces for the set, considering I have a long list with additional ideas? This is a good think to think about while sitting back.

I don't know how transparent is from those clipart images how much I miss the time when I used to fight orcs and be happy about that. I guess it's quite obvious (is a long time, about an year and a half).

PS: the samples above are JPEGs, the PNG version was to big in file size, so I had to use lossy compression (with high quality), but load the JPEG, change the extension and will get either PNG and SVG.

Uploading to OCAL is killing me...

2008-01-23T11:52:55+00:00

So the time has come: the set is done, it have to be uploaded to the Open Clip Art Library. Unfortunately by hand, one by one, the full color image, the outline and a PNG thumbnail.
Question again: what are the computers build for? By any chance to help us automate repetitive tasks? Anyone wonders why I hesitate re-uploading my images (some hundreds) from the old site? Look at the pretty screencast (2.8MB, Ogg Theora) and multiply the operation with 50 (the number of images I have to upload):

Php coders badly needed... anyone available?

Coloring the map

2008-01-17T15:24:23+00:00

The other day I talked about the outlines for my RPG map tileset, naturally I went to the next step: adding pretty colors (as planned) and it progress quite fast, it is the easy part.

I tried to get a balanced result: at the same time shiny enough but also simple enough, I could have added a lot more details but this is my current trade-off (feel free to start from the outlines and do your own colorization).

One decision I made will surely come back and bite me in the ass: I used gradients. They make the look prettier but after importing a few images with gradients Inkscape gets confused very fast (it is a known bug).

But enough for now, I spammed enough with this topic, will talk again about it when the set will be complete and uploaded to the Open Clip Art Library (hopefully next week considering the current speed). Until then I will quietly update my gallery, one by one.

Halfway to an empty pledge: a RPG map tileset

2008-01-16T11:51:10+00:00

One of my many failures in 2007 was to get the people at the Open Clip Art Library into holding a "month of cartography", such a benign defeat is a good show of how bad I react at losing.

A few years ago I made a proof of concept about how Inkscape can be used to create RPG maps and a (small at the time) number of terrain SVG tiles. This showed to be one of the hottest topics on my blog, with important traffic, many reactions and follow-ups (I got many people contacting me offline about it). It can be considered a success.

Recently on the Inkscape users mailing list the topic of cartography came to attention so I got the idea about holding a "month of cartography" at OCAL, we used to have such things, but the (still unfinished) migration to ccHost shifted the focus. They are good for channeling energies, gaining momentum, generating buzz and potentially bringing new contributors and users.
My approach was to make a pledge: if at least two other people back me and will contribute, I pledged to contribute at least 50 new, original, images.

The idea didn't got enough traction, nobody backed me. So here is me bad at losing: once the idea was developed in my head, I continued working on it and created (at a slow pace, due to the low motivation) the above mentioned quantity of images. So today I am halfway to this pledge: I finished the outlines (this was the hardest part) for 50 images, they still nedd to be colored (that is the second half), see below a few highlights:

For now the images are available for download as part of my own clipart collection, after I add colors they will be uploaded (both as outline and full-color) to the Open CLip Art Library. The coloring process will follow at the same slow pace, probably I will make enough noise when ready.

The set is not consistent as style, scale, perspective or quality but, hey, I pledged 50 images, not 50 quality images... (could it still be labeled as a set?) see also a screenshot with the entire set:

When approaching the target number a motivational issue appeared and I got confused about what to do next: start coloring, as originally planned, draw more new shaped, as I have in my head a large list of items which could be drawn or just call all this thing off, freeze and upload as it is.
Most likely I will stick to the plan but he work speed may have to suffer, watch the tileset to monitor the progress.

liblicense 0.5: first stable version of C library supporting CC and licensing metadata - Creative Commons

2008-01-16T08:49:43+00:00

Asheesh blogged about the super-cool liblicense 0.5: first stable version of C library supporting CC metadata - Creative Commons. The thing I would add for all you out there in licensing land is that this generalized to support all free and open content licensing as long as it uses the great RDF developed by CC to express a license:

With the help of Hubert Figuiere, Nathan Yergler, Peter Miller, Scott Shawcroft, and Jason Kivlighn, I’m happy to finally announce a new version of liblicense. Summary: Now this is really worth using.

For those just joining us now, liblicense is a library to make it easy to add CC metadata support to desktop and server side software you write. The biggest reason to choose liblicense rather than handling CC metadata yourself is that we (huge thanks to Jason and Hubert) have written handlers for many file formats. We use Hubert’s Exempi library that is derived from Adobe’s Free/Open Source XMP library.

The two major driving factors on this release were making it crash less and providing a stable interface (API and ABI) for others to build upon. Earlier versions of liblicense would crash on invalid files. Also, crucially, this release has metadata inside the library, called “shared object versioning,” indicating what features the library supports.

As always, you can reuse this under the terms of the GNU LGPL. It’s interoperable with our metadata panel for Adobe applications, supports embedding into files ranging from JPEG to MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, and is available from SourceForge.net. It is written in C and comes with bindings for Python and Ruby. Finally, thanks to Venkatesh Srinivas for his tireless help.

I haven’t had as much time to blog about this project. I’m super proud of the work done by Scott, Jason, Asheesh, Nathan Y., Hubert, Peter Miller and many others! Thanks guys.

Now, onto the big business! Let’s get this library added to KDE 4.1, the Gnome desktop, and some other example apps like Eye of Gnome (EOG), Rhythmbox, Inkscape, etc. Is anyone interested in this? We need to get it plugged-in. Currently, KDE folks are planning on including in KDE 4.1, so I’d like to talk more with other about getting it into Gnome apps, and more specific apps to drive usage and development of this app. Also, we want to get liblicense integrated into OpenMoko, as liblicense creation happened in order to enable content license read/write on al our devices…ebooks, mp3s, etc, that have their licenses inside.

BTW, liblicense comes with an awesome command-line program called license. All it does is allow for getting and setting of license information on files on your desktop!!! It handles content right now, but there is no reason it can’t handle other things…like source code, etc…just need developers!!!

Today is Public Domain Day!

2008-01-02T07:50:18+00:00

Open Clip Art Library is helping celebreate Public Domain Day!!! All content submitted to the Open Clip Art Library is dedicated into the public domain! Hooray!!! As a community, we need to look at Creative Commons new CC0 project and figure out how to migrate to this once released hopefully in mid-January. Here is more from the original post:

January 1st is Public Domain Day, as noted by copyrightwatch.ca:

Welcome to 2008, and let’s welcome into the Public Domain thousands, indeed millions, of creative works from the collective cultural past of our little planet and its many countries. Yes, it’s January 1st, Public Domain Day in most countries of the world, where copyright runs from the death of the author of a work until the end of the 50th, 70th, or some other year thereafter.

Read the whole post for some notable works falling into the public domain in some jurisdictions.

Everybody’s Libraries also has an informative post about Public Domain Day 2008.

A post from Lessig on Public Domain Day 2004.

The microformats community jumped the gun, announcing a transition of their wiki to the public domain a few days ago.

Creative Commons offers a public domain dedication and we’ve announced that we’ll be upgrading and extending that this year with the CC0 project.

Via Boing Boing.

Happy Anniversary! and Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays

2007-12-25T00:37:46+00:00

From a cold Beijing, that is amazingly cleaned up and metropolitan, merry xmas and happy holidays and happy new year!

Most importantly, happy 1 year anniversary to Lu for being married for one year (to me)! Its taken a massive amount of engineering to get here right now and to have some degrees of freedom for our lives, so pretty happy about that overall!

Now its time for me, my mom, dad, Lu and I to take 24 hour train to Guangzhou…geez, I miss my 14 hour battery now

Time to get sentimental and see some amazing country-side while my real imagination comes true. Time to hack on OpenMoko and Open Clip Art Library while on the train

BTW, while waiting for my parents at the Beijing International Airport, I decided to break from that activity to find the atm. While walking towards it, out from the domestic terminal came the the worlds tallest man!!!

I stopped dead in my track and like the other Chinese folks around me, pulled out my phone and took a picture!

Inkscape About Screen Contest Announced.

2007-12-20T00:07:47+00:00

Today, Inkscape announced the About Screen contest for the upcoming 0.46 release. The About Screen changes with every major release, and always demonstrates some of the new features that are present in that release.

For more information about the 0.46 About screen contest, guidelines and how to enter, view the contest page at deviantArt. Ted from Inkscape hosts the Museum of Sodipodi and Inkscape About Screens if you are looking for some inspiration for your splashscreen ideas.

Kottke’s Silkscreen Font on Open Font Library

2007-12-15T08:02:29+00:00

This week has been crazy! First, I have been working on a couple of huge announcements for projects I manage at Creative Commons for CC’s 5th Birthday Party tomorrow (SAT) in SF (its free and freer). And, Lu and I have rented out our new place we got in SF and are going to spend the next few months in China getting that part of our lives settled.

And, on the side, Alex sent me over this cool little piece posted on the web by mihmo saying Jason Kottke had licensed his ever-so-popular Silkscreen font under the Open Font License and even better, he uploaded it to the Open Font Library. Cool!

Here is Kottke’s description of the Silkscreen font:

Silkscreen is best used in places where extremely small graphical display type is needed (duh!). The primary use is for navigational items (nav bars, menus, etc.). However, you can also use it for image captions and the like…wherever small type is needed. Silkscreen also works very well at large point sizes if you’re looking for that chunky, old school computer look so popular with the kids today.

In order to preserve the proper spacing and letterforms, Silkscreen should be used at 8pt. multiples (8pt., 16pt., 24pt., etc.) with anti-aliasing turned off. For larger text (larger than 64pt.), you can use whatever size you want without too much of a problem.

Check it out and use the site! It is the Open Clip Art Library’s sister site…please use it! And, don’t forget to upload your fonts and/or help make better free and open fonts from the ones already posted.

Clipart of the Week

2007-11-23T01:45:26+00:00

Heart with diamonds by Chrisdesign

New version of DiscLabel for Mac OS X comes bundled with 1300 OCAL images.

2007-11-14T22:55:58+00:00

SmileOnMyMac has just released version 5.0 of their optical disc labelling software, DiscLabel. These guys were so impressed with the quality of the Open Clip Art Library’s artwork, that they specifically developed SVG support to utilise the library and also chose 1300 of the best OCAL SVG’s to bundle with their software.

It is great to see companies utilising the potential of User Contributed open media, and helping to distribute our awesome clipart to more and more end users. Following is an excerpt from their press release:

The new clip art library offers more than 1300 items that are accessed via a special clip art browser. The clip art is tagged with keywords that can be searched using the built-in Spotlight module. The clip art files come from the Open Clip Art Library, an archive of more than 7000 user-contributed images that can be freely used. Users can download additional artwork from the Open Clip Art Library and access it via DiscLabel’s clip art browser. For more information about the Open Clip Art Library project, visit http://www.openclipart.org.

Clipart of the Week

2007-11-13T02:15:08+00:00

Here is the openclipart library clipart of the week:

lion with sword
sourced by
JohnnyAutomatic

Johnny is the #1 contributor to the artwork in the open clipart library. To date, he has contributed 1260+ cliparts to the library. Thanks! JohnnyAutomatic!

Version 0.46
	The path changing modes of the new Tweak tool allow you to push, shrink, grow, attract, repel, or roughen any path, easily and naturally sculpting exciting freeform shapes. This is a lot more convenient than the Node tool not only because you don’t need to think about nodes, but also because it can work on any number of selected paths at the same time.
	The color changing modes of the new Tweak tool, paint and jitter, are very similar to the way a soft brush works in a bitmap editor. If you have a number of separate objects, you can select them all and paint over them with any fill or stroke color.
	Inkscape 0.46 comes with a selection of stock patterns, accessible via the Fill and Stroke dialog. It is now much easier and faster than before to fill a path with stripes, checkerboard, or polka dots.
	The use of effects which previously required to manually installed some Python modules is now straightforward on Mac OS X: they all work out of the box. In addition, Inkscape’s interface was made more Mac- friendly by the use of a default theme. This theme reflects the changes made in OS X system preferences (Appearance panel) and works with Graphite (as demonstrated here) or Aqua variants. For advanced users already having a custom ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file, the theme is not enforced and their personal settings are respected.
	The Paint Bucket tool works just like the Paint Bucket tool in bitmap image editors — clicking in an area fills the area with the chosen color. Unlike other editors, the Inkscape tool features some additional fill methods to help you finish your work faster.
	With SVG Filters and Inkscape’s new Live Path Effects, the available options and ease of editability to accomplish various visual effects has been greatly enhanced. The picture in this screenshot utilizes a number of features such as Tiled Clones, SVG Filters, Live Path Effects, Clipping and Masking, Multi-stop Gradients and more. This screenshot shows the parameters used on a patch of hair created with the Stitch Sub-Curves Path Effect. Additionally, you can see how handy having docked dialogs is to un-clutter the workspace with the side benefit of increased productivity. To see the full version of this picture you can click here.
	The Path along Path effect can curve a path along another path. When this effect is applied to path A (called skeleton), another path B (called pattern) can then be passed as a parameter. The result is that path B is bent along path A. With the node edit tool, path A can be editted on-canvas and the result is updated live. This provides a direct equivalent of “vector brushes” or “skeletal strokes” features in other vector editors.
	This example shows how the new hatching techniques can be used to produce a traditional line engraving from a photo. Note also that thinning/thickening can be used not only for hatchings but for sculpting arbitrary paths - easy shape morphing without the Node tool!
	Several new features were added to the Calligraphic pen to make Inkscape capable of the ancient art of line engraving. This screenshot demonstrates tracking a guide path to hatch areas quickly and uniformly; tracing background to make your pen width reflect the lightness of the background in every point; and thinning/thickening that lets you change the darkness of your hatchings at any point, or even erase parts of the drawing.
	Now all guidelines are angled. The usual horizontal and vertical guidelines have become angled at 0/90 degrees. To change to a different angle, just double-click the guideline you want to change and enter the values. You can also create a guideline with an angle of 45 degrees by dragging the guideline from the ends of the rulers. You can also create an angled guideline from a straight line. Draw this line and press Shift+G.