[Clipart] dead or alive

[Jon Phillips]

On Tue, 2006-07-04 at 11:05 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 03:26:46PM +0100, Theresa Knott wrote:
> > On 7/4/06, Nicu Buculei (OCAL) <nicu at apsro.com> wrote:
> > >Open Clip Art Library Feedback Form wrote:
> > .
> > >
> > >Usually in the Open Source world is believed there are a lot of
> > >programmers and not enough artists. I think we proved this wrong: we
> > >have a lot of artists contributing, but not enough programmers.
> > 
> > It's a real shame, this project is truly worthwhile, and could easily
> > grow to huge proportions. Is there anyway to put out a general
> > distress call. Do programmers actually know that this project is in
> > desperate need of their help?
> 
> Speaking for Rejon and myself, we've gotten so tied up with other
> projects (e.g. Inkscape, Crucible, Creative Commons) that it's very
> unlikely we'll be running into much more freetime for OCAL.  We both
> feel kind of bad because we'd put in so much time to get the project
> some momentum, and it's just our busy schedules that's holding things
> up.

Yes, I totally agree...however, I'm not teaching this summer and only
working at CC part-time...but still I'm busy (how is that possible?).

> What would you guys think of the idea of merging OCAL back into
> Inkscape?  Inkscape's community includes people with sufficient
> technical skill and interest that could help with OCAL's needs.  In
> turn, the clipart library would become something distributed along with
> Inkscape itself.
> 
> Of course, we'd want to keep the openclipart.org domain and stuff, but
> there may be some areas where it's worthwhile to cut out overhead.
> 
> Originally, OCAL itself was a spin-off of Inkscape, with the hope that
> being independent of inkscape would increase involvement from projects
> like OpenOffice, Sodipodi, and Skencil.  However, as we see, this hasn't
> really worked out.  Perhaps re-merging the project would revitalize
> things?

I see it two-fold:

1.) start using ccHost (mainly just getting getid3 support for SVG) and
get ppl. working on this asap and more than core developers. I've been
plugging away on development along with other developers on ccHost for
Creative Commons uses. Check out this dream come true feature:
http://cchost.dreamhosters.com/media/view/media/samples/browse This
allows for realtime selection of files by tags (keywords) and works now!

2.) Or, go with the merge strategy. However, I see problems with this
because it takes away from Inkscape's core strategy and really feel it
would just become a package stuck at 0.18 in the sf.net tracker.
However, consolidating resources seems to be the right strategy, I think
this might not consolidate in the right way.

> Let me know what you think; if it sounds viable, I'll propose it to
> Inkscape. 

Right, I'm still for strategy 1. However, this really takes some
committment from some php hackers to get this working. I can help
whoever needs it to get around in the code in ccHost and add/edit where
needed to fast-track changes.

Jon

> Bryce
> 
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> 
-- 
Jon Phillips

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USA PH 510.499.0894
jon at rejon.org
http://www.rejon.org

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Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org)
Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org)
San Francisco Art Institute (www.sfai.edu)