[Clipart] dead or alive

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 03:27:34PM -0700, Jon Phillips wrote:
> > 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.

Of course, possibly both 1 and 2 could be done.
 
> > 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.

I wish I had enough time to commit to helping, but in reality I just
have way too much stuff I'm already committed to...  but I'd be willing
to contribute advice/patches/problem solving assistance if any one else
wants to work on it.  It doesn't look like it's a huge challenge to get
it working for us, mainly some php tweaking and administrative work to
install it on openclipart.org, and of course some tinking with the look
and feel.  Probably could be done within a handful of weekends...

Bryce