I like the idea with the search criteria. I'll see if I can make that happen. When I first built this site, I wasn't all that great with Drupal so there are probably some things that could be done better. Having fixed most of the glaring bugs in 1.0, though, I've avoided making major changes to the way things work right now. :)
As for the dark background when the page is loading, I've made a change to the stylesheet that I hope will alleviate the problem. If you still see it, let me know.
That sounds promising. If someone can find me a working flash player that has a small form factor (like the current one) and can handle OGGs, I'll be more inclined to do this myself. :)
Trouble is, I already have to convert the audio to mp3 in order to support flash, so there's no way around supporting 2 audio formats if I support HTML5 on Firefox.
Edit: If flash can play oggs now, that would alleviate this problem. Does anyone know if it can?
WTactics: An interesting post. Here's my response.
Intellectual property, like all property, is a construct of the human mind. The universe itself has no fundamental concepts of money or property -- those are things that we came up with because they make the world run better.
One thing that people as artists (and consumers of art) have to accept is the idea that we are, as Einstein put it, "standing on the shoulders of giants." There's no denying that Einstein and his compatriots made some huge discoveries. However, he himself readily admitted that he never would have made those discoveries had the multitudes of scientists and philosophers who came before him not made discoveries of their own. In other words, Einstein didn't invent physics from the ground up -- he was building on things that we already knew.
This does not in any way diminish his accomplishment, however. Einstein took old knowledge, built on it, arranged it in a new way, and came up with new knowledge. Were someone to repeat Einstein's discoveries and claim them as their own, they'd be laughed at. On the other hand, people commonly build upon his theories and reach new and interesting conclusions. And much like Einstein, the fact that they're building on his knowledge doesn't diminish their accomplishments.
Art is the same way, really. If you copy a work verbatim, then it's not your work. If you take a tiny step by copying someone's style but not the content of their work, that tiny step is your own. You won't get a lot of recognition for it, but you've earned the right to be credited, much as the artists who came before you were credited for *their* work. No one should be expected to invent art and style from scratch.
Furthermore, the question of whose work something is if person A has an idea and hires person B to bring that idea to life is something that person A and person B have to talk about when they write up their contract. It's completely within their rights to say that it's the work of the person who commissioned the art, provided they agree on that beforehand. When I hire artists to do work for OGA, they maintain the copyright on their work -- the condition is that they *also* release their art under a license of my choosing. Some people might pay an artist for a work and give them more money on the condition that they be allowed to take credit for it. There's nothing wrong with this, provided that both parties agree.
I've already talked with Arther about this on IRC, and HTML5 audio support isn't really practical for me at the moment as a single developer. However, if someone would be willing to chip in and help, I'd love to support it. I've posted a thread with my requirements here.
Using HTML 5 is a worthy pursuit, but I have some reservations. Outside of my refusal to support IE 6 (it's horribly outdated and basically needs its own version of the site, and I don't have time to do it), I'm trying my best to make sure most modern browsers are supported, including IE 7 and Safari. I don't like Apple and Microsoft's refusal to play with others on open standards, but the users of those browsers might not even be aware of open source. Rather than making their first experience with FOSS a bad one (by booting them out and saying something to the point of "use a real browser") I would prefer to gently introduce them to the concept and then engage them and get them involved. Then they might switch to a different browser of their own accord. I may dump IE 7 in the switch-over.
Mind you, I don't do anything to deliberately break IE6 on OGA. I just don't know for certain if it actually works, because I stopped testing it. For all I know, IE6 users might be able to view the site just fine. Here's a rough breakdown of our traffic:
Firefox and Mozilla: 57%
Chrome: 18%
IE 8: 7%
Safari: 5%
Opera: 5%
IE 6: 3%
IE 7: 3%
Anything not listed here, including Konqueror, clocks in at half a percent or less.
Note that I split IE 6, 7, and 8 into their own categories. This is because IE versions need to be accounted for in different ways, whereas if something runs on one version of Firefox, it'll often run on all of them.
So right now, if I went with HTML 5, I'd be not accounting for approximately 6% of OGA's user base. If I stuck with open standards, we'd also lose IE 8 and Safari, which would account for an additional 12%. Flash is a slow, buggy, and ugly solution, but it's relatively easy to implement.
That said, I'm pretty tired of my netbook slowing to a crawl whenever I hit the OGA frontpage. I'll look into it. If it's easy enough to handle different browsers differently and doesn't add a whole lot of maintenance overhead, I'll give it a shot.
You make a good point about the GPL not requiring by default that the author be attributed, however, it is an optional requirement as detailed in section 7 (Additional Terms).
To clarify this, I've added a FAQ question that states that you should assume all of the GPLed work on this site requires attribution to the listed author(s) unless they specifically state otherwise.
As for your other point, I think what you're saying is that you'd prefer a system that defaults "open" instead of "closed". Right now, when a work is created, the assumption is that the author reserves all rights unless stated otherwise, and you're advocating that instead the default should be that the author reserves *no* rights, unless stated otherwise. So if someone wanted to post art on the internet the way it works right now, they'd have to specifically say "all rights reserved" or somesuch, to specify that people aren't allowed to use and distribute it without specific permission. Otherwise, it would be assumed that the work goes into the public domain. Is that correct?
I know you're an artist yourself, so it's not my place to tell you what artists want, but I think it's safe to say that there are a wide variety of opinions among artists about how their works should be used (hence the massive proliferation of licenses). I'm an artist myself (sort of, anyway -- I dabble from time to time) and I tend to release my work under a license that's proportional to the amount of time I spent on it. GPL/CC-BY-SA if it's something that took a major effort, CC-BY if the effort was moderate, and CC0 if it's just a little thing.
But let's take the popular CC-BY license, for example. There are a lot of artists out there who are happy to have their work used for free, for any purpose, provided that they are given credit for it. One thing that's nice about the GPL and the CC licenses is that they're easy to apply. You pretty much just say "I'm releasing this work under the terms of CC-BY 3.0," and you're good to go. The fact that this is so easy and so well standardized is a boon to both artists and people who are looking for art to use in their projects. For artists, it's nice because of the simplicity -- there's no fee and no form to fill out. For the rest of us, it's nice because that simplicity encourages people to put their work out there for our use.
My point is, if people had to go through a rigmarole (and pay a fee) to get their art copyrighted just to ensure that their work will be properly credited, a large number of artists (myself included, and perhaps even a vast majority) who currently release CC-BY works wouldn't do so at all, and we'd have a lot less content available.
Thanks for the suggestions!
I like the idea with the search criteria. I'll see if I can make that happen. When I first built this site, I wasn't all that great with Drupal so there are probably some things that could be done better. Having fixed most of the glaring bugs in 1.0, though, I've avoided making major changes to the way things work right now. :)
As for the dark background when the page is loading, I've made a change to the stylesheet that I hope will alleviate the problem. If you still see it, let me know.
Bart
That sounds promising. If someone can find me a working flash player that has a small form factor (like the current one) and can handle OGGs, I'll be more inclined to do this myself. :)
Bart
Win!!
Trouble is, I already have to convert the audio to mp3 in order to support flash, so there's no way around supporting 2 audio formats if I support HTML5 on Firefox.
Edit: If flash can play oggs now, that would alleviate this problem. Does anyone know if it can?
WTactics: An interesting post. Here's my response.
Intellectual property, like all property, is a construct of the human mind. The universe itself has no fundamental concepts of money or property -- those are things that we came up with because they make the world run better.
One thing that people as artists (and consumers of art) have to accept is the idea that we are, as Einstein put it, "standing on the shoulders of giants." There's no denying that Einstein and his compatriots made some huge discoveries. However, he himself readily admitted that he never would have made those discoveries had the multitudes of scientists and philosophers who came before him not made discoveries of their own. In other words, Einstein didn't invent physics from the ground up -- he was building on things that we already knew.
This does not in any way diminish his accomplishment, however. Einstein took old knowledge, built on it, arranged it in a new way, and came up with new knowledge. Were someone to repeat Einstein's discoveries and claim them as their own, they'd be laughed at. On the other hand, people commonly build upon his theories and reach new and interesting conclusions. And much like Einstein, the fact that they're building on his knowledge doesn't diminish their accomplishments.
Art is the same way, really. If you copy a work verbatim, then it's not your work. If you take a tiny step by copying someone's style but not the content of their work, that tiny step is your own. You won't get a lot of recognition for it, but you've earned the right to be credited, much as the artists who came before you were credited for *their* work. No one should be expected to invent art and style from scratch.
Furthermore, the question of whose work something is if person A has an idea and hires person B to bring that idea to life is something that person A and person B have to talk about when they write up their contract. It's completely within their rights to say that it's the work of the person who commissioned the art, provided they agree on that beforehand. When I hire artists to do work for OGA, they maintain the copyright on their work -- the condition is that they *also* release their art under a license of my choosing. Some people might pay an artist for a work and give them more money on the condition that they be allowed to take credit for it. There's nothing wrong with this, provided that both parties agree.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. :)
I've already talked with Arther about this on IRC, and HTML5 audio support isn't really practical for me at the moment as a single developer. However, if someone would be willing to chip in and help, I'd love to support it. I've posted a thread with my requirements here.
Really loving this so far. :)
How long are you planning on keeping this up?
Arthur:
Using HTML 5 is a worthy pursuit, but I have some reservations. Outside of my refusal to support IE 6 (it's horribly outdated and basically needs its own version of the site, and I don't have time to do it), I'm trying my best to make sure most modern browsers are supported, including IE 7 and Safari. I don't like Apple and Microsoft's refusal to play with others on open standards, but the users of those browsers might not even be aware of open source. Rather than making their first experience with FOSS a bad one (by booting them out and saying something to the point of "use a real browser") I would prefer to gently introduce them to the concept and then engage them and get them involved. Then they might switch to a different browser of their own accord. I may dump IE 7 in the switch-over.
Mind you, I don't do anything to deliberately break IE6 on OGA. I just don't know for certain if it actually works, because I stopped testing it. For all I know, IE6 users might be able to view the site just fine. Here's a rough breakdown of our traffic:
Note that I split IE 6, 7, and 8 into their own categories. This is because IE versions need to be accounted for in different ways, whereas if something runs on one version of Firefox, it'll often run on all of them.
So right now, if I went with HTML 5, I'd be not accounting for approximately 6% of OGA's user base. If I stuck with open standards, we'd also lose IE 8 and Safari, which would account for an additional 12%. Flash is a slow, buggy, and ugly solution, but it's relatively easy to implement.
That said, I'm pretty tired of my netbook slowing to a crawl whenever I hit the OGA frontpage. I'll look into it. If it's easy enough to handle different browsers differently and doesn't add a whole lot of maintenance overhead, I'll give it a shot.
Bart
You make a good point about the GPL not requiring by default that the author be attributed, however, it is an optional requirement as detailed in section 7 (Additional Terms).
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
To clarify this, I've added a FAQ question that states that you should assume all of the GPLed work on this site requires attribution to the listed author(s) unless they specifically state otherwise.
As for your other point, I think what you're saying is that you'd prefer a system that defaults "open" instead of "closed". Right now, when a work is created, the assumption is that the author reserves all rights unless stated otherwise, and you're advocating that instead the default should be that the author reserves *no* rights, unless stated otherwise. So if someone wanted to post art on the internet the way it works right now, they'd have to specifically say "all rights reserved" or somesuch, to specify that people aren't allowed to use and distribute it without specific permission. Otherwise, it would be assumed that the work goes into the public domain. Is that correct?
I know you're an artist yourself, so it's not my place to tell you what artists want, but I think it's safe to say that there are a wide variety of opinions among artists about how their works should be used (hence the massive proliferation of licenses). I'm an artist myself (sort of, anyway -- I dabble from time to time) and I tend to release my work under a license that's proportional to the amount of time I spent on it. GPL/CC-BY-SA if it's something that took a major effort, CC-BY if the effort was moderate, and CC0 if it's just a little thing.
But let's take the popular CC-BY license, for example. There are a lot of artists out there who are happy to have their work used for free, for any purpose, provided that they are given credit for it. One thing that's nice about the GPL and the CC licenses is that they're easy to apply. You pretty much just say "I'm releasing this work under the terms of CC-BY 3.0," and you're good to go. The fact that this is so easy and so well standardized is a boon to both artists and people who are looking for art to use in their projects. For artists, it's nice because of the simplicity -- there's no fee and no form to fill out. For the rest of us, it's nice because that simplicity encourages people to put their work out there for our use.
My point is, if people had to go through a rigmarole (and pay a fee) to get their art copyrighted just to ensure that their work will be properly credited, a large number of artists (myself included, and perhaps even a vast majority) who currently release CC-BY works wouldn't do so at all, and we'd have a lot less content available.
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