Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 302. (Read 1059181 times)

The plan was that we would use Open Transactions for the other-arts and other-sciences sites, so that we would allocate DeVCoins to those entire genres or sciences or arts then those individual projects would each be able to divvy up those DeVCoins themselves from their Open Transactions accounts or Open Transactions servers instead of trying to fit all the artists and scientists of all those arts and sciences all into the extremely limited 4000 blocks aka 4000 shares of the actual DeVCoin blockchain.

Ultimately maybe even Devtome would end up using Open Transactions too, since writing would be just one among many many arts and sciences so the entire art and/or science of writing would itself maybe only be getting one share or fraction of a share. (Once there are 4000 arts-and-sciences, the blockchain would only be sending out one share to each on the blockchain; the art and-or science of administration maybe included! This is why we need a huge market-cap!)

-MarkM-

Feel free to create any appropriate subdomain and point it to the ip of the dedicated server that will host the respective category of content.

I don't think that names will be a problem. But trying to put every different content style under one roof will be an impossibility.

That's why I am willing to create something outside of devtome.

Wouldn't it be better to merge the portal, devtome, devmusic, and devsound under one domain, if we're paying DVC over many mediums?

e.g. write.devcoin.org, music.devcoin.org, sound.devcoin.org, portal.devcoin.org, etc?

I don't think so, but phonic and graphic art gets very complicated because for example you often will find a single-layer image whose source is multiple layers, or a soundtrack whose source is at least partially various sound-bites or a library of various musical notes or sounds, yet they fail to release the underlying sources - the actual layers, the actual musical notes, the actual sound-bites - even though those underlying things that were composited together to form the image or soundtrack are from a programmer's perspective surely the "source material".

For example if a soundtrack is created by performing a number of actions such as "take that drum track over there, run it through this filter that you can download over there, layer on top of it that violin track over there" and so on, you end up with a bunch of such actions and components and arguments start about which parts are programmatic source code (the instructions about what to layer on top of what, which filter to use on which sound-bite before layering it and so on) and which parts are "content".

This is a crux of why programmatic source code (instructions as to how to go about doing something or logs of how something was done) licenses get to be hard to apply to various kinds of artwork.

Thus, it seems to me that for sound we should maybe consider starting out by funding the lowest level possible of the stuff, things like a free open source library of simulated musical instruments, a free open source library of sound-effects and so on.

Because what I have seen happen too often is kind of along the lines of either we get a file of bits, in some codex or format, that when played using a sound player of some kind comes out as some sound or song or symphony or whatnot, or we get a set of instructions (a musical score a musician would read while playing an instrument, for example: source code for execution by a musician who has such an instrument) telling us how to produce an instance of a piece provided we have access to certain instruments and sound-bites and musical notes and such but oops it turns out we do not in fact actually have such an instrument or such a sound-bite or such a musical note available in free open source form.

So I would like to start from the bottom-most layer for stuff we host ourselves.

For example for music we could have a point at which it is actually considered text/writing rather than actual music.

We could thus allow into Devtome (and I think we already do this) those aspects and parts of music that we can categorise as writing.

We could include under that heading the lyrics of lyrical pieces and the "scores" written in musical notation of frets and bars and quavers and semiquavers and so on.

Then when we do eventually get to the point of being ready to also start accepting recordings of actual performances of such pieces we would be in a position maybe to be very strict, much stricter than the wishy-washy arguments I have seen so many times in the past. We could insist that all the stuff used to perform the pieces must also be free open source, and first archive them before starting to accept recordings of performances of them or that use them.

For example suppose someone submits a score for a violin. I propose we accept that score as writing, it is a written set of instructions, thus in effect is it a program or programme instructing a musician how to produce a given piece given that they have access to a violin.

To my mind we should thus next ask where is the source code for a violin, and until we do have a free open source violin we should not proceed to accept recordings of performances of that piece since embedded in the code we have found this dependency upon a non free open source piece of code: the code for "violin".

So we'd want some form of "violin source code" in order that performances of the score using a violin could be open source performances, since one of the sources for the recording would be the violin that was used to play it, or at least some violin or other.

When you get to the actual recordings, some listeners might well be able to hear the differences between different instances of the general category of instruments known as "violin". Thus a recording of a piece played on a free open source violin might well be quite different than a recording of that same score executed upon a closed source violin. If the score was executed upon a closed source violin then to my mind the the recording is not open source, it is compiled code in which some of the stuff compiled into it is closed source.

Thus I would like our goal to be a free open source holodeck and 3d printer type of thing, in which each and every item and piece and performance is free open source, so that in your own holodeck at home or on your own planet's flagship or whatever you are free to freely replicate the instruments and objects used to create the sounds and all the brushes used to paint the paintings and all the inks used with the brushes and all the sound-filters and image-filters used and so on.

Basically if we do not have in free open source form all the details necessary for a holodeck to duplicate / replicate a thing then we do not have the sources for the thing thus the thing is not free open source.

Consider a scan of a printed document, for example, which was printed using a closed source font.

To me that scan is not free open source because we are not licensed to freely use that font to freely create/compose/compile such a scan ourselves from a text file of the words (aka lyrics?) and a script instructing us to use a certain font. We could produce a quite similar scan using a quite similar font, and that, in my opinion, is what should be done. We should tell the person submitting such a scan that they need to re-print it using a free open source font before we can accept it.

Similarly if someone plays a score upon a violin that is not free open source, we should tell them to go re-play it upon a free open source violin and submit to us the source of the violin along with the recording of the performance.

Since afterall the entire point of open source is the ability to replicate/duplicate/re-perform, and the entire point of free open source is that everyone is free not only to replicate/duplicate/re-perform but also to edit any of the components in order to produce similar or even very different end results using the same components.

For digital graphical art this should mean we get source code of all the brushes and filters and so on used so we can replicate the artist's performance if we are able to utilise those brushes and filters and so on in the same way that the artist did.

In cases where the artist used actual physical brushes to paint an actual physical painting for example, we unfortunately have a huge barrier ahead of us because we lack the source code of the physical universe (not to mention we lack the billions of years it would take to produce that specific paintbrush ab initio by executing a big bang and snipping out that brush from the resulting universe once our newly replicated universe reaches the point in its timeline at which its execution results in that brush).

But nonetheless that should be the ideal we are aiming at. We ideally want our Q-continuum buddies to have the full source code necessary for them to execute a universe just like ours, run it through from big bang to whatever lies ahead, and so on. We do not want patent or copyright trolls to come along and say that the Q, or the gods, or god the creator, or anyone else, is not permitted to create and/or execute a universe that happens to be indistinguishable from the universe that we live in right now nor the universe we will live in next week or did live in last week or next year or last year or next breath of Brahma or some previous breath of Brahma or next Kali-yuga nor next entire universe or some previous Kali-yuga or universe etc.

-MarkM-

Note: I am using this post as the initial sketch of a devtome article The ultimate in free open source.

Fair points. A few things. Everybody wants their articles to be most prominent and seems to have different ideas of what Devtome should be most focused on, so I try not to be too subjective (why it's alphabetical for instance). Shopping is under 'Home' on the front page and Companies within commerce, but your point still stands. I categorised Devtome with devcoin.org in mind (i.e. that devtome isn't just a sales pitch for devcoin and devcoin enterprises, the main portal should - now does - have that info). If consensus is otherwise it could be organised quite differently.

Inconsistencies - yep. The issue here is that devtome seemed to start in a way where everybody created articles with little consideration of future submissions. So probably most of my time is/has been spent filing, deleting and recreating 'categories' so that an article on say eggs can be categorised under [[category:Chicken]] rather than an exisitng =chicken article precluding any additions because it's actually an article on someone's page. There are a couple left like that but because they're comprehensive and/or fundamental like 'Devcoin' I've left them for the time being, but yes this does still raise problems for others trying to categorize. Keep the suggestions coming - maybe pm me with specific suggestions.

Once upon a time that Matt something guy who seemed to be one of the top free open source perl-CGI authors at the time (at least I think it was him, this was like way back in the 1990s) had a system that seems like it would be a great fit with the "distributed everything" philosophy folks around here are so fond of.

It was called Hypernews, and it was pretty much just a distributed forum.

It created a "tree" of sections with subsections with subsections etc, but you could also tell it the URLs of other instances of the system located on other people's sites (or other sites of your own of course) and it would subsume them into the tree.

The catch of course with all such hierarchies is you always end up with two places to look for content, so you'd have to keep asking yourself whether a particular item/post best belongs in, for example, a devcoin section of an altcoin section of a bitcoin forum or one of the bitcoin-forum sections of an other-coin section of a devcoin forum.

But across the entire Hypernews network all the posts in the devcoin section of the other-coins section of a coin-forum would all appear, if that forum's admin chose to include such subsections into their tree/hierarchy.

Possibly http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypernews/ might be the hypernews I am thinking of.

I notice that http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypernews/ has two way email gateways too, which causes me to wonder how married Unthinkingbit is to Simple Machines Forum in his bounties for an email-enabled forum.

Maybe an alternate approach would be to add bounties for "subsuming other instances of the forum on other people's sites" functionality to Simple Machines Forum?

Because wouldn't it be nice if our own forum somewhere could simply subsume this whole alternative currencies section of this forum into itself?

So all the many coins' own forums could all share the same "other coins" section across them all, maybe even with an ability to redirect/link the parts of it that pertain directly to their own main/top topic into the main body of their forum so their own users need not go look in the "other coins" section to find any posts from there that actually belong (on their site) in their own this-coin section?

-MarkM-

+1 for initiative

People of Devcoin.

I hereby happily announce that I have registered

devmusic.org (for compositions, melodies, jingles, etc..)

and

devsound.org (for sounds, noises, voices, etc)

and will work as the serveradmin and manager of these two sites.

I will now create websites similar to the design of devcoin.org and will additionaly experiment with a frontend and backend for uploading, reviewing and distribution of music files.

I have been an ambitioned hobby musician for over 30 years, and will create and upload a few pieces of music and sound that will be free for everyone to use.
My dayjob is a flash, php and javascript programmer, and I have been working as selfemployed programmer since 2005.

Please stay tuned. I will post progress here first.

Thanks for your attention.

George

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Yes exactly, that is my definition too.
My music is free for sharing and "tweaking" even for commercial products, as long as proper attribution is given. (e.g a link to some devcoin sound repository wherever that would be)
What is NOT allowed is that someone just takes my piece of work and sells it as his.
He must do enough transformation so as it is not anymore an exact clone of my work.

PS: posting a reply on bitcointalk is incredibly frustrating today... I had to retry 10 times...

With CC BY-SA wouldn't that just mean that whatever music the artist posted could be remixed under those terms however someone wanted? And if the artist felt really inspired they could also post the ingredients to the track, such as samples, separate vocal tracks, transcripts, etc? I think some Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/en) artists release under CC BY-SA.

I would like to propose a bounty for qt images and new icons.  8 shares for the images and icons used in the qt, 4 shares for the second best set of icons.

Any objections, or should anything be changed??

I think this is a perfect example of it being buried. It's *there*, but it's still hard to find. Under the Business section there's a link to Where To Spend Your Altcoins article, which is probably how I found it originally. It's buried under a lot of information, though, and the label 'business' could be misleading, since that's a term typically aimed toward people who want to sell things, rather than people who want to buy things.

'Shopping' exists as a category (http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=category:shopping&s[]=shopping), but it's not listed under any of the topics on the mainpage. It's not under commerce, devcoin, or devtome. Even searching simply for 'shopping,' it's the eighth search result. If there's a prominent page where it's linked, I haven't been able to find it, though that's not to say I didn't miss it.

The topic tree is also inconsistent. Some of the links lead to category pages, some directly to articles. This can also be confusing for people trying to categorize their articles who find that a 'category' doesn't exist.

More interlinking will help (I'm trying to add pertinent links to sections as I find them).

Another thing I start wondering:

I have seen that the devcoin wallet looks different than most other coin wallets, because the creator of the devcoin wallet deliberately ommited the usage of the QT library, because it is proprietary.
Well, atleast that's my reasoning why the wallet looks the way it does, or am I just paranoid?

Now let's analyze how incredibly self sabotaging this would be if I was to create free music without using any proprietary  piece of hardware or software.  

Because then I can surrender and abandon my ambition for creating free music for devcoin-network immediately.

Are my fears justified?  

The music I create will be free, because I decide so. But the means to create my music are certainly not free. (over the years I spend a few thousand dollars on music software alone, how much money I put in music hardware and instruments I will not tell you because you would cry.)

if I create free music, it means I provide the sample materials (WAV files), the midi files, and descriptions about the devices (hardware, software) I used to create that specific sound.
How I distributed the sound on say 8 channels, and what panning, eq and dynamics I used in the mixing. Now THAT does make sense and can be considered open source.

But how do I describe the 10'000 hours I spend training my skills to be able to create the music in the first place?

If "open source" means a person can learn how to reproduce my work, doesn't this mean that he has to learn how to be a professional musician first?
So there is a line that can't be crossed. Open source with music means I explain every step I did, but how do I transmit an explanation for how I moved my vocal chords to create the sound?

Yes ok, but wait a minute. If I were to be a voice artist, willing to create copyright free (creative commons) voice samples , does open source in the broader sense mean that I have to give the world access to my vocal chords, so they can tweak my voice the way they like?

At what point does this argument sound completely ridiculous?

I think a devtome for musicians would have to be about free music, meaning the artist has agreed to give the music away for free (well not really, he hopes to earn some DVC) and if available free transcriptions of the notes played (if composition, etc) but open source is not really valid at all with an artform like music, because the musician himself is the source, and he is not going to be able to share his body and spirit not even if he wanted to.

So maybe we shouldn't be so fixed on this definition of open source, because some artforms will simply not work with that definition anyway.

It's not just that. For art and music in particular, free is not the same as open-source or at least the scale of licensing matters a lot. Open-source means being willing to relinquish the 'source'. Markm wrote about this in the past, that such forms might amount to the core or stepped design process as well as the finished article. So yes that requires people and expertise, but is also requires artists being willing to release the model, layers, components - source. To be able to broadly utilise open-source people have to be ablt to tweak it, change it, adjust it without necessarily going back to the originator. You can't do that with a complied or locked finality without having all the constituent bits that make up the ends. Music and art, musicians and artists, face this challenge. One step at a time...

Here's the full devcoin business link: http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=where_to_spend_your_devcoins

@georgem: No site exists like devtome for music, so nobody has earned DVC from it.    There are not enough admins for a music site.

so, can someone answer me this question:

to this date, has anyone ever earned DVC by creating free music or sound?

With free music I mean a composition, and with free sound I mean stuff like noises, voices, etc..

One of the tasks I perform is to spot check articles and grammar, not to "catch" people like some sort of DevNazi, but to make sure the content is either original or belongs to the writer.

For example, I noticed one person's content was originally posted elsewhere. One solution: 1. On the Devtome page, identify the location of the original post. 2. Go to the location where it was first posted and add a statement "This article is also on Devtome." 3. Take a screenshot of that original post with the Devtome statement in case your Devtome article is ever reviewed or comes under scrutiny. You will now be prepared to give a defense for your Devtome entry. This is not a 100% rule, it's just one route to make sure that folks are using their own content and that the writer is ready to demonstrate it belongs to them.

If an article is clearly your own and it is easily identified that you are the owner with the source clearly pointing to the original material, it really shouldn't be a problem.

GCW, you make a good point about prior ownership of a piece. A few of my own articles are copyrighted and in print. I had to demonstrate that I owned the copyright, which, of course, wasn't difficult. But some people will get frenzied if they find duplicate material out there. If you own it, then just be prepared. On at least two occasions, people have fired off notes to UTB: "AAGGH. He's a plagiarist! His material is in print already." The funny thing is that the material I put up here is even more recent than the print material. And then they wanted proof that I'm the same Ethan Harris as the books. But once that is established with your admin, you do gain a level of trust and it becomes less of a burden if the issue comes up again. If you're a published author, even self-published, you know how long it takes to get a revision to process. On Devtome, you just edit the page. I like the idea that for people who are willing to search, a lot of my content is available open source. It's kind of like an Easter Egg for your audience. And once they are here, they tend to click around. Something like 10% of the people who pop on to my articles click through to other content.

And while I'm thinking about it, there are some writers here who I think should really think of bundling their material to promote Devtome by using Smashwords. Include a front-piece that says something like "This material is freely available on Devtome, the home of content covering a host of genres." Or something like that. My first step in creating accessible, carry-out versions of Devtome content is at the bottom of http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=custer_survivors_101_preface. I want people to take the content, send it to others, pass it around and always know that Devtome is where they got it. Everytime they open the article they should see Devtome as the source. So if anyone has ideas on how to help me track downloads, please let me know. I tried Google Analytics, but it doesn't like the page extensions.

Points and questions are good. As I said, Devtome is a work in progress. I’m not the best person to be answering this, so this is all my own take:

Devtome is about building an open-source repository of information, building a revenue generation source to re-invest into Devcoin and projects, and a way to incorporate a much wider interest, audience and user base for cryptos to date and the idea of open-source specifically. For Devcoin that means an underlying support via funding development, but as you note devtome and devcoin are not actually Devcoin exclusive. That’s the point.

I agree that Devtome organisation could be better, but at the same time there’s little point having nicely organised garbage or plagiarised work. I’d assume with time some more plugins could be added to pretty the site and make navigation simpler. I work on categorising articles and organising Devtome, so I’m particularly interested in your perspective on finding articles. Although I appreciate the frontpage could be more simply categorised, to date I’ve just focused on putting it all there to browse.

On translators, that link is on the front page. I assumed people would just look at the tree on the front page - see 'Devtome' - 'Translators' - and go there: http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=start#topics Or alternatively just select 'Devtome' and access a list of relevant devtome articles. Similarly with 'Philosophy' or 'E-Currency' etc. That doesn’t seem to be the case, so I’m interested in why that is?

I also agree that a separate concise summary is necessary to break down core topics - why I’m suggesting a FAQ to be incorporated into Devcoin.org. Devtome isn’t just a wiki as you point out. It’s effectively an amalgamation of a wiki, blog and editorial opinion piece because there's generally no censorship. In terms of ‘earning’ dvc for writing particular articles, compensation is increasingly related to quality and readership, implying the reward for writing an article of little value will over time trend towards that broad consensus as more people get involved and so the incentive to submit them diminishes. I concede that will take time. Many articles are sourced and referenced, many are not. Referencing is now a factor in ratings devtome.com/doku.php?id=devtome_rater so should improve where appropriate.

Separation of content style - there's been discussion previously on this. It comes down to similar issues to other language sites - resources. Adding a new site or blog that focuses on a particular topic or style requires a whole new set of people and time to do it, and do it properly. I’m somebody who thinks it would be a good idea for a limited target focus, but can also understand the challenging practicalities and potential cost of fragmenting content and resources before enough of a foundation has been laid to get people interested and onboard.

giftculturewriting - The article you mention, it’s listed under ‘devcoin links’, ‘shopping’, ‘business’ etc, but maybe I’m just assuming people know where to look? Ideas are very welcome

eeh - I agree