[DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated

[smeagol]

Y not create more bounties the new wallet needs testing? Any immediate work? The new pr work im doing is going to be good shit I suggest it be worth more than 12 shares its going
to wider audience and I will adhere to higher standards ( up to quality admins to judge before release)

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??

[1713569588]

1713569588

[giftculturewriting]

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

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...

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?Huh

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.

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.

[georgem]

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.

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...

[georgem]

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

[eeh]

+1 for initiative

[markm]

Community - Should I just link to this forum thread on Bitcointalk? Someone asked if there is going to be a forum on devcoin.org. I haven't heard of any plans for this (wasn't there already a forum that didn't receive too much traffic?) The problem with having our own forum is that things will become fragmented with some people posting on the new forum while others (probably the majority) will still end up posting here.

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-

[weisoq]

I think this is a perfect example of it being buried...

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.

[markm]

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..

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.

[smeagol]

I hereby happily announce that I have registered

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

and

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

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?

[georgem]

I hereby happily announce that I have registered

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

and

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

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?

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.

[markm]

I hereby happily announce that I have registered

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

and

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

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?

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-

[georgem]

I hereby happily announce that I have registered

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

and

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

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 devcoin.org should ever strive to be more than an entry portal that informs and redirects people to all the different dedicated servers (with their specialized admin- and userfrontends, and forums)..

But those are just my 2 cents.

[markm]

Open Source is ultimately about performance, not the results that a particular performance results in.

So really what we want is not a recording of the output of a performance, such as a static image or a specific bit-sequence that represents a noise or sound, but, rather, the instructions necessary to perform that performance or produce some particular output/recording of a performance.

Open Source is all about performing, also known as executing.

So for a digitally painted painting someone painted with a paint program, what we should be wanting is the full recording of all the brush-strokes along with the code of all the brushes and so on.

Because our freedom given us by our free open source license should include the freedom to modify any of those brush-strokes or brushes, so we can see what that painting would look like if we moved our brush differently in a given moment of stroking a brush, or used a different brush or a different paint for certain of the brush-strokes, and so on.

Thus ultimately any static flat image or end-result-of-performance soundtrack is not really what we want for free open source at all, as that is simply a snapshot that does not include the source code, the instructions, the which brush or instrument to use and how to use it, that is the source code we need in order to duplicate / replicate / re-perform the thing.

-MarkM-

[georgem]

Open Source is ultimately about performance, not the results that a particular performance results in.

So really what we want is not a recording of the output of a performance, such as a static image or a specific bit-sequence that represents a noise or sound, but, rather, the instructions necessary to perform that performance or produce some particular output/recording of a performance.

Open Source is all about performing, also known as executing.

So for a digitally painted painting someone painted with a paint program, what we should be wanting is the full recording of all the brush-strokes along with the code of all the brushes and so on.

Because our freedom given us by our free open source license should include the freedom to modify any of those brush-strokes or brushes, so we can see what that painting would look like if we moved our brush differently in a given moment of stroking a brush, or used a different brush or a different paint for certain of the brush-strokes, and so on.

Thus ultimately any static flat image or end-result-of-performance soundtrack is not really what we want for free open source at all, as that is simply a snapshot that does not include the source code, the instructions, the which brush or instrument to use and how to use it, that is the source code we need in order to duplicate / replicate / re-perform the thing.

-MarkM-

No problem. Especially for music created with a sequencer, it is easy to not only output a WAV file of the music (you can listen to) but also a MIDI-file that gives you information about what keys where pressed at what time and for how long. This should work easily for every MIDI-capable instrument.

I think it's important to understand that in contrast to pieces of text, music has to be listened to (meaning with your ears) to be able to review and judge its quality.
Much like you are using the appropriate sense (your eyes) to review and judge a piece of text, you should apply the appropriate sense when it comes to music.

Music has a psychological component to it that will simply not be existent in pure text or score form. Good luck reviewing that. That's why an acoustic representation of the work will let you much faster decide if the piece of music is decent or not.

[sidhujag]

I'm running a permanent DVC node at 192.241.155.73. I'd like it to be a seed node.

The people developing the shiny new daemon and client need to add it into whatever code they are using for seed nodes.

I am editting my old-devcoin-git and old-devcoin-qt-git to add a seventh name it will look up, dvcstable07.dvcnode.org, I do not know what their code does, whether it checks the dvcstable nodes on the dvcnode.org domain or not. Your IP address has been added to the dvcnodes.org DNS as dvcstable07.

Also who-ever controls the DNS for devtome.com needs to add it into their own dvcnode## hostnames in their DNS, my code so far only looks for dvcnode01 through dvcnode05 on that domain as I have seen no notification that they have added any more nodes than the five. (In fact when first I coded the code to look for five of them we did not even have have at the time, I just wanted the code to have a couple of spare lookups we could plug IP addressed into in the DNS later.)

-MarkM-

Done:

static const char *strMainNetDNSSeed[][14] = {
   {"public.txn.co.in", "dvc.public.txn.co.in"},
   {"21stcenturymoneytalk.org", "dvc-seed.21stcenturymoneytalk.org"},
   {"devtome.com", "dvcstable01.devtome.com"},
   {"dvcnode.org", "dvcstable01.dvcnode.org"},
   {"dvcnode.org", "dvcstable02.dvcnode.org"},
   {"dvcnode.org", "dvcstable03.dvcnode.org"},
   {"dvcnode.org", "dvcstable04.dvcnode.org"},
   {"dvcnode.org", "dvcstable05.dvcnode.org"},
   {"dvcnode.org", "dvcstable06.dvcnode.org"),
   {"dvcnode.org", "dvcstable07.dvcnode.org"),
   {"dvcnode.com", "node01.dvcnode.com"},
   {"dvcnode.com", "node02.dvcnode.com"},
   {"dvcnode.com", "node03.dvcnode.com"},
    {NULL, NULL}
};

I assume you have dvcstable06 if you added it to dvcstable07. I went through the list based on old devcoin code and the seed nodes on devtome and added all of them into my dnsseeds structure above. This should give us maximum connections.

[matt608]

I think it's important to understand that in contrast to pieces of text, music has to be listened to (meaning with your ears) to be able to review and judge its quality.

lol   Bravo on that insight. :p

But I know what you mean, they'll have to be admins to listen to the tracks, which will be time consuming.  At least until there are enough listeners who can rate the tracks in an automated way like imdb.  I would really enjoy rating music, and even giving feedback being primarily a musician myself.  This whole idea of devtome moving into music is really exciting, I have a bunch of tracks I'd love to put up on this.

[georgem]

Open Source is ultimately about performance, not the results that a particular performance results in.

I don't know yet. I haven't made my mind up yet.

Is devcoin more about open source, or more about free content?

And when was the decision made, and by whom?

Often those two terms are used interchangeably although they represent different things.

Should devcoin strive for a balance between those two, especially when it comes to difficult (open source wise) content like music, or are we going to measure everything with the same yardstick?

When it comes to music, if you really want to be all open source about it, you would first need to create all the necessary open source music making tools, because the ones that are available at the moment are not considered at all by professional musicians. This should take a few years.

So if you were to go with the open source music making software that is available at the moment you might not attract the kind of musician you want.

Ofcourse the situation could change over time.

[georgem]

I think it's important to understand that in contrast to pieces of text, music has to be listened to (meaning with your ears) to be able to review and judge its quality.

lol   Bravo on that insight. :p

But I know what you mean, they'll have to be admins to listen to the tracks, which will be time consuming.  At least until there are enough listeners who can rate the tracks in an automated way like imdb.  I would really enjoy rating music, and even giving feedback being primarily a musician myself.  This whole idea of devtome moving into music is really exciting, I have a bunch of tracks I'd love to put up on this.

No no no.

If you think that listening to the music takes a long time, imagine how long it will take to read the score and perform the music yourself to be able to judge its merit.
(because that's what markm is proposing)

That's the point I was trying to make. Maybe it did go under.

[matt608]

I think it's important to understand that in contrast to pieces of text, music has to be listened to (meaning with your ears) to be able to review and judge its quality.

lol   Bravo on that insight. :p

But I know what you mean, they'll have to be admins to listen to the tracks, which will be time consuming.  At least until there are enough listeners who can rate the tracks in an automated way like imdb.  I would really enjoy rating music, and even giving feedback being primarily a musician myself.  This whole idea of devtome moving into music is really exciting, I have a bunch of tracks I'd love to put up on this.

No no no. If you think that listening to the music takes a long time, imagine how long it will take to read the score and perform the music yourself to be able to judge its merit.

 

That's the point I was trying to make. Maybe it did go under.

It depends if we are talking about music scores or music tracks.  For tracks it will take some time to listen, but that's potentially do-able.  For scores as you say it's impossible to judge the quality without listening to it being performed/recorded.  I'm not sure how scores can be accommodated.

[markm]

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

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...

For writing, think about fonts.

We do not care what font is used at display time to display an article, we are free to use any font we choose to use.

Publishers though would prefer we only get a scan of a printout of an article, and font publishers would prefer that it be printed in their font so that anyone trying to "duplicate" or "re-use" the article would have to have a license to use their font.

Instruments in music and vectors or brushes or inks/paints in graphical art are akin to fonts in that way.

To get a free open source Mona Lisa we would need to discover what brushes and paints were used, how, and in what sequence, to produce that painting.

We would then be free to see what the Mona Lisa would have looked like if it were performed using different brushes, different paints, different sequences.

-MarkM-