Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Liberating Freesound.org

[Fabio Pesari]

On 02/18/2016 12:12 PM, Bram de Jong wrote:
> Hi Fabio,

Hi Bram,

> I believe much of the confusion comes from the interpretation of the
> word free. We are freesound as in GRATISsound rather than LIBREsound.
> Freesound is a research project, with clear research-driven goals, and
> so many of our policies reflect this.

No, it's me who apologizes for thinking that you referred to freedom!
I thought that was what made Freesound different from the dozens of
"royalty-free" sample sites.

I came to that conclusion by looking at how many libre samples were
submitted as opposed to nonfree ones, and your support for free software.

Just out of curiosity: is the research funded with public money?

> We welcome pull requests and forks of Freesound and we love
> improvement requests as you have already seen. We already changed the
> LICENSES file to reflect Essentia's license and made a ticket to
> remove the javascript filtering in the search. Using Piwik would
> require us to host yet-another-service so this is not really an
> option. We would like to run less services, not more. If you have a
> hosted/free analytics solution that could help us, please let me know.

Piwik.org provides hosting but a hosted analytics solution would have
the same problems as Google Analytics (except that it's a smaller
company) so in this case, I think you should focus on making JavaScript
optional, so that only people who use it will be tracked by Google.

> A few parts of freesound you have the most problems with (i.e.
> login-wall, only 3 licenses, ...) have been the same for over 10
> years. This setup has proven to be a winning combination for our most
> active community members (i.e. uploaders!) and will not change, sorry.

I can understand that. All I am asking for is a way to let _someone
else_ share those files with the world more easily, since the Creative
Commons licenses explicitly allow it.

Aside from the initial bandwidth investment of uploading the samples to
Archive.org or somewhere else, there would be no more work required on
your part.

If you want to help, it'd be great and I would be thankful for it, if
not, well, I think this should be a lesson for all people who upload
their freely licensed works on services that aren't run by nonprofit
associations which can be trusted to share them with as many people as
possible (like nongnu.org or archive.org).