The Breathe icon team just announced their initial release. Check it out if you haven't seen it yet on the ubuntu wiki or on gnome-look.
They've come a long way and are moving ahead at a steady pace. Breathe is an excellent example of the ubuntu artwork community's "theme team" model and proves it's effectiveness and strengths.
Breathe is a growing team and is always looking for new contributors. Specifically, they're looking for someone to help with releases and so forth, so any developer with some free time would be highly appreciated.
from the wiki page:
ReplyDelete'Breathe - "Because humans need oxygen."'
and then it goes on to note how it's going to be based on Oxygen, but you'll replace icons as you go along.
.. and instead of working upstream you'll just fork and replace as you go, with a name and slogan that makes it sound like you have stewardship of oxygen and are doing the next version of it. which isn't exactly accurate is it, since what you're doing is forking?
what's really sad here is that there are never enough artists in the Free software world. we moved Oxygen to a standardized naming scheme to make it more accessible to everyone and grew the group of people working on Oxygen (you were even part of that process) to try and cluster the manpower available to create something really great.
now, while it's flattering to oxygen that Canonical / Ubuntu feels it should be used as the inspiration for the next icon theme, i fail to grasp why it's a fork which is naturally divisive instead of trying to find a way to work upstream and once again reinforce the fracturing in both the visual identity of Free software as well as the art resources we have at our disposal.
if human deserve oxygen, give them oxygen. don't go around reinventing the wheel.
on a related but different note, the use of the trade name Oxygen in what is obviously not an Oxygen project is pretty cheeky as well; by doing so, this project is trading on the good name of Oxygen, which actually isn't the Breath's project to do so with.
all in all, this is pretty sad. getting more quality artwork out there could be immensely exciting, but instead we have this kind of a start to it.
.. and people wonder why there's so much discord in the Free software desktop world.
Gorgeous. Very nice.
ReplyDeleteI just came here to just lookup your email, but then I got distracted and looked at the icons, and I like them a lot!
ReplyDeleteThey might even get me to try setting my Gentoo theme to brown like the Ubuntu default just to enjoy them :)
Great work!
@Aaron:
ReplyDeleteActually, breathe did not fork anything. (I think) they looked at Oxygen as inspiration more than really taking anything. If the text refers to it as being based on Oxygen it should be re-worded as there are no Oxygen icons included in it. Then again, one could argue what "based on" means.
Canonical had nothing to do with this other than to provide the infrastructure (LP, etc). It came from the ubuntu-artwork community.
To be frank, "because humans need oxygen" sounds quite a lot like using Oxygen to go on - but it is also a reference to Oxygen.
ReplyDeleteTo me Breathe sound just like the improving and forking free software makes possible: They can use the great work done by the Oxygen team and shape it into their vision.
And the Ubuntu vision of the looks of a free software desktop is quite different from the one many others have (I normally can't stand their choice of brown).
It would be nice to have an easier shareback option, though, like themed Oxygen ("human-touch oxygen", "corporate-steel oxygen", "ice-cold oxygen", "apocalypse-now oxygen", ...).
Then they could have just joined the Oxygen team with a new theme.
Their goal was to use the ideas behind oxygen to create a new set of icons for ubuntu. There is a difference between stealing something and creating someting completely new based on the ideals of something else.
ReplyDeleteBreathe does not include any oxygen icons and although it still needs lots of work I cannot see any reason to discourage anyone from working on something which, in the end, is designed to work well with the default kde icon theme.