License missing

[scy]

I've discovered this project today and I’m totally in love with the idea. Thanks for building it! ❤

I have some ideas in my head about little things that I might want to change or add, that could even result in pull requests (if you’re interested). However, before starting to hack on it, I’ve noticed that it doesn’t have an open-source license file.

Would you mind adding one? GitHub even has a nice UI that helps you select one if you like. It would allow people to build upon your work or contribute back to this beautiful thing you’ve created.

[patbl]

@astrojams1 @wonga00 I too am fascinated by the project and am interested in contributing. Are you potentially interested in pull requests? If not, would it be OK for me to fork the project and host a separate version?

A couple of things I might look into:

• There was a fair amount of repetition (similar videos from the same channel) during the hour or so I spent watching videos last night. For example, I got a bunch of "partly in-frame desktop computer with discoball in front" videos like this. I think this is because many videos with "IMG" and the like in their titles are parts of batches of similar videos (I also saw a bunch of automatically filmed deer-in-the-night videos). If the code kept track of what channels it selected videos from, it could deprioritize videos from a channel that had already been shown during a session. (I haven't yet checked how feasible this is.)
• Given the repetition I observed, I wonder whether it's less common these days to have "IMG," "DSC," etc. in the title of a video. I could try and investigate whether this is the case, and explore other criteria that could be used to identify home videos.

[drassi]

Hey friends @scy @patbl et al,

I know you commented here quite awhile ago, but would you have any interest in contributing to a fork reboot of this site?

I had been thinking of this project again in recent months and noticed very sadly that the site's been throwing 502 errors for awhile now - I'm sure the creators are busy on other great things. But it's a quite magical project and I'd be sad if it didn't exist in some form, all the alternatives I found to be quite inferior. I dug in briefly yesterday to understand the code a little bit, and made some efficiency improvements to the crawler to get new data flowing.

Just now put it up on an AWS micro http://astronaut.cam:3000 using my fork drassi/astronaut

Anyone interested, contact me if you'd have time/interest in keeping the project going, I set up an email forward at dan@astronaut.cam - I think what's needed first is node.js operational knowledge (which I'm lacking), and further improvements to video search crawler, filtering, and extending the data storage, some quality suggestions above.

On to the actual topic of licensing, I also hope to gain clarity on creators' wishes as to how they'd like the code used. At the low end, I think the underlying libraries would force some type of derivative use permission, though I'd be conservative and assume non-commercial-use.

Cheers,
Dan

[wonga00]

hello! thank you all for the kind words and interest in this project, and letting me know about the issues, I am currently fixing the 502 issue. As for rights / forks we would appreciate if astronaut.io is the only deployment of the project in the wild. We will look into the licensing options to better understand the implications, as this is new territory for us.

[drassi]

That's awesome to hear, thanks Andrew!! Just know you have dedicated followers if any help is needed : )