Talk:Wikistamp

I found the WPID data on funet.fi. It looks pretty rudimentary, and not useful without a paper catalog as backup (e.g., how on earth would I know if I'm looking at "die 1" or "die 2" of a design?). It also looks pretty unfree (copyright, no GPL or similar licensing).

Are you prepared to distribute your own code and data yet in any way? I'd like to take a look... I'm no C programmer (I only do Perl and Bash really, and nothing very complicated), but I can handle compiling. Do you need any libraries beyond libc?

You might, BTW, consider starting a Sourceforge project. That doesn't require you to give up any control over your project, and you can maybe get more attention than this page brings. —Tkinias 07:06, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

DWCS is not independent of paper catalog yet, sometimes it's tough to distinguish types without a picture (ask a botanist). Right now my personal collection data needs to be filtered out before distributing - thus the merging problem. The program itself is a command-line tool, just reads and writes various formats, about 8K lines in four source files, not even under source control. SF is certainly a possibility, was looking at it before WP sidetracked me two years ago... Stan Shebs 19:54, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

How does copyright law apply to Stamps? I suspect there might be problems with more modern designs. --Paul youlten 15:16, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

It's kind of a strange situation; generally the stamp-issuing organizations own copyright on the designs, and license them out for merchandise (coffee mugs, etc), but everybody can make and pass around scans of actual stamps, and nobody tries to interfere with that. (Which makes sense; collectors buying stamps is like free money, who wants to get in the way of that!) I've been planning to write a WP article on the whole subject after I've done a bit more research. Stan Shebs 00:16, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)