
Show HN: Tinkersynth 2.0 (now with color and open-sourced) - joshwcomeau
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/posts/tinkersynth-two-point-oh/
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droidist2
The resemblance to the cover of Joy Division's _Unknown Pleasures_ album is
interesting. According to Wikipedia, the image used on the cover was of "the
intensity of successive radio pulses" specifically from radio astronomy.

[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V3Ioohi9aqE/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V3Ioohi9aqE/maxresdefault.jpg)

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codetrotter
> One new caveat: I've changed the license to CC Attribution-NonCommercial
> 4.0. This is really just to prevent people from directly selling the stuff
> they export from Tinkersynth. I hope artists will use this as input to their
> creative processes!

Absolutely appreciate the effort you put into making this, and very grateful
that you’ve open sourced it.

When I read the text quoted above my takeaway was that the intention is that
people should still be able to use the outputs in their own work. However, as
I understand copyright law, the copyright of a work also applies to
derivatives of it such that permission is required (either directly or through
a license for the work) to make use of the derivative works in ways extending
beyond any initially agreed upon use.

Fortunately, you’ve got that bit covered in the details about the license.

> If you use Tinkersynth as input to your creative process, and the output is
> so different that it would be unrecognizeable as a Tinkersynth design,
> please feel free to use it commercially, or however you wish. The art is
> 100% yours at that point. I'm not sure if this is technically within the
> bounds of the license (I just picked the closest representation of what I
> want I could find), but please feel free to contact me and I'll grant a
> personal exemption after seeing the work.

To play devils advocate it might be difficult to say what would qualify as
“unrecognizable as a Tinkersynth design” though.

From the point of view of most of your users I think it will turn out to be a
non-issue.

I do think however that there is some potential that some users might
interpret what it means to be “unrecognizable” differently from what you do,
and so there is a risk of future disputes between you and some users.
Hopefully there won’t be of course. I am not a lawyer, by the way. Just
offering my thoughts on this.

Secondly, however, and more importantly, I wonder to what extent it is
actually possible for the author of a tool to claim copyright on the output of
a tool if said tool has sufficient amount of randomness or user input
controlling the output. I don’t have an answer to this, and I don’t know if it
would apply to your tool. But I think it might be worth looking into, just to
ensure that the restrictions you are putting on the output of your tool are
actually possible to put there.

(And again, IANAL, TINLA.)

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joshwcomeau
Yeah, I had concerns about how grey all of this is. Really as long as someone
is putting artistic effort into it, I’m happy to cede all copyright. But
that’s a very hard thing to specify legally (and it certainly isn’t specified
in any licenses I looked at).

The thing I don’t want is people inverting the colors, or cropping it, and
calling it a unique work. I’ve already had people trying to sell Tinkersynth
works they hadn’t paid for in the old model, and I’ve heard some horror
stories from other creative coders.

As to whether it’s possible to copyright the output of a tool... that’s a good
question! I’m not actually sure either. I don’t expect any real issues to
emerge. The licence change is largely around guarding the most obvious cases,
I won’t even try to make a fuss in any other cases.

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alexanderson
Very classy! The interactions are so delightful, and the premise of
"serendipitous discoveries through experimentation" is spot on. Well done!

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wortelefant
nice! Did you think about connecting it to spreadshirt or a similar T-shirt
producer? There is a service with random text designs already,
[http://zufallsshirt.de](http://zufallsshirt.de) \- they even generate
T-shirts from "non-notable" Wikipedia discussions

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joshwcomeau
Yeah, t-shirts are an interesting idea... I haven't really looked into it.
Thanks for the tip!

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detaro
More "you're allowed to look at the source" than "open source" though.

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alexanderson
I don’t see how it isn’t legitimately open source. There may not be a
“LICENSE.MD” file in the repo, but the “package.json” file does list the
license as “MIT”. That’s good enough for me.

~~~
detaro
The README says:

> _License

This code is released without license. I hope that you'll read the source to
answer any questions you have and take that knowledge to your own projects,
rather than forking and augmenting Tinkersynth itself.

(Of course you're more than welcome to try modifying the code for your own
curiosity! Just please don't publish it, or try to monetize it)._

~~~
joshwcomeau
Ah, I hadn’t noticed the package.json said MIT! I should change that.

As for “not really open-source”, you’re right. I’m clearer in the FAQ on
tinkersynth.com; it’s not “OSS” in the conventional sense. I just didn’t know
how else to phrase it in the limited HN title.

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oezi
I was surprised and sad that there is no sound coming from this synth. It took
me some time to realize that this synth is for generating images.

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gdsdfe
This would be amazing if you would map the params to web midi and allow
recordings to video

