shahzaibmushtaq 10 months ago

The guy who paid $70k to convert 14000 existing icons/logos to SVG for commercial use because he wanted to use these icons according to his product standards. All existing SVGs icons are for personal and study purposes, that's why he spent so much amount out of good faith, moral compliance and professional courtesy.

Moreover, this website has 3198 icons and what about the remaining icons as per his specifications?

One very important thing to note here is that these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License meaning you must allow users to download the source code no matter whether it's modified or not.

  • chrismorgan 10 months ago

    > these SVG icons come with the GNU Affero General Public License

    The only information I can find for this collection is CC-0 <https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/develop/LI...>.

    Another important point is that licenses like AGPL are (simplifying slightly) copyright instruments, and for a work to be eligible for copyright protection, there must be creative effort, which I expect not to be the case for at least the vast majority of the icons—they’ll be mechanical translations, more or less. The original creators will hold copyright over the designs, but I don’t believe there will be any further copyright on such an icon collection, just as photographs of public domain artwork don’t get copyright protection. I am conscientious about these details, and I’d be comfortable ignoring an AGPL claim on such a thing.

    Also AGPL would not be a good license for a work like this. The GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code, and quite a bit of their terms are a little difficult to apply for such a collection as this. And their nature would largely prevent anyone from using the icons unless they wanted to license their stuff under (simplifying slightly) the same license.

    • shahzaibmushtaq 10 months ago

      Thank you for the correction. It doesn't come with the GNU Affero General Public License, and the GPL family of licenses are very specifically designed for code.

      If you can help, where can I learn more about licensing in plain English?

  • taskforcegemini 10 months ago

    can svg even be "not open source"?

    • PaulRobinson 10 months ago

      SVG the standard, no. SVG icons, absolutely. In the same way Python is open source, but I can write software using Python that is not open source.

      • druskacik 10 months ago

        But if you use it on the web, it becomes "open-source" - not by license, but for all practical purposes. Or am I wrong?

    • dspillett 10 months ago

      Yes, unless you incorrectly assume “source is available” directly maps to “is open source”.

    • snatchpiesinger 10 months ago

      It can get minified/optimized by a tool. The "source code" is what you immediately edit, but you might not distribute that version, only a "binary" derived from it.

spoonfeeder006 10 months ago

And don't tell them about the browser inspector nor how to copy SVG code using that

  • bryanrasmussen 10 months ago

    I didn't want to tell you, but there is a thing called copyright. That said, if you copy SVG it is often easy to change the paths etc. and make it "yours". I guess I'd rather pay a small bit though.

    • Culonavirus 10 months ago

      > a thing called copyright

      All the chatbot corps out there: And I took that personally.

Brajeshwar 10 months ago

What is the story? URL to read? (Search resulted in another CEO's $70K salary thing.)

Is this like Pepsi’s Million Dollar logo redesign?

  • ec109685 10 months ago

    It’s quite the saga, including the designer putting in their portfolio that they actually completed the project as they were ghosting their client: https://x.com/Shpigford/status/1807802947394588842

    • dgfitz 10 months ago

      $5.00/image. The math on that is absurd unless the artist is cranking what, 20 images an hour?

      Feels like they thought they had an edge, probably an LLM, and it didn’t work out.

      Also feels like it took $70k to generate 14,000 requirements, or the SOW is actually shit and this is all a disaster.

      Disclaimer: I don’t read twitter, if all this was spelled out in the link I apologize

      • spoonfeeder006 10 months ago

        If you already starting from an existing set from publicly available sources, and you just need to standardize them amongst each other for consistency, then I can see how that would be kinda reasonable, though I'm no designer myself

        perhaps things like giving them a consistent center or consistent brightness/contrast could be done programmatically as well, and maybe there are end user tools to do those things en masse

        other tweaks such as selecting between subtle variations found in each icon, or adding some artistic modification, shadow mimicking, etc... can possibly be done, to align the set to a certain pre-defined theme now that I think about it more

        seems like a pretty interesting kinda project actually

        > Arts, crafts and sciences uplift the world of being and are conducive to its exaltation ~Baha'u'llah

        the designer who chose to instead run with the money probably got insecure or bored, but they would probably be happier if they learned to appreciate the creative process more

    • spoonfeeder006 10 months ago

      So what, he was asking the designer to re-create already existing icons? Or brand new icons for each stock?

      Thats insanely fucked up either way of the designer leading them on like that or to ultimately cheat someone

      • cyral 10 months ago

        Re-create existing icons, since a lot of these icon packs are not very standardized (e.g. some icons are full logos, some are actual icons, some have borders, some have backgrounds, etc).

        Here is a good tweet from another company on why they made their own logos: https://mobile.x.com/tcosta_co/status/1808174493170344345

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