Comment by shahzaibmushtaq

Comment by shahzaibmushtaq 10 months ago

12 replies

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?

      • chrismorgan 10 months ago

        The key to open source is the ability to modify it effectively.

        To use GPLv3 definitions <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section1>:

        > The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.

        For icons like this, it’s just that there is no object code, the source code is the only form there is.

        But supposing you had your SVG document with high precision, meaningful object IDs, Inkscape PowerStroke data (variable stroke thickness, which gets materialised in SVG as a path that gets fill), editor metadata and the likes, and then fed it through svgo and stripped all that stuff out, leaving just the bare bones, the original would be the source code, and the svg output object code.

        To put it in the frame of another format where the difference is more stark, if you design something in Photoshop and you export it as PNG but don’t distribute the PSD, that ain’t Open Source. You can modify it, but not properly.

        Or another: C, and a compiled binary. You can patch the binary, but that doesn’t make everything open source.

      • Maken 10 months ago

        Having the source code available is not open source nor free software.

      • pestaa 10 months ago

        Open source is a category of licenses.

        What you mean is that it is plaintext, and can be introspected. Great for many practical purposes, yes, but in business context, you are obligated to honor the actual license.

      • Hamuko 10 months ago

        If you find a GitHub repository with code inside it and no LICENSE file (or any other license specifier), it is not open source.

      • albert_e 10 months ago

        maybe if those SVGs are only used as assets inside an iOS/Android app but not on a webpage accessible via browser ....

  • 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.