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by ArcaneMoose 632 days ago
Don't tell the guy who paid $70k for icons about this!
3 comments

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.

> 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.

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?

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

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

If you find a GitHub repository with code inside it and no LICENSE file (or any other license specifier), it is not open source.
maybe if those SVGs are only used as assets inside an iOS/Android app but not on a webpage accessible via browser ....
Yes, unless you incorrectly assume “source is available” directly maps to “is open source”.
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.
And don't tell them about the browser inspector nor how to copy SVG code using that
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.
> a thing called copyright

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

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?

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
$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

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

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

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