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by pessimism 4586 days ago
As someone with open projects on GitHub that may or may not be a future source of income (lol), specific and succinct language on the licensing is probably your best way to ensure adoption of your product.

I just cannot be bothered to risk using an icon font in a GitHub repo only to have to bleach every trace of it, because I misunderstood the license or the author’s intent.

To help remember just how the hell the most popular “free” font icons are licensed, I created a gist: https://gist.github.com/4443939. There is no way that overview looks simple to anyone.

This is what I as a developer think about as the very first thing, when I see a collection of free-asterisk icons.

The cognitive load of parsing the legalese, especially from the standpoint of someone with zero jurisprudence is a huge toll and reason for my personal bounce rate on similar products.

Consider what the point of your free icons are (portfolio vs. seeing your icons everywhere), and how you wish to stand out (quality vs. licensing).

They say cache invalidation and naming things are the hardest thing in programming, but licensing is definitely up there; at the very least, it is something most people in the field do not—but should—understand.

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tl;dr: If you launch a set of free(*) icons, crystal-clear licensing should be at the top of your checklist.

1 comments

I wonder why most free icon sets are licensed with attribution but most free software is not...
> licensed with attribution but most free software is not

Let's see:

3BSD: Redistributions in [source/binary] form must [retain/reproduce] the above copyright notice [...]

MIT: The above copyright notice [...] shall be included in all copies [...]

ASL: You must retain [...] all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices

MPL: You may not remove or alter the substance of any license notices (including copyright notices, patent notices, disclaimers of warranty, or limitations of liability)

The above sounds like attribution to me.

And here's for the elephant in the room:

GPLv3: Not required by default (merely requires an appropriate copyright notice to make the license actually enforceable), but (7.) Additional Terms may supplement the basic terms (especially for but not limited to additional material such as art). GPL is deemed compatible with BSD so there's no problem in adding such a clause, even if it is free form. Even if not required, I guess it is customary to do so anyway.

Perhaps designers and developers have different priorities?