I have learned to stay away from open-core icon sets. It seems like they are doing a very nice balancing act where the icons you need later on happen to be in the paid section.
I also dislike this is promoted as an open source icon set. This is a commercial product providing free samples. By design, it has a funnel of free / 'open source' users of which some will be turned into customers.
Finally, it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech. It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version. But basically this is how graphics / icons / page templates / etc are being marketed.
I guess this is where any kind of 'community' helps. If a library has a community, it would be forked the 2nd day if it tries to pull something like this. But icons / templates / graphics are generally the work of a single person or small group of persons. There is no community that may philosophically decide they disagree and thus fork the project on new license terms.
All in all, quite depressing. But, I understand, we all need to eat.
> it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech
While the criticism of this being called "open source" is somewhat valid. The suggestion that people creating usable graphics for the community should do so for free is a little frustrating. It's a bit like the memes where designers/photographers/ect are asked to do work for "exposure". The devaluation of creative output is quite sad, people who go out of their way to create something you can use for small fee should be held up as examples of the best of the community.
The vast majority of people who "create" (rather than contribute to) an open source projects are doing so for some sort of "commercial" reason. Wether it's an ambition to built a business around it, promote themselves as an expert, or being done as part of study to further themselves, its all about personal growth which translates to an income.
I fear we are all becoming too used to building upon the "free" foundations of open source and it blinds us to the creativity that goes into these types of projects.
> If a library has a community, it would be forked the 2nd day if it tries to pull something like this
I also find this frustrating as an attitude towards open source, the "open core" concept is completely valid and isn't an argument to fork. With most open source projects the majority of the work is contributed by a very small group of people, true if you frustrate a core contributor they may justifiably fork the project. However we should champion open source projects where the core team find a way to commercialise it in a sustainable way, when done well it only benefits the community.
When picking a foundation to build a business on, the advantages of picking one where there is a commercial organisation supporting the project as a core of their own business model is well known. Examples I can think of:
- Ionic Framework and Capacitor from Ionic
- Tailwind (actually a brilliant counter example with Tailwind UI being the commercial upgrade)
> While the criticism of this being called "open source" is somewhat valid. The suggestion that people creating usable graphics for the community should do so for free is a little frustrating.
It's a weird balancing act. At the end of the day though, everything on the internet is a race to the bottom; nothing beats free. Of course, you don't have to make your work freely available, if you think that your contributions stand on their own merits then you can of course charge a fee. Here's the thing, though: 99% of the time, developers will completely skip over your product even if the free alternative is decidedly worse. For example:
> The vast majority of people who "create" (rather than contribute to) an open source projects are doing so for some sort of "commercial" reason.
Au contraire, just look at Linux, an OS that was designed as a passion project by One Guy and the Internet. It was developed by people who cared, and thought they could create a better system for free. Commercial purposes appropriated it, not the other way around. This is the case for a number of OSS: before people even contribute to an open-source project, it has to be someone's proof-of-concept, someone's toy project. History simply doesn't align with this claim, it takes a lot of Freudian contrivances to make it true.
> I also find this frustrating as an attitude towards open source, the "open core" concept is completely valid and isn't an argument to fork.
Then use your own license. Of course, then it likely wouldn't be considered open-source, but if you're not comfortable letting your community take control of your project then you probably shouldn't use a license that explicitly allows for exactly that. Source-available licenses will assuage your security-minded customers while deterring those pesky contributors and passionate freeloaders from appropriating your hard work.
> When picking a foundation to build a business on, the advantages of picking one where there is a commercial organisation supporting the project as a core of their own business model is well known.
Of course it is. Money follows money. Your priorities as a software salesman are not the same as your priorities as a software user. That disparity is what drives the misery that makes up the modern commercial software landscape. It's the reason why the whole dream of "open source projects where the core team find a way to commercialise it in a sustainable way" doesn't really exist, and certainly isn't championed. Your goal can either be to empower your users at all costs, or to monetize your product. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
What makes me mad is watching people appropriate the ideals of Free Software for commercial purposes. The only people you're fooling is users, the developers worth their salt won't even give you the time of day if you're peddling some contrived licensed crapware. Every piece of software you listed at the bottom has openly-licensed alternatives, explicitly because there are droves of people who have nothing to gain from paying for the same thing they could get for free.
It's a free world, and ultimately your choice how you choose to license your work. Truly great work transcends these petty concerns with what your users will think and what commercial alternatives exist. Nothing, and I mean *nothing* beats free.
> Finally, it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech.
That comes from the roots of programming and computer science in general, where it's part of the old-school "academic spirit" is making stuff available for others to experiment with and advance on. Universities paid their professors, doctors and other academics to work on all that stuff like compilers, programming languages, communication standards or operating systems - wherever you look in open source projects dating prior to the 2000s, all of them have a strong foundation somewhere in academics or the military.
Only when computers became household items, commercialization really took off, as suddenly the market for software was no longer restricted to fellow academics, a few very ambitious hobbyists and even fewer megacorporations.
UI/UX design, in contrast, never had that "golden age" of third-party funding everything that the people wanted to work on in that moment.
It is open source, and it's commercial. It's both. The word "Upgrade" is right there at the top of the page. It's not in the last surprising, or hidden, and thousands of businesses here promote themselves with a freemium product.
That doesn't detract from the generosity of giving something away - the only reason it's not been forked and improved by others (for free) is that nobody blinkin' wants to without payment.
Just take what's free, or pay for what's not! I don't know why that's depressing at all.
Well you clearly feel strongly, but it came off as a bit harsh when the creator spent 12 years on these. How is this different than shareware or 30 day software trials or feature limited trials? Free stuff shows the quality, nature, general function. If you need more or need to use it commercially (to make money yourself), you have to pay to upgrade. Seems pretty much like this approach is analogous.
> It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version.
Unfortunately this is frequently the case in programs and libraries: GraalVM has commercial-only optimizations, Qt has commercial licensing and proprietary modules, SQL/NoSQL/caching databases, search indexers, etc.
> Finally, it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech. It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version.
Open-core (open source with enhanced commercial version or commercial first-party add-ons) model is not uncommon in software (libraries, applications, etc.)
Neither is having a downstream commercial derivative vendor being a major contributor of work and resources to an open source project, which is essentially the same thing. (e.g., EnterpriseDB & Postgres.)
It's not something that the design industry does but software doesn't.
By the way, is it right to call these free sets "open-source". From the GPL:
> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
Unless the designers from Streamline are working directly with the SVGs, which is possible, but unlikely. To be truly open-source, it would have to include, for example, Illustrator files.
Otherwise, it is free, libre, permissive or just open. But I wouldn't call it open source unless we have the source.
Deep learning libraries are free; GPT-3 is not a library, it's a pretrained model. It's offered (for a fee) through an API. The company offering it (as much as I dislike their naming OpenAI, while being all but open) spent considerable amount of money training it, and is paying more in hardware costs for each instance you send through their API.
Actually, even though training models is very expensive, most models are even available online for free! A large collection is on HuggingFace (including GPT-2, which is essentially a smaller GPT-3), and there are studies proving that the quality is essentially the same. You can literally just download and run them, pretty much like... a free library.
If this became popular and thus a marketplace it would have extra value being able to describe the you want an icon to represent 'idea' in the style of 'example' and be able to run a mini-contest with a winning submission purchase.
Exactly this. Whenever I tried to find some free fonts/icons/illustrations/sprites online, I always got tricked into one of those websites that have the word "free" in its title, but most of the content is locked behind a paywall.
Now I think about it, maybe we should have a blocklist that automatically removes results that invole this kind of deceptive behavior from search results.
Same with 3D assets. There is a website called Free 3D dot com, with page title "3D models for free" and when you search anything their result page literally says "Free 3D <search term> models" but every other result is actually a paid model with no way to filter.
I also dislike this is promoted as an open source icon set. This is a commercial product providing free samples. By design, it has a funnel of free / 'open source' users of which some will be turned into customers.
Finally, it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech. It would never occur to me to create a programming library where you have the 'basic' open source version and the 'optimized' commercial version. But basically this is how graphics / icons / page templates / etc are being marketed.
I guess this is where any kind of 'community' helps. If a library has a community, it would be forked the 2nd day if it tries to pull something like this. But icons / templates / graphics are generally the work of a single person or small group of persons. There is no community that may philosophically decide they disagree and thus fork the project on new license terms.
All in all, quite depressing. But, I understand, we all need to eat.