OSS clarification for assets

Icons8 Assets Icons
1

I’m considering buying 90 SVG icons from the Fluency set for desktop app toolbar/menu usage (wanting resolution independence, but drawing them myself in Inkscape takes too long :art::clock330:). However, the project is open source (and definitely not wikipedia-noteworthy … perhaps someday :sweat_smile:), and of course, other developers can’t build the executable without the assets.

A question that remains after reading the short usage, a dozens community posts, and the full license is what mitigations are available, and how much transformation to the files is necessary?

“A User or Licensee may not resell or distribute Licensed Materials as stand-alone
files (Example: Separate icon files in SVG format) without the express written
consent of Icons8”

Obviously uploading the raw SVG assets on GitHub is a no-no, because that would be standalone redistribution of original content, and you want to avoid them being trivially accessible. However, I don’t need them to be SVG (convenient as that may be to just call an existing rendering library), or even any form of XML, just a series of vector outlines and gradients.

Would it satisfy the license if I converted them to some other format (possibly proprietary just to this app) stored in the git repo such that code spelunkers can’t open the vector files in Inkscape or Illustrator or other vector editor? Additionally I would copy your license into the resources/ ditectory to make it clear the assets (in transformed form) were from you, and do not share the same license as the rest of the code. TY

2

Hi!

Yes, I think that will be enough. But SVG is just an example, so whatever format you use, there shouldn’t be a way to access the assets directly. If you need to convert them for your own technical needs, go ahead :slight_smile:

We have been thinking for some time already that a Wikipedia-page requirement is a bit strict, we now look if the project has a page on Github and if it is active enough. Could you send us a link? We’ll see what we can do.
Regarding the phrasing, we usually mean that there shouldn’t be any “Download” button or a link that directly leads to our assets and we also ask to put up a disclaimer that warns users it would be a breach of license to extract our assets. Of course the assets used in templates, apps, etc. are going to be in the files somewhere, that’s a given, so don’t bother with encryption :grin:

3

Hi George. The project I want to use them in isn’t published yet (in a private repo on GitHub until after I finish features for a presentable v1.0 release :sweat_smile:), and so there’s no fear of asset leakage currently anyway, but I wanted clarify ahead of time regarding the icons before switching it to public. For a similar project of mine with a toolbar, see here https://github.com/fdwr/TextLayoutSampler. It’s not that active and wouldn’t bring much attention your way. So if you’re content with copyright text under the resources/ folder, disclaimer in the app license, and converting them to some form that isn’t a standard vector format openable by image editors or common tools, then I’m happy to do so :+1:. Cheers.

4

Sure, that’s more than enough :slight_smile:

Once you are ready for your creation to see the light of day, feel free to send us a link, and we’ll see what we can do for the project.

Cheers!

1 Like