What's the advantage of going with Fixed Funding as opposed to Flexible? Wouldn't receiving the $8 million (or whatever it ends up at) be better than nothing?
There are significant fixed costs in building a smart phone, for example in design, certifications and tooling. Building something like 50K of them is already on the low end.
It would be a disaster for them if they got into a position were they had costs of $1500 per phone and had to choose between bailing out or eat the losses.
Arguably the whole attraction of these things is that there's a model where you pledge an amount and only have to pay up if there's enough money to get it off the ground.
No one wants to be the guy who stuck $700 down for something that will never exist because they were the only ones to pledge.
If it weren't for the fixed model, they would struggle to get even a fraction of the money they've raised so far.
Maybe I'm just not ruthless enough for business, but this does not seem like a great way to make money. I'd rather make less through honest customers who like my product, then screw over those who don't.
I actually like this. I think (hope) it will force people to put a bit more thought into their reviews. Anonymity with reviews is unproductive for the developer and brings down the quality of a store.
EDIT: However when companies like Enfour publicly slate those who leave bad reviews, maybe keeping their name private is a good thing.
I've written some fantastic reviews. Why am I being punished by an unproven notion? This doesn't help anyone. It's merely a terrible marketing ploy to further push G+.
The license terms mean that the icon set cannot be used in open source projects intended for redistribution. Your call, of course, just pointing it out.
It might be better to use a more standard license, maybe Apache or BSD with an extra clause prohibiting "sale in whole apart from use in a larger software distribution." IANAL but it might hold up better and be less confusing.
Otherwise, obviously really great work and very generous. Thanks.
@davidw - that is meant to refer to not selling or redistributing the icon pack as a whole - you are more than welcome to use it in any open source redistributed work.
I think that requirement would conflict with some open source licenses -- they typically grant the right to redistribute and modify the source code in any way.
That would include stripping out everything but the icons and selling them.
So if the license requires all accompanying code/assets to be under similar licenses, that could prevent use of your icons. I think that's the case under the GPL? Not really sure anymore.
e: After doing a bit more reading, I believe I was wrong. As long as the icons aren't somehow compiled into the binary, there are no license problems.
No, this differs from CC-NC in that you can use them in a commercial work, you just can't sell them on their own. Using CC-NC would prevent users from bundling these into a commercial product whatsoever.
Public Domain and CCZero would be a very efficient way to quiet people's fears about what they can't do with this icon set, without alarming them that they need Legal Advice to build their app. You've tried to trim down the restrictions to almost nothing, but we have an established protocol to encompass all uses. Why not go all the way?
