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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

Are Google serious? Simultaneously pushing websites to be highly efficient (Core Web Vitals), at the same time as introducing the methods that can make them less efficient.

Also, about these icons, they mention "please don’t try to sell them", immediately followed by "Apache license 2.0". Well, Google, which is it? Do they actually mean to say "you have permission to sell them, but please don't?"

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You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?

I don’t care since the icon font approach is technically inferior to SVG icons: it’s monochrome only, whereas SVG supports colors and transparency.

Icon fonts also suffer from a plethora of rendering issues across platforms because fonts are usually rendered with speedy display of long text in mind.

It’s strange Google would invest in a years-old kludge tech.

Well, it's a good thing it's under Apache 2.0, then. Maybe someone will convert/trace them as SVGs and sublicense them...

They're available as SVGs. They link to the GitHub repo at the top of the page, and if you select any icon, there's a download SVG button.

Fonts can actually contain coloured glyphs now, originally for emoji. Although it does seem like a layering violation.

Good luck recoloring them in CSS :/

y...yes? they should use an appropriate license

All Google is saying is don't scam others by reselling the same stuff that is freely available. Licensing it under something more restrictive (or custom) would make this a non-starter for other companies to reuse or remix.

It's incredible that one of the biggest companies in the world can't manage to appropriately license their stuff.

Apache 2.0 is also a strange license for anything that's not code, too; it refers to "source" and "object" form throughout. I imagine they could've chosen it for license simplicity & compatibility reasons, but again, if they just wanted these to be used as widely as possible, they could've just gone CC0.

> Apache 2.0 is also a strange license for anything that's not code, too; it refers to "source" and "object" form throughout.

Fonts are code. And very often have a clear source vs. object form.

Not every undesirable behavior can be blocked by firm rules without catching non-problematic behavior. Using a license which that errs on the side of being permissive rather than restrictive at the boundary and using social pressure to try to mitigate undesirable behavior in that boundary area seems a reasonable approach. (True for law, too, and lots of other domains.)

There's some domains where you need to (given that perfect calibration is unattainable) err on the side of being restrictive, but that's definitely not always the right choice.

They can ask nicely, but I expect it will have very little bearing on how people use these. Determining how things get used is what licenses are for.

I'll try selling them

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