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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Interesting LICENSE: https://github.com/uswds/uswds/blob/develop/LICENSE.md

Wonder why they decided to go with Material Icons vs building out their own icon library? US seems to have various glyphs all over the place, would be neat to see them consolidated in a standard icon library.

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It also mentions Font Awesome. Probably better to build on ubuquitous icon sets instead of wasting taxpayers money on redesigning exclamation mark icons.

This would cost a lot of money.

They can still augment with custom icons where it actually matters.

Creating icon set from scratch is rather difficult and time consuming. It also requires a lot of research to ensure usability. What ends up happening is designers will just start from existing icon set anyway to stay close to existing convention and mental model.

I guess they felt it’s not the best use of their limited resources?

Producing a bespoke icon library for a large organization can be shockingly expensive depending on how the organization is structured.

I've worked on projects where dozens of different stakeholders needed to sign off on the icon library resulting in thousands of person-hours of design review meetings alone. If I could save millions of dollars by picking an existing icon library and adding only what is needed that seems like a smart move to me.

There is a standard set. https://designsystem.digital.gov/components/icon/

Those are material icons

Really unfortunate. It’s not like we don’t have the will or capability. I’m hoping this is just while they iron out licensing agreements.

Could you or someone please help explain why a new icon library or license would be really fortunate compared to this choice?

How does public domain license compare to something like GPL? Isn't public domain better?

Public domain allows you to do whatever you want with the work. GPL requires derivative works to also be GPL’d.

As a matter of law, all copyrightable work done by Federal employees as part of their job is public domain. This is yet another loss to society in the trend towards privatizing government operations.

Can’t tell what you’re lamenting.

If the federal government designed their own icon set it would be available for anyone to use without license restrictions. Since they’ve decided to use someone else’s icon system, they aren’t making a public domain set of icons.

But also, since they’ve decided to use someone else’s icon system, taxpayers are not paying for yet another icon system, when an existing one under an Apache license is available.

This is true. In some ways, Apache/MIT licensing is superior to public domain licensing as some jurisdictions (Germany, IIRC) don’t recognize public domain as a status.

I’m lamenting the fact that by contracting out work to private companies, the government-sponsored work product belongs to the private companies and not the public domain. I suspect from the part of those architecting the contracting (on both the government and private side) that this is a feature, not a bug.

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