Pay It Forward Design Bundle – 100% to Watsi | Hacker News Reader

Pay It Forward Design Bundle – 100% to Watsi

payitforwardbundle.com

127 pointsgracegarey19 comments

I love the idea of a Humble Bundle, but for other interests, like this. But this bundle is a little confusing to me. I suppose selling things that may be used professionally is much different than selling video games or eBooks.

The Creative Market Charity Design Bundle looks good, but the other items are just limited time subscriptions, or even worse, discounts on purchases/subscriptions. It's like paying for a coupon book. It might be nice if you're planning on purchasing some of these, but I doubt I'll use any of these services knowing that in a year (or less), my access is gone unless I pay full price.

Also, where is the licensing? For the Creative Market items, it seems like each one has it's own license? Most of them seem to use this Simple License[1], but I don't know if they all do. The text for the Simple License is way too vague for me to use this on any commercial project. As far as what you cannot do with the license. For example:

> Cannot be used in a product offered for sale where the item contributes to the core value of the product being sold.

How do you even decide this? The first example listed is:

>You Can: Use a purchased icon set as functional icons in your app, such as button icons.

>You Cannot: Use a purchased icon set as artwork that enhances actual gameplay in your app, such as the birds in Angry Birds.

That's so arbitrary. The artwork of the birds is somehow different than the artwork of the menu icons in the game? What if you make an Angry Birds clone, except where buttons are used to aim and fire the birds, instead of touch/dragging? Let's say I make a messaging app where the "core value" is just a simple, clean interface. Do I lose the ability to use these icons?

[1] https://creativemarket.com/licenses/simple

Probably from a technical lawyery standpoint that's not enforceably clear, but from the standpoint of someone who uses paid creative assets as part of my regular work, it's certainly clear enough that I could feel fine using them and moving on with my life, and knowing if I was stepping over the line.

Question to anyone in the media industry:

Why aren't there a lot of open source media assets (that actually are as high quality as paid assets)? I remember trying to make games and such, and people required me to pay $1000's of dollars, seems relevant here as well, such as "10 movie clips" for $1500.

It puts up a barrier for individuals to use assets they haven't made, does it not? I think that was one of the main reasons FOSS was started; so a homebrew hacker doesn't require shelling out $2k for a text editor!

The benefit of open source software is clear: If I open source my text editor it can be made better by other people contributing to it.

I don't see the benefit of "open sourcing" high quality media assets. The expectation of a media asset is for it to be completed and then used as is, not continuously improved like a software product.

The Free Software/Culture stuff is also about DRY, in a sense. Say I need a picture of a stream for a project. I get my camera and drive a couple hours to the woods. Batch process the set and finally decide on one picture to use. At the end of this, fairly expensive process, I actually have 10-15 pretty good, usable pictures that I no longer am going to use (at least not in the near future). The (modern) traditional ideology is to lock those away just in case I may need a picture like that in the future.

Makeing them free to others means they don't have to repeat the same process for basically the exact same thing. Now multiply this by the 100's or thousand's of other assets that could be used in a small project.

In my opinion, it's actually more about the happiness you feel when you give these things away. It's doubtful you'll use them again and so why not give them away.

Picture doesn't work repeatedly. Same for design and other graphical element. It gets boring after the second use, annoying as hell the third and there's no fourth time. We want to experience "new" stuff. We can already seen those kind of complain with the light reuse of some stuff in video game and movies...

I think the problem isn't so much that there isn't good open source media assets, but rather it's hard to find/filter them. One site that comes to mind that has free assets is http://opengameart.org/

One of the greatest assets there come from Kenny at kenney.nl/assets.

It's just CC, not "open source," but there are plenty of places (i.e. Flickr) where you can share your assets for others to use. I've had people contact me about using some of my photos in books they're publishing (wasn't necessary, given the CC license, but gave me a warm fuzzy and was appreciated), and I've contacted photographers about using their work for a wedding invitation I was making. But many of the kinds of things that are actually useful have the kind of specific requirements that make them not fun to create and share for free, so Shutterstock makes lots of money.

In that realm, one example I've seen pop up a lot where some kind of video needs to be shown off is "Big Buck Bunny" [1], a project to build an open movie using blender.

[1] https://peach.blender.org

So if I sign up to get this.. how many of the services require credit information?

I'm a bit worried that I'll sign up for a bunch of services to receive the offer, and then 12 months from now when all of them expire I'll suddenly have autorenewals all over my credit card statement.

I'm guessing this is for a good cause but I don't know that a bundle works in this particular case.

Also, I disabled my ad block software a few weeks ago for unrelated reasons and when I visited another (news) page a few minutes later what do you know? There are now ads for "creative market" (fonts icons graphics etc) along the side of the news article... So it appears someone got a few cents worth of information by me clicking on this link as well. Oh well, I don't care but I might consider re-enabling the ad blocker.

On the off chance the creator is here, explaining what Watsi is, even if only in a few words, would be very helpful. I'd never heard of Watsi before. I had to click on the 'stories' link and then click on the Watsi homepage to find out.

Additionally, finding out what's in the bundle is similarly counter-intuitive. The 'Explore All Assets' link showed two separate popups that seemed like it was required to pay or at least register just to see a list of what I'd actually get.

Watsi's doing really good work. Here's some more information from the front of the Pay It Forward Bundle homepage (no need to click through anywhere). Please consider donating. Even $2 makes a real impact.

"Watsi enables anyone to fund life-changing healthcare for people around the world. 100% of every donation to Watsi funds healthcare, and the organization is dedicated to complete transparency. Since launching, Watsi has funded healthcare for 2,631 people in 19 countries."

Ah. It was below the fold. And the link near Watsi I figured was a learn more link but it wasn't.

This is a pretty great bundle, even if you only redeem a couple of the offers like myself.

Wunderlist and Scribd alone make this an easy purchase for me; I was going to buy Wunderlist Pro yesterday, so this is perfect.

Wunderlist is really nice and Scribd too! Totally agree. Given that you can donate anything you want (minimum $2), it's hard to say this isn't a great value. :-)

But much more importantly, it goes to a really great organization. I've been a supporter of Watsi for quite a while. It's really powerful to get that email update some time later and learn, more often than not, that a patient's surgery went well or need was fulfilled. Watsi is super transparent and upfront about where money is flowing, how successful it is, and you get direct knowledge of exactly the patient you're helping. Great stuff!

No bitcoin payment?

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