Taking One for the Mac-team
Sebastiaan de With has taken a hit for all of us. By releasing his great Orion icon set for Leopard (to replace the ass-tastic default folders Apple shipped with the big cat) on his own server and become a huge hit with Apple and their users he’s been stuck with one helluva hosting bill. You always hope people dig your stuff, but bandwith can break your heart. I didn’t link to Orion just out of respect, if you don’t have it wait and grab it once he has a new home for them.
So here’s the question, in an age of community where does freeware live? Do we find a way to help Sebastiaan offset the cost, or is this just the cost of ‘giving’ assets away? With 180,000+ uniques that pulled the icons is there enough business drummed up to not feel bad for the upfront cost? No idea what any of the answers are, but if he asks for help I’d happily chip in.
If you’re willing to make it Open Source, there are lots of places that will give you free bandwidth. If you want to keep control of it as freeware (but not Open Source), then the bandwidth cost is yours.
Thanks for the post. Regarding the commenter; it’s hard to make icons open-source… I could offer up PSD’s of my work, but that would only help increase the problem of my bandwidth, as there are no ‘open-source’ licenses for artwork.
I won’t bother my readers or ‘users’ (downloaders, whatever) with begging for money because I can’t run my company. I think I provide a service, out of free will, and those people should just be able to get at it, like it is for the products of friends; the Iconfactory and others. In the mean time, I have been able to avoid the problem by upgrading my bandwidth package somewhat, and although costs now total over 110$ over the regular costs, it won’t run my company into the ground as their estimation of almost $4000 predicted.
It’ll be a good christmas for me once I get around to setting S3 up, which will have more decent rates.