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