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Free Flag Icons

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Re: Free Flag Icons

#71

Post by neilk »

uvdiv wrote: post #69
neilk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for making these, but I wish you would have also acknowledged the sources in your LICENSE.txt. As for the license itself -- even though I used to work on licensing and UI for Wikimedia Commons, I acknowledge this can be quite confusing, so I sympathize. I've rewritten this comment a couple of times already. It's not clear to me if you can re-release everything under any single license. It's also unclear to me…

I'm curious, how did wikipedia get copyright over the designs of national flags? What right to they have to attribution?

Wikipedia took over the world while nobody was noticing. Didn't you get the memo?

You are a bit confused here, but I don't blame you. Here is the legal situation as far as I understand it (IANAL, standard disclaimers apply).

The Wikimedia Foundation hosts content on its servers provided by the community. Usually, the individual contributors own the copyright to all the content. And when they submit content to a WMF site, like Wikipedia, they explicitly agree to license the work under terms such that others can use it. (I am ignoring the case of fair use for now).

Certain kinds of contributions, however, are not original to the contributor. This gets confusing because then you have to prove that it's okay to reuse.

Depictions of national flags are often ineligible for copyright, or are explicitly granted to the public domain, in their country of origin. However, "public domain" has no legal meaning internationally.

The CC0 license is really designed for creators who want to dedicate their work to be freely copied, like public domain, but want something that is legally meaningful.

But - there was a large collection of flags licensed CC0 which became the basis of the Wikimedia Commons collection. Other flags have specific justifications for why they are public domain, sometimes quoting laws from specific countries. This is the good thing about Wikimedia Commons, it doesn't force you into any straightjacket to explain how the license works. But that also means that everything's kind of a mess if you want to get a straight answer to a question like "under what license could I republish all the flags on Wikimedia Commons?"

And that's where it sits. If you squint, everything's not so bad. But maybe Wikimedia Commons should relicense all the flags as ineligible for copyright -- it would make things a lot simpler.

Of course, because copyright is taking over the world, I would not be surprised if there are some nations that would insist they do hold the copyright to their flags. For instance, the EC insists it holds the copyright to their flag and the Euro symbol. Maaaaadness.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Europe.svg#Li...

http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/euro/cash/symbol/index_e...

Re: Free Flag Icons

#72

Post by hendi_ »

spyder wrote: post #53
hp wrote: post #28

Using flags in your visual design can be tempting but in my experience it's a bad idea. The problem is that certain flags force you to "take sides" in political disputes that you likely aren't aware of and don't understand. You'll inadvertently make one side very angry with you, and you won't even really know what political statement you accidentally made. It's OK if you stick to flags you know but if you start tryin…

By the same logic you shouldn't use red star symbol in your design if its target country includes one of the countries formerly occupied by the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_star#Legal_status

This is correct.

You also wouldn't use a swastika in an app targeting Germany, would you?

Re: Free Flag Icons

#74

Post by rolux »

timparker wrote: post #25
zalew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the question is why 'a bit', especially when there is only 11 of them.

The flags were made a while ago when there was less than 11, we will have to add a few more in the coming days.

For a good list of countries, mostly derived from wikipedia as well, that comes with properties like dependency, disputed, and so on, includes historical data, back to 1970, and whose main purpose, similarly, is a set of flag icons, see OxJS:

https://oxjs.org/#doc/Ox.COUNTRIES

https://oxjs.org/#examples/countries/live

(The latter has a menu to show more than just current sovereign countries.)

Edited to add: In https://trac.oxjs.org/browser/oxjs/tools/geo you'll find the python toolchain to automatically generate the flag images.

Re: Free Flag Icons

#76

Post by shakesbeard »

jarek wrote: post #58
crazygringo wrote: post #54

For people saying "don't use flags", and "especially not for languages"... I totally agree in theory, but... In a lot of interfaces, having something visual helps a lot. Especially when you need to pick something from a list where you don't even know what language the user speaks! Obviously, you can present a text list like "English (American)", "Português (Brasil)", "አማርኛ", "贛語", but it can look kind of ugly, how do…

What flag do you suggest we use for es_US and fr_CA? Or how to distinguish de_CH and fr_CH?

Common practice seems to be using a half Swiss/half German flag for de_CH, and half Swiss/half French flag for fr_CH or just the Swiss flag for both languages.

Re: Free Flag Icons

#77

Post by atas »

dagw wrote: post #7

Wow, awesome. I'll definitely be using this. In fact this is so awesome I actually gave my real email address.

You didn't have to give an email address, btw. So no point in giving a fake one anyway. But I think someone willing to bypass "registration" would not impulsively submit a fake address, but rather would have read the small print.

Re: Free Flag Icons

#78

Post by tripzilch »

Xion wrote: post #36
hendi_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even worse is using them to indicate languages. There are countries with more than one language (e.g. Belgium which Dutch, French and German) and there are languages which are used in more than one country (think us.png vs gb.png for "English"). So, rule of thumb: - never use flags to indicate a language - use flags to indicate a country only after thinking twice EDIT: Nonetheless, this flag collection looks awes…

How do you indicate a language in icon-like manner then? Is using the textual ISO codes the only safe option?

From what I've read about it--by people who thought long and hard about this issue--the generally most accepted solution seems to be the Wikipedia way: use the name of the language as its written in in the language itself.

The reason for the latter is that, say the site is originally presented in Russian, I don't know how "Dutch" is written in Russian so I couldn't pick it, but I do know what "Nederlands" means (FYI, that's the Dutch word for "Dutch", beats me why you English-speakers don't call it "Netherlandish", but each to their own I guess ;) which again demonstrates names of the same language in different languages can vary a lot).

Though I suppose if you're really tight on space, ISO codes would probably also work.

Note that Wikipedia itself is sometimes a rather extreme example; most websites/applications will only offer a choice between a small handful of languages.

When the list of languages in the sidebar of Wikipedia is very long, it's not the most user-friendly method of selecting one. On the other hand, with flags that would be much worse, bordering on impossible (while the UK and US flags are pretty unique, there's a couple of flags that are very hard to distinguish from the flag of the Netherlands, for instance).

I really wonder if there might be some creative better solution to language-selection than "the Wikipedia way", but I really want to stress that using country flags is not that solution, for a variety of usability reasons, political reasons and emotional reasons, most of which are probably outlined somewhere in this discussion so I won't repeat them all.

I have to admit I have been guilty of using a German/Dutch/French flag for language selection on a website I developed many years ago--I didn't realize it was a bad idea back then (for instance, the flag of Belgium has the same colours as the flag of Germany in a different order, but they speak Dutch and French there, while the flag of France and the one of the Netherlands differ mainly by a 90 degrees rotation) (and the blues are subtly different, afaik).

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