Free Flag Icons(gosquared.com) |
Free Flag Icons(gosquared.com) |
It's OK if you stick to flags you know but if you start trying to have a list of all flags, there's no way to do that without making various groups angry.
I don't doubt that there's a "right" answer to all disputes over flags but do you really know what all the disputes are and want to arbitrate them as part of developing your software ...
Deliberately not digging up specific disputes because the whole point is, if you have to ask what they are or if you start debating them case by case, maybe this wasn't a can of worms that needed opening.
(also, the last time I encountered this was long enough ago that I'm sure the relevant examples have changed, and I never understood them well to begin with. But it was clear that flags poked more than one political group in the eye.)
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 awesome, and if I ever have a legit use case for flags in a GUI I'll definitely use them. Thanks for sharing under a free license!
For example, I often appreciate browsing a shop in English (better content, more comments), so I select it from the dropdown, but end up browsing the US or UK shop, whereas I'm in France.
One website that gets it right is Zara: https://www.zara.com/ You select the store (country) and the language independently.
You can put all the flags up, disputed or not. Then you have people mad at you for putting up the disputed ones whom they view as being an insult. You can remove the disputed ones, and people will accuse of wanting oppression and being anti-freedom. Even when you avoid this problem, you have the problem of people not wanting to see a particular flag anywhere, dispute or no dispute.
Design is all about making decisions, which will invariably make person A happy and person B unhappy (for some values of A and B). Look at how many people are ranting this month about Apple's decision to remove X11.app from OS X, for example, even though you can download a newer version for free. If your goal in building software is to make every person on the planet satisfied, you are setting yourself up for failure. You should make clear decisions that make most of your users happier, not water down all design to make everybody not-upset.
All of the most successful systems today seem to be "opinionated", perhaps not in terms of global politics (usually) but in other ways. Being more clear to the vast majority of your users probably has a lot more value than not upsetting the less-than-1% who probably are even less than their share of your revenue, anyway.
Besides, in my experience, more important than getting it right is being responsive. If you're concerned about getting it wrong, then just put a link next to it that says "Did we forget / screw up yours? Tell us here: __". Then you will have actual data about who's coming to your particular page and what they want to see there.
Or, you can pick a relevant ISO/UN/EU/... list, and say you're using that for country names and flags. That may or may not be biased, but it removes you from the decision. If somebody is so mad they refuse to use your program because they don't like an ISO/UN/EU list, I don't know how they got past the Time Zone Setup screen on their computer.
There's people who will get upset if you say there are 50 states in the USA. They can believe what they like but I'm not going to lift a finger to accommodate them in my software.
The UN/ISO list has Taiwan as "Taiwan, Province of China". Go look for that string in any operating system, app or on any website that is internationally popular - you won't find it. The ISO is not neutral, and the Time Zone Setup guys know this.
While I had no horse in the race, I welcomed the opportunity to learn more about someone else's culture. Perhaps it's not so much taking sides as it is better understanding all the people who are involved.
You also wouldn't use a swastika in an app targeting Germany, would you?
Even more importantly, never use a flag to represent a language choice.
(* most major websites do avoid using flags, but one notable exception is Apple, which completely corrupts every single flag with their own shiny style: http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ ...)
The ratio is 3:2, but the correct ratio is 11:7. The colors are wrong, both the gradients and flat versions. The correct RGB colors are well defined. [1]
[1] Colors and ratio are defined on this page http://valitsus.ee/et/riigikantselei/riigi-ja-omavalitsuste-...
And to your point about correctness: there are specific issues such as illegible text in the Saudi flag and general issues such as the use or gradients or borders throughout.
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)", "PortuguΓͺs (Brasil)", "α ααα", "θ΄θͺ", but it can look kind of ugly, how do you decide to sort them, etc.
Plus, a lot of times the language is tied to a country, because each country has their spelling and grammar differences, etc. That's why many times you don't see "Portuguese" in language lists, but rather "Portuguese (Portugal)" and "Portuguese (Brazil)" -- because there's no such thing as a general-purpose Portuguese.
So while flags aren't perfect, a lot of the time they help far more than they hurt. In a perfect world, there would actually be language-specific icons that everyone recognized. Suggestions, anybody?
If you want one particular flag (instead of many for language purposes), I think these are very fine.
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 if you can assert copyright over the whole thing, as you must if you are going to use a CC license or the BSD-style license you used.
However, I would suggest that whatever you are doing, you should not arbitrarily reassign the work to a BSD license. They are not designed for graphics, since they require publication of the license wherever the graphic is used. Imagine if you wanted to use the icon on a postcard; according to the license you'd have to include the license text on the postcard. If you want these to be used widely Creative Commons Zero is much better... assuming you can assert copyright for the whole thing as a derivative work.
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
The really pedantically correct thing would be to list the licenses for each and every flag, but I acknowledge that would be no fun at all, and as far as I know Wikimedia Commons doesn't have tools to make that easy with large collections.
Sorry for the legalese - I think you did a great thing here, I'm just trying to help you share it with others.
So the option to have icons you can freely use without accidently stepping upoon somebodies IP can only be a good thing and counter any arguments about flag copyrights and images. Amazing how even the simplest common items can be copyrighted - swiss clock being one even Apple slipped up upon. So some free ones are always good.
They're free, but require attribution unless you buy a 'royalty-free license.'
Can't find any informations regarding a license (usage) ?!
First of all, flags are really bad for languages since there's an n:m relationship. Which flag would you use for "English"? The USA flag? The Flag of England? The Union Jack?
If you offer only "English" then depending on if you write "center" or "centre" you may offend either USA or British people. Same for "German", where a Swiss may be offended to see "StraΓe" while a German could be offended by seeing "Strasse". Of course most people won't care about that and I bet most Brits are used to see "color" without a 'u' on the internet, but from experience I can say that there are people who care about or even get offended by that.
But even if using textual representation for languages like "English" is not perfect, offering every language-country possibility (en-US, en-GB, en-??...) isn't a viable route in most cases since there are way to many combinations.
Just think of yourself (assuming you're from the USA): would you rather see the word "English" in a language selector or the Flag of England?
So what should you do? I'd suggest going with textual representations like "English" or the ISO 639-x shortcodes ("en" or "eng"). Being German that's easy to say for me, and I know a handful of people who'd like me to distinguish between de_DE, de_AT and de_CH.
So as I've said: it depends :-)
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).
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.
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...
If we did exact aspect ratios for every flag they would all be different and look shit. We tried to be as exact as possible with colors and shapes, if they don't work for you guys or are not close enough then you don't need to use them.
Not aimed directly at you, just at anyone who doesn't find them precise enough.
It's not a big problem in my opinion - no-one should be overly hung up about minor anomalies like that for web icons - but it's not true to say the colours are exact.
