Re:Show HN: Open-core icon sets that took me 12 years to create
by mschuster91 on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @05:43AM
(#30358400)
> Finally, it's amazing to me as a programmer how commercial minded designers are in tech.
That comes from the roots of programming and computer science in general, where it's part of the old-school "academic spirit" is making stuff available for others to experiment with and advance on. Universities paid their professors, doctors and other academics to work on all that stuff like compilers, programming languages, communication standards or operating systems - wherever you look in open source projects dating prior to the 2000s, all of them have a strong foundation somewhere in academics or the military.
Only when computers became household items, commercialization really took off, as suddenly the market for software was no longer restricted to fellow academics, a few very ambitious hobbyists and even fewer megacorporations.
UI/UX design, in contrast, never had that "golden age" of third-party funding everything that the people wanted to work on in that moment.
That comes from the roots of programming and computer science in general, where it's part of the old-school "academic spirit" is making stuff available for others to experiment with and advance on. Universities paid their professors, doctors and other academics to work on all that stuff like compilers, programming languages, communication standards or operating systems - wherever you look in open source projects dating prior to the 2000s, all of them have a strong foundation somewhere in academics or the military.
Only when computers became household items, commercialization really took off, as suddenly the market for software was no longer restricted to fellow academics, a few very ambitious hobbyists and even fewer megacorporations.
UI/UX design, in contrast, never had that "golden age" of third-party funding everything that the people wanted to work on in that moment.