That’s the business of stock photos. Unsplash managed to stick around because they provided free high quality images that were more “real” looking than stock photos. It was supported by ads, which I’m sure kept the site running but when Getty knocks on your door and offers to buy you out ... it’s hard to say no.
The cycle will continue. In its place there will be a new Unsplash which will offer the same + a bit more until it gets bought out too.
To be clear, Unsplash never provided images: they created a website that accepted user submissions, that's it. All content in Unsplash is user generated.
What bothers me about this sale is exactly this: Unsplash cashed in on their user submissions without guaranteeing their users (and use!) would be protected and perpetuated.
This is equivalent of me building a little lemonade stand, inviting a neighbor that makes a good lemonade but doesn't have a very visible stand to come give away their lemonade on my stand, and then selling the entire stand (with lemonade) to Lemonade Store down the street.
I wrote a bunch of articles for a community blog/magazine a while back that had a lot of others in the community doing the same thing. Then the "owner" turned around and sold it to some nameless person that wanted to profit from it.
She patted herself on the back and moved onto building another community thing. I removed my articles and moved on.
It's a real shame, she's very talented, but I struggle to engage with any of her work now because I keep looking for where she's going to try and profit from community participation.
I wish her no ill, but it was a reminder to not treat things as a not-for-profit if they don't have clear governance to back that up.
Unfortunate but I think you are very right. For my part, I very much do want to find the next Unplash, with a good F-droid app to look at wonderful free high quality images. I'm ready to ride whatever the next wave is in this cycle.
Pray tell what "healthy relationship" we have with nature with the current status quo?
Using science and technology for good by reimagining the antiquated methods of creating stuff like milk, cheese, beef , honey, leather, etc is a good thing.
Some vegans do oppose lab-grown meat (perhaps also dairy), on the grounds that humankind will never treat our animal brothers and sisters justly until we have lost the very appetite for their flesh.
Replacing these "antiquated" methods with extensive supply chains (even more) dependent on non-renewable resource extraction doesn't seem like using technology "for good"
This is pretty much what I try to do. I avoid people taking photographs of me altogether or if they do, I request them to not put them on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet. It usually works if you ask kindly.
How would a user be forced to upload all of their photos? I have (allegedly) unlimited storage with Flickr, but I manually upload the photos that I choose.
They're not forced to, they're tempted to. And most people will. From the presentation, it looks like as soon as you take a photo it's uploaded and backed up on Google's servers.
I wouldn't say they are dead. The decline of the sales for iPad can be attributed to its wildly successful launch. People just hang on to their iPads a lot longer than they do their iPhones. The numbers should stabilize soon.
Considering a bunch of people seem to be a) fairly keen on it and b) seem - at least at first glance - seem to have thought fairly hard about issues related to UX and aesthetics, surely you can put a teensy bit more effort into your critique?
EDIT - money where one's mouth is time. Here's my take: There's some great stuff and some slightly less convincing stuff in the original 'Material' concept pitch but the problem is that the devil lies firmly in the details and it's already getting Cargo Cult-ed to hell and back - even in Google's own core products.
However - I've generally found the quality of the critiques to be far below the quality of the topic being critiqued and I'm quite comfortable calling people out on lazy reactions if they haven't bothered to convince me that they've given the subject the attention it deserves.
EDIT2 - Another thought has congealed after reading some more comments. The cargo cult is partly the fault of the original pitch. You can't propose something that is ostensibly as based on abstract principals as 'Material Design' is and only give a single implementation as the example without inviting people to fail to see through the surface details. Show us 'Material Design' with a completely different look and feel and then we might find it easier to grok the underlying principles and not get hung up on the specific choices made for this particular implementation.
Or to put it another way - how would Material Design look if you wanted to distance yourself from the new Google branding as much as possible? What would remain constant?
I don't have to say much, just go and read the manifesto for Material Design. It's a lot of words that don't mean anything [1].
Another problem with it is that it's extremely trendy. Bright, almost fluorescent colors, ridiculous amounts of whitespace almost to a fault, long shadows, arbitrary grids for icons, etc.
The bigger problem is that Google decided to become smartasses about creating a new design language. They took it way too seriously and I think who this hurts the most is the developers who make apps for Android. They don't know what Material Design means -- really means, as in how Google sees it. Third party developers will never really be able to adapt it properly and what you're going to end up with is a whole new type of visual fragmentation in Android.
This look already looks dated, and I can't imagine what it will look like in a year.
Stop thinking of the Apple Watch as a technology product. It's not called iWatch for a reason. It's called Apple Watch and if you think you're going to take it to the Genius Bar to get it looked at, you're dead wrong.
