who is behind BioIcons?

[KamilSJaron]

Hi,

I am curious. While BioIcons seems like a lovely project for figure democratisation, https://bioicons.com/ is ".com" - a domain that is typically used by commercial subjects.

Would you mind clarifying somehwere who is running the service, if it's commercial or not, and if it's commercial, what is the business model? We have now too many .coms that messed up with trusty academics using their seemingly free services, so I would appreciate some transparency about this.

Best,
Kamil

[duerrsimon]

BioIcons is completely open source and maintained by me (a researcher). The .com domain was chosen for pure convenience and I think nowadays the emphasis is no longer on commercial projects for .com domains. For example the chanzuckerberg foundation is also using a .com domain.

Actually at the bottom of the page there is also a legal imprint as required by german law that also shows it is a private individual running the website. You can also tell that BioIcons is not commercial because there is no tracking whatsoever on the webpage to know how many people are using it.

Hope that answers your question.

[KamilSJaron]

That's very dope. I am glad to hear that...

I must say, I did not notice many non-profits going .com, I noticed the trend other way around. For example https://academia.edu is a regular commercial company. Even open source projects are copy-righted and sometimes owned by commercial subjects. And sometimes, open source packages are hosted by a commercial subjects who than demands payments for it (anaconda).

There is a large world of people that try to take advantage of academics, and I think projects like yours are great in taking wind out of their sails. I just think it would be good if it was dead clear you are not running a scheme you hope to get packed on one day.

[KamilSJaron]

By the way, completely unrelated... I lived for years at Rue de la Mèbre (moved out 2019), now I wonder if we ever bumped into each other.

[KamilSJaron]

Ha, one more small thing - quoting wikipedia: "The CZI is legally set up as a limited liability company (LLC) that can be seen as a for-profit charity and is an example of philanthrocapitalism."

.com gives serious for-profit vibes.