[HN Gopher] Penpot, Open Source Figma alternative, raises $8M in... ___________________________________________________________________ Penpot, Open Source Figma alternative, raises $8M in funding Author : simulo Score : 397 points Date : 2022-09-27 19:49 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (techcrunch.com) (TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com) | [deleted] | o0-0o wrote: | 20 billion is just a lot of money though right? I never thought | Figma was that great to use anyway. Maybe there's more than meets | the eye on the way it is set up in the back end and adobe is | looking to leverage that knowledge. | pixxel wrote: | How many users has Figma taken from Adobe? Perhaps that's the | 20 billion dollar question. | that_guy_iain wrote: | Enough that I had to use it via Fiverr projects to Enterpise | in-house projects. | costcofries wrote: | Future Webex (Cisco) acquisition, said it here first! | nerdponx wrote: | Microsoft will buy them. Penpot will be absorbed into Microsoft | Office 365 Design Studio and Taiga will be absorbed into | Microsoft Project Management for Teams. | jansan wrote: | Let's hope it will not end like Microsoft Expression. We | actually bought a few licenses because it looked promising, | but what a sorry way to go. IIRC Microsoft even offered | refund for some purchased licenses. | diacritica wrote: | If that ever happened, the way you describe it, you'd also | find my dead body the next morning. The autopsy would read | like this "The cause of the death was forcefully ingestion of | a full set of CDs with some strange 'Debian 1.3' markings, | the poor fellow bled from within and suffered greatly in long | agony". 25 years of open source hacktivism can't end like | that, I wouldn't be able to process it. I'm Penpot's CEO BTW. | nerdponx wrote: | LOL, that's encouraging! Better keep those VCs at a safe | distance! | rvz wrote: | Cisco will probably buy Penpot and maintain it the same way | after how Zoom bought Keybase. Microsoft will just buy Lunacy | instead [0]. | | [0] https://icons8.com/lunacy | costcofries wrote: | All the downvotes.. Decibel is an independent venture capital | firm created in partnership with Cisco, their play is to invest | strategically in companies that Cisco can acquire. This isn't | some made up witchcraft. | Tostiman wrote: | flanbiscuit wrote: | Scott Tolinski (Syntax podcast, LevelUp tuts) did a video about | Penpot on the day that the Figma acquisition was announced. Check | it out to see how it compares to Figma. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7D0tSNmEg | monkin wrote: | There's nothing there that would tell how it compares to Figma. | [deleted] | dharma1 wrote: | Tried it - pretty straight up Figma clone - doesn't feel as | polished but it's not bad. Nice addition to open source design | tools. | | Would be great to be able to import .fig files | __d wrote: | So you can finally migrate off Xfig? | simulo wrote: | They announced that an import for figma files will be added | soon: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has- | come/1563 | js4ever wrote: | Congratulations to the team behind it (Kaleidos, Peter & Pablo) I | trust them to make really great things and still fully OSS, this | is where they are coming from. I can't believe for a second they | will betray their own vision. | pen2l wrote: | The folks behind Penpot also make a kanban management tool, kind | of like Trello, called Taiga: http://taiga.io/ It's also OSS | (Django/Angular), self-hostable, and very pleasant to use. | | I'm rooting for both of these, and now that they have some | funding I hope they'll dedicate effort on polishing the rough | edges (and do something about the gratuitous amount of white | space that permeates all of their web presence, and maybe | reconsider their color palette to be less muted and more | saturated, heavier, and decisive). They seem to be actively | working on Figma imports, auto layouts, multi-user edits and more | at this moment so they're on the right track. | | For both of them, _even_ if the VCs pull the rug from underneath | to race for an exit, it being OSS is good insurance. A fork would | mean that we don 't have to spend time learning yet another tool. | The good will fostered by it being OSS is what encourages some of | us to look into their offerings, and in this way what we see is | something that seems like a sustainable model for OSS projects. | debacle wrote: | We just switched to Taiga for our task management platform. | It's enjoyable to use, opinionated but just a little, and works | great out of the box. | | As an aside, does anyone know what software this page is | running: | | https://community.penpot.app/ | | It looks like a taiga plugin but I don't know what it's called. | pen2l wrote: | It's running Discourse forums, a YC-funded thing, also OSS, | authored with Ruby on Rails. | | I find it fascinating that people are praising their skin of | Discourse, because I think it's got a little too much white | space! With those needlessly huge button-banners, for folks | with small-to-medium sized screens, the content of interest | is almost a full screenful-scroll away. | rapnie wrote: | I agree. I use many different Discourse forums, and this | one annoying to scroll through the list of latest topics | because of that. | gizzlon wrote: | Thanks, open source AND it has WIP limits =) | Kukumber wrote: | What a mistake, they should have setup a developer fund | | VC funding = it'll become Figma | karaterobot wrote: | This is great news, congrats to Penpot! | | As a full-time Figma user and one-time evangelist for it, I | looked eagerly for alternatives after the recent news. Penpot is | not ready for my team to switch over yet, but I hope that if, in | the future, Figma suffers the same fate as Adobe's other software | design tools, Penpot will by then have grown into a viable OSS | alternative. | tbatchelli wrote: | This project is mostly ClojureScript. That's quite of an | endorsement of the clojure ecosystem. | b0afc375b5 wrote: | I'm an experienced Vue/Nuxt developer. After trying out | Typescript and Svelte, I think I want to go all in on | ClojureScript. | | Currently learning through an open source book right now | (https://www.learn-clojurescript.com/). I was planning on | paying for it after I read the book to see if it was worth it, | but I paid for it halfway through. | barrenko wrote: | This what all those "Clojure needs Rails" posts miss. Clojure | _is_ Rails. | axlee wrote: | > (ns hello-world.core (:require [goog.dom :as dom] | [goog.dom.classes :as classes] [goog.events :as events]) | (:import [goog Timer])) | | (let [element (dom/createDom "div" "some-class" "Hello, | World!")] (classes/enable element "another-class" true) (-> | (dom/getDocument) .-body (dom/appendChild element)) (doto | (Timer. 1000) (events/listen "tick" #(.warn js/console "still | here!")) (.start))) | | How is that even workable? And that's just an HTML fancy | hello world. | swyx wrote: | > After trying out Typescript and Svelte, I think I want to | go all in on ClojureScript. | | ouchhh what a burn haha | vlovich123 wrote: | Can't speak to frontend / UI things but I've generally | found typescript a pretty easy language to implement | Cloudflare R2 on top of Workers. I have no experience with | ClojureScript so I can't provide any meaningful comparison. | YMMV. | yjp20 wrote: | Just curious - what did you not like about svelte? | papaver wrote: | absolutely love clojure and all that it's taught me. i even | ported many of the core functions to python so i could | continue using them. | | but not a fan at all of writing html in clojurescript. it's | extremely ugly to look at vs raw html/jsx. and became | cumbersome really fast for me as my app grew in size... maybe | there are better alternatives now, this was around 5 years | ago. | | using react with libraries like ramda/redux/rxjs in affect | achieve the same thing but with 10x more libraries and | references online. | | the philosophy behind clojure will completely change how you | code and visualize problems if you embrace it. honestly can't | remember the last time i wrote a for loop... | getcrunk wrote: | Yea what's the tldr on clojurescript | rvz wrote: | Here comes the same VC scam again. | | Like what happened to Keybase, also what happened to Bitwarden | and is now happening to Penpot. | | With all of this, it will just end up just like Keybase as | investors will race for an exit. | lbotos wrote: | I'm sorry, what? | | Why is this a "VC Scam?" | | A competitor just got aquired for $$ and a startup raised funds | to attempt to compete in the space. | | I don't see anything here that looks like a "scam" to me. | | Keybase as an idea was much more pie in the sky vs. "an open | source figma clone". | [deleted] | rchaud wrote: | In this case, I take "scam" as referring to VCs investing in | companies so they can challenge the market leaders just long | enough to prompt an acquisition and cash out. | skyfaller wrote: | It gives me hope for the future to see commenters on HN, a | forum made by a VC company to talk about VC funding, dunk on | companies for taking VC funding. Any tech enthusiast who has | been around long enough has seen VCs and acquisitions | eventually destroy everything they've ever loved. Our | incredible journey, indeed: | https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ | | The question is, can we organize around alternatives to the VC | model, and build communities with control over their own | destiny, instead of having the rug pulled out from under them | repeatedly due to the whims of capital (and founders securing | the bag)? | | The concept of "exit to community" appeals to me, but | unfortunately I see crypto grifters / DAOs trying to take over | any "decentralization" narrative. Unless the crypto crash wipes | those scammers out, I fear the community may flee from VC | scammers into the arms of crypto scammers, new boss same as the | old boss. | | I hope that we can build some sort of cooperative movement that | can avoid the "world domination or acquisition" pressure from | VCs, while also avoiding weird technocratic "fixes" like DAOs. | There's no replacement for organizing and community, tech | cannot replace that difficult and necessary work of marshalling | people to pull together in the same direction, accept no | substitutes or "shortcuts." | rapnie wrote: | Is Bitwarden a recent event? I planned to take a paid | subscription, but this may withold me from doing so. | jacooper wrote: | Bitwarden is still okay. | devteambravo wrote: | What are you using instead of Bitwarden? | nerdponx wrote: | I use KeePassXC, with Seafile (paid hosting, not my own | server) for syncing my database across devices. | number6 wrote: | Vaultwarden | SSLy wrote: | Because you can't read it because of their broken "consent" | intersitial https://archive.ph/0ekuT | throwthisbro1 wrote: | Taking any app and adding Google Docs style "collaboration" to it | is a recipe for success, in the same way that taking a piece of | art and making it an NFT did, for a period time, make its value | 10-1,000,000x greater. | | From an engineering POV, maybe someone should sell a CRDT service | that proxies multiple users into one and pretends to be general, | but really authors domain-specific stuff since CRDTs and OT | "general" is not very valuable. | s1mon wrote: | Conceptually, yes. However "taking any app and adding Google | Docs..." is less about adding, and more about rethinking the | base app from scratch so that the fundamental actions are | atomic enough and determinant enough to easily sync between | users despite latency issues. | | It wouldn't be easy to take Illustrator and add collaboration | and get Figma. Microsoft bought a company that had already made | a collaborative version of Word to get a head start on that | process, and O365 is still clunky compared with Google Docs. | | In the 3D mechanical CAD world, Onshape has done an amazing job | of taking the functionality of Solidworks (or Creo or NX or | ...) and making it collaborative. But really the biggest change | is that they turned every user step into a "micro-version" | which can be undone (pretty much infinite undo/redo). They | built a Github style branching/merging (and reverting) version | control system on top of the micro-versions. They have one | service which runs the versioning system and another which runs | the geometry engine. If you have all the steps, you are always | guaranteed to get the same geometry - this fundamental rule of | their system design means that only the deltas of micro- | versions need to be shared between users/locations. | | Anyone who's opened a Word file on a few different computers | can tell you that the fonts, font handling and subtle version | differences between different installs of Word means that the | same source file doesn't equal the same visual layout. To some | degree, putting "Word" in the cloud should mean that every user | is using the latest (same) version of Word, but that's not the | case still... | | There's a reason that Google Docs doesn't have an offline mode | or support any font in the world. | no_circuit wrote: | There definitely is an offline mode for Google Docs [1]. And | since it uses Operational Transform (OT) [2] instead of CRDT, | theoretically they could be customizing the handling of a | coming back online event. | | IMO CRDT seems to be the "easy way" to make the output look | consistent, but when it comes to interactions that may have | semantics, then one may want to go the OT route. My | impression is that CRDT is better suited for distributed | computing applications. | | [1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6388102?hl=en&co=G | ENI... | | [2] https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different- | about-n... | s1mon wrote: | Well clearly I was wrong about offline editing of Google | Docs. I'm trying to search for when this functionality was | added but I suspect it was during a dark time when I was | forced to use O365. | SSLy wrote: | Google Docs has offline version dating back to long | forgotten Gears platform | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gears_(software) | [deleted] | ricardobeat wrote: | Whats the end game? Doesn't taking VC money spell a similar | ending to Figma (acquisition)? | atoav wrote: | What is the end game for e.g. the Blender Foundation? Looking | back on a crazy good software project when the Nuclear war | starts? | Pulcinella wrote: | Blender doesn't take VC money that I am aware of. They do | accept donations, many of which are from large multinational | corporations, but I don't think any of those are expecting | equity in Blender; they do it for ideological and/or | strategic reasons. | | Still, it's not like there aren't many, many companies that | make money from open source, including when it's their own | code they are open sourcing. (Honestly I wished way, way more | lawyers and executives in general understood where the value | their company provides actually comes from. Too many times | they think their "secret sauce" is the actual code when it's | really the team and the labor that went into creating it, | maintaining it, supporting it, and selling it. They aren't | being paid for the code, they are being paid to deal with | it!) | victor9000 wrote: | Open core SaaS, similar to ElasticSearch | marapuru wrote: | Good question, and exactly what popped up in my head. Is there | any documentation of the type of VC money that was accepted? | Does this _really_ mean that from now on the investors are in | control? Or is this a type of open source funding without | strings attached? I can't really see that happening. | rapnie wrote: | This is a recent announcement on their community forum that | provides more background and detail: | https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 | jacooper wrote: | Well at least its fully open source | rapnie wrote: | Somewhere down the line a bunch of money has to be made. For | themselves and especially to make those VC folks happy | (however 'patient' they are, according to their | announcement). If they remain 100% open-source, their hosted | servers may come with subscription (the Discourse model), | and/or they may supply paid for professional templates and | plugin packs. | | But whatever their plans are in this regards, I think it | would be good if they were more clear on their planned | strategy. | jacooper wrote: | SASS is the way to go for almost every FOSS startup | jjcm wrote: | Disclaimer - I work for Figma but had no part in the acquisition. | My comments are my own and I don't represent Figma. | | Technically I'm very curious to see how Penpot evolves with this | investment, especially in regards to their choice to base | everything on SVGs. IMO this will be their greatest superpower | and also greatest weakness. Keeping things tied explicitly to | code means exporting the final product is going to be near- | perfect translation wise, but it will also mean they're tied | explicitly to the browser's ability to render the combined | html+svgs. | | Currently Penpot's performance starts dropping rapidly once you | approach around 1000 layers. Most robust design systems I see run | around 10-40k layers (with the record I've seen being 250k). I'm | very curious if they'll be able to optimize their approach to | support those sizes of libraries. | diacritica wrote: | Penpot's CEO here. You're spot on! SVG is a design principle of | sorts for us, as we absolutely bet everything on open | standards. You say this "but it will also mean they're tied | explicitly to the browser's ability to render the combined | html+svgs" and we hope we weren't wrong on building Penpot on | top of these massive pieces of software. History will tell us | if we made the "impractical" choice but our vision around open | standards and design+code seamless integration demands that we | go all in for SVG. I hope we'll be able to satisfy your | curiosity sooner rather than later, thanks for your comment! | jjcm wrote: | Thanks for making the product! It's been really exciting to | watch your growth. 100% agree with the decision you made | given the objective for the software, and I really hope it | pushes more people towards open standards. Best of luck ya'll | and congrats on the funding round! | thelittleone wrote: | Long time Figma customer. In the last week I've had major | performance issues to the point my machine becomes unusable. | Force quitting Figma is required to be able to save work in | other apps before doing a hard reset. | | Along with the Adobe news, it's perfect time for an | alternative. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Sorry I am amazed by _tens of thousands of layers_. I have not | used figma but with all the kerfuffle recently, I get it is | sort of photoshop with collaboration. But how, how does any | user interface design get to have 10,000 layers? Is each layer | a square or a comment or an erase? I might not get the scale of | the collaboration, or something but the numbers sound ... huge. | LightG wrote: | Annoying, ganky UI's don't just build themselves, ya know. | jjcm wrote: | It's pretty easy actually! Take a look at this page for just | a button component: https://i.imgur.com/TodWS0r.png | | It has 1.3k layers, and this is for one component. Most | design systems have around 50 components, many more complex | than just a button. This is from the Ant Design System: | https://www.figma.com/community/file/831698976089873405 | | Another way to think of it that may help put it into | perspective for devs, think of the number of html elements in | your average storybook page. Atlassian's page for their | button has around 2k html elements to display all the | variants and documentation: | https://atlassian.design/components/button/examples. A Figma | file represents all of the components in the same file, which | quickly leads to an explosion of layering. Performance | becomes a concern VERY quick. | cosmodisk wrote: | How does Figma approach this layering, as I understand you | have your in-house built engine to support it, right? | kajecounterhack wrote: | Not a figmate but I would guess they create their own | virtual representation (e.g. how the browser maintains | the CSSOM & DOM trees) and render that to a canvas, | rather than relying on the browser to render the SVG. | chrisseaton wrote: | So what is a 'layer'? Just any path at all? I think people | thought you mean filter or effect layers, so thought a | simple button gradient or something was being built up from | like 250k transformations. | jjcm wrote: | Best way to think of a layer is as an html element (or in | Penpot's case, it's exactly that). | chrisseaton wrote: | _250k_ layers to build up an image? I 'm thinking Photoshop- | style layers, or do you mean something else? | longtimelistnr wrote: | As a designer not in web development, I cannot even begin to | wrap my head around that. Because at what point is just | developing the thing directly or merging layers or using a | more suitable app the solution? | jjcm wrote: | Don't think of it as 250k layers for a single image. Modern | design tools represent many artboards at once on the same | page, i.e. https://i.imgur.com/wvWSv4F.png from | https://www.figma.com/community/file/1154649549752855805 | | You're often representing every page on a site, or every | component in a design system in the same file. A way to think | about it is "If you counted every div on every page of | Reddit, how many would there be?". Most modern sites will | have around the same order of magnitude of html elements. | petespeed wrote: | I see what you are saying regarding artboard view. | | But is it necessary? Can't the artboard be visualized in a | better way? If such high-level view is desired, won't | rasterized details be sufficient till one zooms in? | jjcm wrote: | "Can't the artboard be visualized in a better way?" It | absolutely can! Caching and optimizations in a zoomed out | view are a core part to many design tools today. These | are doable when you control the whole stack of how these | elements are rendered. Penpot may have to be more clever | here though as they rely on the browser to render native | elements. | katbyte wrote: | I assume each feature is a layer | rapnie wrote: | Or each simulated UI interaction.. amounts to much more | layers (imagine a 10k long feature list). | petercooper wrote: | As an aside, that is a _really_ nicely skinned Discourse | instance. I had to view source to double check it even _was_ | Discourse. | diacritica wrote: | Thanks! That was the work of Juan de la Cruz, one of the Penpot | UI designers! | nerdponx wrote: | I'm surprised to hear someone say that. The weird sidebar | slider thing, the orange pencil "edited" icon, the green box | showing the category and tags under the title, and the | "suggested topics" at the bottom are all very distinctive | Discourse interface elements. | petercooper wrote: | They are, but they seem _far_ less annoying on this site, so | I initially assumed it was just inspired by it. This looks | more like a blog than a forum thread. | | _(Note: It was originally linking to a post on the company | 's own community site. For some reason it's since been edited | to a TechCrunch post(!))_ | WaffleIronMaker wrote: | Link to original post: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33009657 | | Link to Discourse post: | https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has- | come/1563 | shishy wrote: | > Before September 15, Penpot's CEO and co-founder Pablo Ruiz- | Muzquiz said that sign-ups were growing at around 40% per month: | after Adobe's news, that figure ballooned to 5,600%, and has | stayed consistent since then. On-premise deployments have also | grown 400%. | | 5600%! Good for them. I'm sure a lot of it was folks exploring | options but I wonder how many of those new users will stick | around -- anyone try it out and decide to make the commitment to | use Penpot as a full replacement? Anything it still needs / | hesitations? | marapuru wrote: | I tried it out a month or 5 ago. And my main concern was in | performance. Haven't tried it again since. Might be a good time | now to give it another spin. | shishy wrote: | Ya I think the other comment in this thread from a figma | member about penpot performance issues from using SVGs is | interesting and lines up with what you said. I'll have to | give it a proper try, at easy ones it seemed fine but didn't | think to really stress test it fully. | throwaway1777 wrote: | The cycle begins again. | equilibrium wrote: | Which cycle are you referring to exactly? | joecot wrote: | 1) We're a good company aiming to help people and make the | world a better place, and we promise not to do any evil | | 2) We've taken Venture Capital funding in order to get ramped | up much faster, so we can do all those great things | | 3) Because we didn't ramp up as fast as the Venture Capital | funding wanted, we're changing our direction. | | 4) We're selling to a big company for billions of dollars who | will either ash can our work entirely or totally ignore our | initial mission. | | Founders like to pretend they didn't break their promises when | their VC funders or a takeover totally changes their product in | step 3 or 4. But they broke their promises in step 2, the | second they took Venture Capital funding. VC is investing a | small amount in many companies expecting massive payout from | one of them. The end goal is to go public or sell to a large | company. Either means giving up control, which means you've | agreed to give up control as soon as you take VC funding. A | company can no longer be trusted to do what's in the best | interest of their customers as soon as they a) take VC funding, | b) go public, or c) get sold. No matter what promises they've | made. | | Point is, don't jump from Figma to PenPot thinking everything | will be better, they will go the same route within 3 years if | they're successful. It's nice that it is open source, but at | some point it will not be open source, or will have significant | changes for a professional paid version. Open Source is only | part of the equation, it also needs either a community or | consistent company support, and that's not guaranteed once VC | gets involved. | diacritica wrote: | One thing I didn't share on my community post here | https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 | was how tough was to find the right VC for us. The | conversations started back in Nov 2021 and we received a ton | of calls from excited (yet misaligned) VCs. Being used to | enjoy total freedom as an employee-owned consultancy company | we would quickly turned down most of them because we did see | this path that you're describing crisp clear in front of us. | | I think what is key for us here is that we, as a company, | don't actually own the whole thing. That our open source | license and a strong community lead us to a very successful | business without having to revert to traditional playbooks. | TBH, my biggest concern right now is not trying to convince | you that you have to trust us, that would insult your | intelligence. No, my biggest concern is how to create an open | source community with both designers AND developers (I touch | upon this here https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all- | communities-are-creat...). This is my personal dream and it | has been since I sent $15 to the Free Blender Campaign in | 2002 while still a Physics undergraduate. For all these years | I thought someone else would create something like Penpot but | it kept not happening and some us got a bit nervous, I guess. | Thanks for your thoughtful post! | joecot wrote: | If you want to convince people to get invested in using | PenPot, while you've also taken VC funding, then yes that | is the way to go about it. The main way that open source | projects continue if a company suddenly pulls out is if | there is a robust volunteer community to be able to fork | and continue. If you build that community, that would be | able to continue maintenance and development if, say, your | VC funders decided today it would be better to take the | ball and sell it to Adobe for 8 billion dollars, then you | will have built the contingency for when you inevitably | lose control. | __d wrote: | Is there a path for the community to develop an ownership | position in the managing entity, in addition to having | access to the source code? | joshmanders wrote: | The problem is that once you accept VC funding you are no | longer doing it for the customers but for the shareholders. | | It doesn't matter what your end goal is, their end goal is | to 10x or more their investment, full stop. | | Whatever you do that gets in the way of that will result in | you being removed. | | So congrats on the funding I guess? | diacritica wrote: | I've made my professional career out of rejecting false | dichotomies and I've made sure to be surrounded by like- | minded people, they'd had to remove everyone I guess, | including the community. I understand where you're coming | from and all I can say at this point is that I also write | comments like yours elsewhere. | joshmanders wrote: | I applaud your dedication and I hope it's true. I've | grown to really dislike when my favorite bootstrapped | products announce VC funding because 99.99999998% of the | time, it ends up badly for customers. | diacritica wrote: | And that's exactly what we saw with 99.999999998% of VCs | and investors that approached us. This news is about | securing the funding to build something that is | remarkably challenging and make it happen fast. Our bet | on SVG, like the Figma employee above says, is at the | core of our ethos, but requires extra work, this is the | type of commitment you should expect from Penpot. | pen2l wrote: | Your commitment to open standards is inspiring, and I | wish you all the success for the role you play in it. | | You've publicized elsewhere your thoughts on Blender, | particularly that it would delight you to have | Taiga/Penpot be viewed as the Blender of the 2d world. | Blender foundation as you know is a NPO, did you consider | going in that direction? To operate on user-funded | donations in addition to funds brought by continuing | SaaS? | | Also, is a desktop app in the cards to enable offline | use? With https://tauri.app maybe (instead of Electron, | for improved performance)? | rglover wrote: | Great articulation of the problem. Had to take a screenshot | for when this inevitably comes up later. | rvz wrote: | > The end goal is to go public or sell to a large company. | Either means giving up control, which means you've agreed to | give up control as soon as you take VC funding. A company can | no longer be trusted to do what's in the best interest of | their customers as soon as they a) take VC funding, b) go | public, or c) get sold. No matter what promises they've made. | | Correct. They broke their promise as soon as they took VC | money. Same with Keybase and same with Bitwarden. They cannot | be trusted on their 'promises'. | | > It's nice that it is open source, but at some point it will | not be open source, or will have significant changes for a | professional paid version. Open Source is only part of the | equation, it also needs either a community or consistent | company support, and that's not guaranteed once VC gets | involved. | | This. 'Open Source' is a marketing term and illusion which is | 1/4 of the equation with it being hijacked for a different | purpose. There is a possibility that there could be a private | fork that has different features to the open source version. | | As soon as VCs get involved it is basically a race to the | exit at all costs, even if they have to close or omit some | features from the open-source version if they have to. | lol768 wrote: | > Point is, don't jump from Figma to PenPot thinking | everything will be better, they will go the same route within | 3 years if they're successful. | | Doesn't matter - it's an open source app, I can clone it and | run it on-prem or locally (and I already have - and opened a | PR!). FLOSS simply eliminates a great deal of SaaS risk. | | They can delete their repo tomorrow, go full-proprietary, | sell out to the highest bidder, get taken over by Adobe. None | of it matters, I can still work on my designs. | joecot wrote: | Open source is only part of the equation. The other part is | having maintainers and community. Being able to fork it is | great, but if there's no community fixing bugs, if there's | no security fixes, if there are no improvements, if the | main product changes drastically from the open source | version and the files are not compatible in between, there | are serious problems. Many open source products stagnate | and die, whether or not they were popular, when the company | is no longer involved. Community is not automatic or | instant. | jboy55 wrote: | Well, you can work on it with the existing functionality, | with the trust that everything that's hosted on Penpot is | first released to the current version on Github. Eventually | they will diverge though, and the source code will be a | version behind what's on their site. At first the files | will be backwards compatible, but soon there will be a | _must-have_ feature on the hosted site that will make files | incompatible. Then the VC funding will dry up, the hosted | site will become paid, and those features and backwards | compatibility won 't make it to the open sourced code since | there won't be the resources to work on the community | version. Now you will be stuck, your designs will require | the paid software. | cercatrova wrote: | Until they change their license from FOSS to something | source available or proprietary like many OSS projects are | doing these days. If it's successful, it won't be open | source for long. | DesiLurker wrote: | Yes thats true, however, it also means the baseline | features till the lockdown were open sourced & are | secured for public. Now they have to value add over | those. this process is slow but surely moves more | basic/hardened stuff to public domain so should reduce | rent-seeking behavior. if nothing else it will make likes | of adobe to keep shelling out cash to squash any | existential risks like figma. I'll take that. | | The only really evil things can come from the likes of | google anti-fragmentation agreement where essentially you | are marked with a Scarlett letter if you didn't go all-in | into google proprietary ecosystem. But we have FCC to | protect us from that, right? | joecot wrote: | Without a community, an open source code repository is | text files you can use to run or compile an application. | An open source project needs maintainers, active | contributors, a roadmap, etc. Github is full of very | popular open source projects that have been completely | abandoned, and forks of those projects that are also | abandoned. An open source project having maintainers | after a company has abandoned it is not the default. | Sometimes it happens because the company nurtured an open | source community before abandoning it, sometimes it | happens because the project is crucial enough it | scratches enough itches to attract volunteers. Sometimes | it happens out of spite. But those are exceptions, not | the rule. | devteambravo wrote: | I'm sure they won't get acquired | devonnull wrote: | That's impressive growth. I just hope that Penpot can quickly | scale to support such sudden growth. | thrillgore wrote: | Is it gonna stay open source, though? | simulo wrote: | Yes - they have not announced anything to the contrary and the | same company also creates taiga, a project management too, | which is open source since many years. | marapuru wrote: | And what if, at some magical point in the future they decide | not to make version XX open source anymore? I've seen to many | promises of VC money backed companies that make a 180 degree | turn on earlier statements. | mritchie712 wrote: | Open source alternatives do really well when a lot of people are | complaining about the pricing of the closed source leaders (e.g. | Snowflake). I don't hear many people complaining about Figma's | pricing, but maybe that will start once Adobe starts meddling. | Zealotux wrote: | I care much more about Adobe's ability to destroy products' | quality than prices really. | mritchie712 wrote: | yep, that's coming too! | caloique wrote: | Pricing is one aspect, but OSS solutions bring community and a | level of transparency that most closed source companies don't. | nerdponx wrote: | Until the VCs turn the screws and they don't anymore. | arvonle wrote: | If that happens, fork. It's (literally) free. | hbn wrote: | Does that ever work in practice? Has there been a | standard fork of Audacity that everyone flocked to since | they got purchased by Muse? | capableweb wrote: | Tons of example. Most wildly used forks out there are | probably WebKit and Blink, the engines of two popular | browsers. | | Some other notable projects that started as forks: | postgres, Wordpress, Apache Server, OpenSSH, ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-28 23:00 UTC)