[HN Gopher] Penpot, Open Source Figma alternative, raises $8M in...
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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,
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