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.
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.
Cool thanks for sharing. I remember, please correct me if I'm wrong, you were a Kanban tool that offers self-hosting right? I can't remember we were using Taiga around ~6-7 years ago.
We offer KANBAN and Scrum and Issue management plus WIKI and EPICs, yes. And it's MPL 2.0 and you can self-host it, yep! 6-7 years ago! wow! Yeah, we've come a LONG way. Taiga6 is amazing but TaigaNext (codename) is just a totally different story and it will connect to Penpot!
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.
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!
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!
Thanks for your comment.
I've been following Penpot since last year and sometimes joined your livestreams :)
I really love that Penpot is sticking with standards and I think piggybacking on SVG might bring lots of cool features for free. I always thought that it would be very nice to embed custom stuff using the foreignobject tag that could enhance a live prototype (ie: videos, 3d content, real html+js, etc).
Use real scripting + SVG is a dream of mine to build a design system. You know many of us are hybrid devs and designers and sometimes pushing pixels here and there is too much work when a simple script can automate stuff :)
I hope you have a good plan on how to optimize the canvas since I found it my major blocker to use it together with the lack of autolayout (I know you are working on this last one :)
On the other hand, I'm a fan of Kaleidos and your business model and I'm very happy that you got the funding to speed up Penpot. Hopefully one day we could cross paths and have a chat!
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.
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.
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.
Calling such a concept a 'layer' is quite confusing, given my experience with Photoshop, OmniGraffle, Pixelmator, and most other drawing tools I've seen. Why not just call it an "element" or "shape" or "item"?
When designers started switching from Photoshop to Sketch, "Layer" kinda changed meaning from "a clear sheet with drawings on it" to "any object on the canvas".
In Photoshop a layer could have many shapes on it, if you drew one shape/mark on top of another within one layer, they would be inseparable. If you drew any two things in Sketch, they would always be separate, I suspect this is why they stuck with the term "Layer" even though something like "Object" may have been more accurate.
I think layer is quite correct. Both Photoshop and sketch approach it the right way. Think of a sheet of paper as a layer. In Photoshop layers are sheets of paper that each matches the size of the document. On each paper you can draw whatever you want. They then lay on top of each other and the white parts are transparent.
In sketch, instead of sheets of paper that match the size of the document, you have a perfectly cutout shape for each stroke you draw. You can then move that cutout around within the document.
Both of those have the same principle except one is cutout one is not.
I agree that layer is correct, though I understand where there might be some “intuition clash” with people who are used to the classic paradigm.
When each layer is a transparent sheet it has an absolute Z order that translates 1-1 with the physical thing it’s virtualizing (transparencies, probably from traditional animation).
However if you cut out tiny shapes and arrange them with some on top of others to make a larger composition, there is no longer an absolute Z order to any element because there are a bunch of smaller stacks of various heights.
The virtualization no longer translates to the physical world, and from my experience that disconnect can sour people against a new way of doing things, regardless of whether it’s better.
Holy cow. Wow. This image really opened my eyes to the design world. I’m just personally wondering whatever happened with “an eye for design” and intuition.
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.
Stimulating question! Maybe some useful observations as we do client webl <> server cuda acceleration of vector data (our use case is big visual graph analytics) and have to handle large + real-time contexts:
* SVG at those levels sounds quite amenable to serverside offloading for bulk rendering: not "easy", but many options for HPC types. The browser can handle pan/zoom. My main computational question is hitmaps & hover effects, but wouldn't bet against ingenuity here as the use case is fairly static. Arguably, even Figma should move off in-browser and to offloading, if it hasn't yet.
* Browser acceleration of SVG has been improving over the last decade. Maybe more B round+, having 1-2 people work with Chrome will help knock out whatever is left in the browser. Working to optimize one site on both sides is WAY easier than optimizing for everyone, this is an open secret of Nvidia etc games & top websites for ~decades.
Real-time SVG is less practical in our case b/c our users will run clustering & filters and expect real-time vector transforms of 2M nodes + edges (imagine Google Maps... but live), but for something like a site design.. a lot more room for perceptual tricks!
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.
> Most robust design systems I see run around 10-40k layers (with the record I've seen being 250k).
All of that is insane, IMO, and points to the fact that most designers see Design Systems as a giant “skin” and not a set of ideas. This causes massive friction.
IMO this is where Figma fails, it treats Design Systems as a picture. A canvas. This is a relic of graphic design traditions (contact sheets.) Figma’s successor (whatever it ends up being) will embrace the fact that Design is Ideas not Pictures and Ideas are best represented in Code.
Maybe Penpot is onto something here. Although SVG is not the material of the web. HTML is, or maybe the frameworks that target the DOM.
UI Design in 2022 is like pre-modern architecture. Like architects whose designs don’t prescribe anything about the materials of construction.
It might be illustrative to actually build a design system for a production application and see how you'd improve the process and tool chain. I have to say most of what you're suggesting strikes me as incorrect.
I work full time on Design Systems for production applications and have for many years.
Check out https://interplayapp.com/ for a different take on how design systems should be created for use in Figma.
I think it’s telling that Figma can’t really do any of this natively and there’s a whole ecosystem of companies surrounding Figma trying to help it actually Do The Job. Zeroheight and Storybook/Chromatic being the other obvious examples.
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.
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?
"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.
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?
I'm not the parent commenter, but I work using Figma (and other design tools). So, I may be able to clarify it.
Figma is a vector drawing tool like Illustrator, which means that the comparison with Photoshop layers is misleading. What the parent post refers to as "Layers" is the name that Figma uses for objects like rectangles or text. So if you have a design file with many elements the number of layers grows quickly. The same happens in Illustrator or Sketch.
The closest equivalent to merging a layer is combining different shapes in one or rasterizing vectors into pixels. The usual tricks to handle big files are to work with different pages (so the app doesn't have to render everything at once) or to rasterize the parts that you'll like to keep as a reference (and move the vectors to another file).
It's not a problem of Figma, but a feature of vector design tools where you like to preserve the editing (and details) of everything. You'll have the same performance challenges in Sketch, XD, Illustrator, Affinity Designer, etc. The case of Penpot using SVG is interesting because big files will push the Browser SVG to its limits. (BTW I took a look at the Penpont code, it's interesting that they use ClojureScript for everything... it gave me the motivation to learn about CloujreScript).
SVGs broke my heart when I went searching for mathematically-accurate SVG renderers and found none.
Not only that, but there are spec issues that make SVG precision impossible.
If anyone can prove me wrong I’ll be happily wrong. The easiest example: make 3 circles of radius `r`, and place them in a straight line where the centres are `r` distance apart. The outer circles should touch and not ever overlap. Not even past 999,999% zoom.
IMHO not a minor strength, getting pixel perfect designs when SVGs are involved in Figma is near impossible, they are rendered in a very different way and in some cases the differences are huge.
> Before September 15, Penpot’s CEO and co-founder Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz 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?
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.
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.
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.
I’ve read through that post and think the most insightful part is this:
“ Most investors will love what you have achieved but also feel strongly about creating immediate commercial results. We were excited to learn that Jon, Sudip and Dan from Decibel 28 were a different group of investors. If you want a patient investor who gets open source and community, look no further - nobody beats Decibel’s passion and care for your team’s vision and encourage you to build a strong open-source community around your company!”
But the terminology used is hollow and finite. Why would they provide an open source company with $8M? Passion alone? There must be some sort of ROI they aim for. So what is that?
Hi - Sudip from Decibel here. Backing oss companies is most of what we do; so, couple of thoughts fwiw. first, building an oss company is really building two companies and definitely not at the expense of one another. For the community, there has to be a free-forever, well-supported product, period. Without that, there is no community in the long run and hence, no company either. The enterprise business, when that comes, must be focused entirely on delivering value to enterprises and NOT on monetizing individual users. That’s what we strongly believe at Decibel and that’s what we have found mission-driven oss founders believe too. But, this certainly requires more patience and capital; hence, the need for complete alignment all around.
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!)
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.
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.
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...
I’ve done projects with enlive and quite enjoyed it. Allows a workflow where designers create pure HTML/CSS templates and you just fill in the blanks using selectors and transformations written in Clojure.
I have a huge bias towards functional programming, one core tenet of which is immutability. When I was going through the official svelte tutorial I read this[1] paragraph:
> Note that interacting with these <input> elements will mutate the array. If you prefer to work with immutable data, you should avoid these bindings and use event handlers instead.
Which left me with the impression that svelte's functional story wouldn't be that great. Though I did still finish the tutorial.
As my first project I tried to migrate one of our static websites to svelte with sveltekit. It didn't really feel like I was doing something different than when I was using Vue3/Nuxt3, so I might as well stick with it. I understand that the technical tradeoffs are different, svelte is compiled and has no runtime after all, but the developer experience pretty much feels the same.
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.
- emphasis on data (collection and sequence) transformations
Also the concurrency model of ClojureScript's `core.async` is similar to Go, which is good apparently? I have not tried Go yet, but to me it looks similar to Elixir/Erlang's actor model.
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.
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(!))
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> Before September 15, Penpot’s CEO and co-founder Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz 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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I saw earlier this year that the Figma team had (finally) got around to thinking about the accessibility of their UI. Out of curiosity I went hunting to see if Penpot has UI accessibility built-in. It's not one of the founding principles, but good to see they say it's one of their 'values' going forward - https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/2195
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.
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.
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.
How do open source companies make money? The only thing I figure here, is that VCs are betting another company like Microsoft will want to acquire the number 2 player, and exit that way.
My guess is partly consumer donations, partly industry donations (e.g. "Google donates $1M to Penpot since it uses it heavily and can't let it die") and, perhaps money from cloud hosting and technical support.
2 is why Linux is alive, too many large companies depend on it for it to die.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
There are projects which have managed to do so, like KDE's QT, which was closed source but negotiated an escrow license with the community to release the code as BSD if the owner company ever stopped development.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you! Open standards and not just "open formats" belong to the critical path to accessible innovation. There's already a community "port" of Penpot for a Desktop experience. You can learn a bit more here https://community.penpot.app/t/introducing-penpot-desktop/14...
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
this funding agreement came months ago, the FigmaGate had nothing to do with it. I'm surprised how many people think deals like this can happen in just a week, LOL!
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.