Comment by bolt7469
3 years ago
rough at the edges
That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
3 years ago
rough at the edges
That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
If you are a company and not an individual, nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs instead of paying some try-to-hook-you-up-with-subscriptions company.
Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia, India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying them for particular commits than buying software from bay area company.
It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable problem.
upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies like Adobe.
> nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs
company or individual, that's true. but there's still big opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software?
You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
I don't think I've ever successfully gotten a SaaS or other paid product to fix a bug for me. I mean sure I've paid a lot to upgrade _hoping_ that an upgrade comes with bug fixes, but that usually doesn't pan out either. On the other hand I've seen great responsiveness on open source projects.
In one year you’ll be one year older. Won’t you wish you’d invested in yourself, org, and community?
It’s a marshmallow test for adults.
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Hire devs and use OSS as a base to create the tools you need!
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Economics prohibits it. Consider a feature that will cost 1 month of developer time, let’s put that at $10k. 20 companies using the product want that feature, and each would be willing to pay $1k for it. No problem, right? The community would be willing to pay $20k total, and the feature would only cost $10k to implement, so why can’t it get done?
It can’t get done because every company wants to let some other sucker pay for the feature, and then free-ride after it’s implemented. No individual company would pay the $10k, because the feature is only worth $1k to them, even though it’s worth $20k to society.
So how did Penpot come into existence? Because some 'sucker' paid for it?
Kaleidos, the creators of Penpot, built a tool that they need and invested to make it open. And they get recognition for it which builds their brand and gets them more customers and employees.
Paying for feature X and having that advertised in the ChangeLog and on the sponsors page is a sound business decision.
Soon enough, businesses pay fees to Adobe only to have their data taken hostage in the cloud will be known as suckers.
But on the other hand a lot of companies are quite happy to pay a subscription of 1000k a year (which increases if the company grows) to get the same features. Let's be real purchasing decisions are often not based primarily on economics otherwise companies wouldn't have large marketing and sales departments which throw huge parties at trade shows.
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Project managing all the tools that we use to get our job done seems very distracting.
These people learn to hedge:
- Take X% of what they pay to Figma/Adobe and donate to FOSS alternatives.
- Every year, go through an exercise to look for missing features on the open source tool that still keeps you dependent on the proprietary one. Take the results from the feedback and give to the developers.
- (If you are a big company) use the results of this exercise to try to negotiate down on the price of the proprietary system you depend on. If you manage to get a discount, take it and double down on the support of the free alternative.
- Repeat until either you no longer need the proprietary solution or the open source alternative surpasses the closed one in capabilities and market share.
Keep in mind that Figma was initially started in 2012, first public release in ~2016, while Penpot just got started in 2018. Figma has a bunch of years headstart on Penpot. Give them some years and I'm sure Penpot can achieve at least as much as Figma, if not more, because of the FOSS nature of the product.
I feel like that is mainly in the consumer application space, things that have a user interface; everyone's favorite developer tooling, languages, CLI apps, etc are mostly open source.
The analogy for me has always been Snap-On hand tools vs Craftsman. If you are making a living twisting wrenches eight hours a day, six days a week, the wrench you use really does matter.
If I'm running a company (ha!) and dependent on Figma I'd still be paying for Figma while at the same time sending some funds over to Penpot as an insurance policy.