Seriously fuck adobe. We use them at work and they have the shittiest management portal in the universe and also make it so hard to cancel subscriptions.
I made nearly all the 2D assets in my game with Inkscape. It wouldn’t have been possible without it.
I like his hat.
I appreciate him very much, OSS maintainers and devs dont get enough praise. Also I dont get the intense entitlement some people have towards unpaid OSS devs and mainatinerd, they think that they somehow deserve a product equal to that of a corporate offering while not offering any money or code.
It’s because they haven’t thought about it.
They’re so used to the paradigm. I pay money. I get product. I get support.
So when they get the product but they don’t pay money, their brain short circuits and thinks they deserve some kind of support.
In a capitalistic world, communistic projects are confusing. Which is sad.
People equate “cost” with “value”. If something has no cost, it has no value. There’s an old story about computer mice that is apt. An electronics store sells computer mice. Some are expensive, some are cheap. The store has found that one specific mouse is really really reliable. Some of the more expensive mice get constant warranty returns or RMA requests. But not this one mouse. This one mouse is built well, feels good, and works great. Every single desk in the store is using one of these mice. And this specific mouse also happens to be extremely cheap. As in, one of the cheapest that the store carries.
Sales floor employees struggle to sell it, even when they personally use it every day and know it’s a superior product, because customers see the low price and assume it is a low quality product. The customers are directly equating cost with value. And so the store manager does something sort of backwards. They increase the price of the mouse, to be around the same price as the others. Suddenly, this specific mouse is flying off of the shelves. People are now seeing the high price, and assuming that means the mouse is good.
Another place you experience this is when helping your family with tech support. Every single IT worker has experienced the “you updated Chrome on my computer six months ago, and now it’s broken. You broke my computer” complaint from a tech-illiterate relative. They see a friend or relative with a computer issue, they know how to solve said issue, they try to be helpful, and it blows back on them when the computer breaks in the distant future. This is largely because the IT person didn’t charge said friend or family member for their services.
In grandma’s eyes, your tech support service were free, so it has no value. You can’t be trusted as a real IT person, because your services are free. Charging a small “friends and family discount” type of thing actually cements in their mind that you do this for a living. You literally do this professionally. Even if you’re only charging them $5 for an hour of work, when you normally get paid $50 per hour. Again, you can call it the friends and family discount if you need to. But by charging them something, all of those “you broke my computer” complaints suddenly dry up. Because now you’re not just the grandson who plays with computers; you’re a professional in a specialized trade. You know what you’re doing, so it couldn’t have been your fault that the computer broke. It’s not really a friends and family discount; it’s a “stop blaming me when you download viruses” fee.
Bingo! I doubled the amount of business I was doing with my side-hustle PC repair by doubling my price. Also, my customers weren’t such a pain in the ass.
Inkscape is a pleasure to use; as powerful as you need, and you can use it with almost no learning curve and add power features as you need them. It’s a wonderfully designed program with a well-thought out UX.
Gimp really could learn a lot about UX design from Inkscape. As much as I like Gimp, while uncommon things are possible but hard, simple things are also possible but hard.
This is the truth, right here. GIMP’s user interface is an entire F5 tornado’s worth of bullshit and it always has been. I always put it forth as the poster child of precisely how not to do it with any open source productivity software of any stripe and it’s consistently never failed to serve as an example for nigh-on decades.
If the GIMP people would just suck it up and broadly copy the layout of… well, pretty much anything, even MS Paint, it’d be a massive improvement to usability and would probably confer a tenfold increase to the number of users willing to try it out. Or at least stick with it for more than five minutes.
I’m sure it’s a perfectly capable program that’s able to do many things. I just can’t be bothered to put up with it. And this is coming from somebody who willingly uses FreeCAD.
Somehow in the transition from the bunch-of-disparate-floating-toolbar-windows paradigm to the current all-in-one design they’ve managed to make it slightly worse. GIMP’s feature discoverability is basically nonexistent, and the uninitated have no hope of figuring out how to do anything with it other than doodle with the preset brushes without resorting to tutorials.
I can’t believe the dockers (“dockable dialogs”) still take up so much space yet somehow there isn’t room to put title bars on them describing what they do even when you have one of them open and not just tabbed with an inscrutable icon at the top, nor is there any discoverable way to dismiss any of them once you’re done with them because that option is buried in a flyout menu for some reason.
I could go on forever. Don’t get me started.
I am a FOSS nerd for sure but GIMP sucks and it’s awful. I’d rather individually plink pixels into a bitmap manually from the command line with Imagemagick than use GIMP.
Yeah, say what you want, but GIMP developers are brain dead. There are loads of quality OSS apps for creatives: InkScape, Darktable, Blender, etc. And their developers genuinely care about their users. But not GIMP devs, fuck them.
I hear and feel your pain. Gimp is incredibly powerful, and yet I have to look up a tutorial every time I want to just want to draw a square box.
I needed to make a quick cabling diagram for someone, basically just a router to a switch type thing. only took 15 minutes and I don’t use it every day. very user friendly
Based
So the website is super summy, finally found the “real” download button which took me to the MS app store. Ok fine, but now its been 10 minutes and it actually hasn’t started downloading yet…
Are you sure you are at https://inkscape.org/ ?
Last time I downloaded it ~1 year ago I don’t remember any hoops I had to jump through.
Thank you Martin and Inkscape-team!
Inkscape is one of my favorite applications out there. I use it almost daily, both for my day job and hobbies. Thanks Martin!
People like him are why I still have hope in tech. May the machine bless him eternally.
Lost dollars because of free software and lost dollars because of piracy are both imaginary numbers.
It seems just fitting that he wears a hat that you need bezier curves to draw perfectly with vector graphics!
I’ve been using Inkscape for over 10 years now. I had no idea the man behind it wore a bowler hat and now I will never use another vector program again.
Thank you!
You don’t lose money when people use a competitors service/product over yours. That money wasn’t yours to lose.
Yet, the companies cry about losing money due to online piracy. At this point it’s eźtremally funny
for me, anyway, they didn’t lose money because if i couldn’t pirate it, I just wouldn’t watch. I’m told this is a common thought process
“If I couldn’t easily grab it off the table and walk away with it ,I wouldn’t have stolen it.”
Screw the media companies for the price gouging and being general dicks dragging people through the courts, but it’s still knowingly working around and accessing content that someone else paid to create. I dunno why people can’t be honest “I did it because it was easy and the chances of being caught were nominal. The risk / reward was in my favour”.
Your gonna get down votes and people crying about how words can mean anything, but entirely true. Risk/reward is 99% of it. Its also socially acceptable to talk about owning pirated media, which reduces the risk.
it’s not theft if you can’t legally own it. They willingly change the TOS to say that you’re basically renting it, and they can take it away for any reason, at any time. If they can take away something I paid money for, it’s not wrong to pirate it.
Not to mention, it’s not theft because the original is still intact.
If I go steal a car, I’m taking the physical item and depriving the owner of said item.
If I download a movie, the movie is still there, it has been copied at best, not “stolen.”
It’s like watching a baseball game from the fence, sure you didn’t pay for the ticket, but you’re not occupying a seat so that someone else can’t pay to use it.
If I download a movie, it doesn’t take it off netflix so nobody else can enjoy it.
Okay so its forgery? Who gives a fuck, its all a type of stealing shit.
That’s a different argument though. If you have paid for a license to the content and they remove the distribution method or kill the drm that allows access to it. I’d say it’s fair game that you find an “alternative” copy of the content or work around to keep access to what you paid for. Unless you are knowingly buying it on a 1 off rental basis.
Don’t get me wrong, the current system is not weighted in the consumers favour at all and it’s a good reason to not play the game and avoid netflix, buy drm free computer games, etc but I just object to the argument the people who pirate are somehow noble robinhoods in a legally sound position. You’re still knowingly accessing something that someone paid to create and you’re gaining a benefit from that in entertainment. You’re just finding a way to justify doing so that sits right with your own moral code.
If everyone pirated, the entertainment industry would cease to exist or at least be greatly reduced the remaining people would only be doing it as a hobby. Big budget moves and TV series, AAA computer games would no longer find funding if no one at the consumer end is paying for it.
I feel like, in the long run, this is going to be a good thing.
Hopefully:
Consumers will realise the problems with streaming platforms and those who pirate will realise the importance of supporting the studios they like.
Then there will be less people using the streaming services and more people buying copies directly from the studio.All that remains is studios using a service that P2Ps directly to the customer’s computer, bypassing all the wasted Blu-ray plastics.
I am going to, once again, give the example of Steam game soundtracks, which I can keep wherever I want and listen to, using whichever software I want.You’re still knowingly accessing something that someone paid to create and you’re gaining a benefit from that in entertainment.
And how do you feel about adblockers? By using one you’re depriving sites of the ad revenue they’d gain off of you reading their article or watching their video, etc. Do you use one or are you raw dogging the internet so that the content servers can harvest your data which they sell to serve you targeted ads?
Not the gotcha you think it is. They said competitors, piracy makes them use your own product and not pay you for it.
Would a kid buy photoshop if they had to? Probably not. Would a sketchy company? Yup.
Would a sketchy company? Yup.
Completely irrellevant to the discussion and nice ragebait, but whatever.
I don’t see how it is. A kid that can’t afford to buy photoshop won’t buy it any more than a sketchy company would, just like how facebook much rather steal material than pay their way for it. The difference obviously being that the sketch company might very well have the capital to pay their way, they’re just used to get away with it.
The point you are missing is the “had to”.
The sketchy company didn’t have to pay the creators for it because it was available via different means.
They would have had to, if they couldn’t find it otherwise.Of course, in that case, they would have “borrowed” it from libraries and such, but then again, the premise is that they had to, which is not being fulfilled in your example.
Tell that to all of the monopolies that have totally captured a market segment.
