Martin believes everyone should have access to free quality software.
Thanks so much🙏
I disagree with that framing, someone not buying your shit is not the same as you losing money. Inkscape saved millions for graphic designers, which is very different. Adobe was not entitled to that money, you can’t lose something that was never yours.
Subtle distinction, but actually pretty huge. I agree with you. Companies also use this to say that pirating is stealing, when they never had the business in the first place.
Exactly. I’m pirating because I can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars each month to watch all the movies and shows that I do. If I didn’t have the opportunity to pirate, I still wouldn’t afford it legitimately…
It’s also a great way to demo games and other software if you can afford it before you waste money on something that has no value to you. This is especially useful when you’re on a tight budget.
So close.
You should be pirating even if you can afford it because pirating is a tool to help reduce the disparity in wealth.
Uhm. I don’t have a big picture view to claim yay or nay on this one but it seems like if everyone did that we wouldn’t have any entertainment at all. With only small wealth in entertainment, we would only have indie low budget movies and shows, too.
I dunno. It’s a pros and cons situation, for sure.
Yeah. If piracy wasn’t an option, I just wouldn’t play those games.
So many games I have pirated that I have yet to play because there aren’t enough hours in the day and I don’t want to spend them all gaming.
All the money you give these corporations will be used against you someday.
“I bought a lottery ticket and didn’t win. I lost 50 millions dollars!”
- adobe
You are right, of course, but I personally draw a great of pleasure from imaging the CEO of Adobe screaming, “CURSE YOU MARTIN OWENS!!!”
I was prepared to scold you for being pedantic, but upon further reflection, I’ve concluded that you are 100% correct, and your point is germane to the conversation at hand, so you get an upvote instead.
Companies talk about lesser earnings as losses all the time.
edit: I don’t agree with the companies, just pointing out what they do.
And they’re wrong all the time
Certainly!
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I worked for a company that made MIDI sequencers. Had been making them for decades before I got there, and still making them long after I left.
One of the first products I worked on, the marketing team decided to put on the box, “World’s first ever MIDI sequencer” 😆
We almost need a new series called, “Companies Say the Darndest Things” that picks up after the original. I’m sure a lot of the kids in the original show are running these companies now.
I had exactly 0 intention of ever buying anything from Adobe.
Inkscape gave me an alternative to the high seas. And it happens to do everything I need it to, although it’s way more powerful than the simple vector graphics conversions I use it for.
10/10, Adobe never lost money from me getting Inkscape. They lost the game before they knew I was a player.
I agree. I would never have bought Adobe, I would have not the little bit of vector drawing I have done.
I’m grateful for InkScape, but I wouldn’t have bought or downloaded anything otherwise, so I neither saved nor did Adobe lose.
Right, it’s akin to saying he stole that money from Adobe the same way the media companies imply that poor people making digital copies of music and movies they wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise is theft.
Thank you.
those dollars were not adobe’s to lose but users’ to save
I am a Corel kind of bird myself, having used it both professionally (which is how I got started with it) and at home for a couple of decades now. I will say two things about that:
In its current version Inkscape is roughly on par with were CorelDraw was in its 4.0 state or thereabouts (which I still have a copy of, on like seventeen 3.5" floppy disks!) which sounds like damning with faint praise but it really isn’t considering that Inkscape costs nothing to use.
However, one factor that I think most people don’t think about is that Inkscape is currently the best software I’ve ever used, bar none, for ripping apart .pdf documents made by other software, for the purposes of monkeying with their contents. And that’s a ten story tall flaming middle finger to Adobe, and completely obviates the need for 99.9999999% of all users to ever have to pay for the “pro” version of Adobe Acrobat or whatever they’re calling it this week just to be able to made minor adjustments to a .pdf.
This is good to know!
You may not know if you exclusively use Corel, but where do you think Corel stands compared to Illustrator these days?
I’m a pro graphic designer, so you can be as technical as you like.
I’ve been messing around with Affinity Designer a bit lately, and while it’s gotten a lot better over the years (and some features have surpassed Adobe), the little things and workflow stuff is still such a step down I find it hard to want to use it still.
I use both Corel and Illustrator for work but I’m very much more “fluent” with Illustrator. I’d say they have a bit different focus. While I hate Adobe with a passion, I’d say Illustrator is a lot better. My co-worker who works with large format printing, likes Corel more.
Appreciate that perspective. I also can’t wait to kick Adobe to the curb someday, but I usually have the same experience when trying alternatives.
Adobe stuff is slowly falling apart though it feels like. It’s coasting on the brilliant work of the original devs pre-creative cloud, and while there have been a few genuinely good features added over the years, I hate to say that most new features they add feel like amateur hour to me. They just lack the level of polish and attention to detail that old features had. It doesn’t feel like the people making it understand the workflow of a professional anymore. They’re also just getting slow. Whenever I open Affinity I’m struck by how much more performant it feels!
Yes, slowly falling apart is a good description. I’m actually thinking of just switching careers. I work in print, so Adobe is pretty much a standard, there are very few viable alternatives.
I do a lot of print design too so I feel it
No idea, unfortunately. I have not touched any of the professional Adobe products in any detail since abandoning Premiere Pro back in probably around 2009. I briefly dabbled with a pirated version of Illustrator when I first got my X1 Yoga and discovered that it did not work correctly with the inbuilt stylus, full stop, and I abandoned it on the spot. I haven’t looked back since.
I did not choose the Corel suite on purpose at the beginning but when I was starting out working professionally it’s what the company worked for used in house, and I’ve stuck with it ever since due to CorelDraw and PhotoPaint doing everything I need and my continued familiarity with it. From what I understand Illustrator is more complex and for that reason some people insist it’s more “powerful,” but I suspect that really just means it’s more byzantine and harder to use. I’ve never not been able to do anything I needed to do with the Corel suite, except:
CorelDraw is to this day useless for editing .pdfs. Which is pretty damn rich for a professional graphics editing suite that costs $400 for a full license. I mean, it can, insofar as the file open and import dialogs will let you choose and load one, but it basically never works right and tends to produce a broken mess. Somehow Inkscape always works for me. So I have a copy of it around on all my machines alongside Corel, for those instances where I need to tweak or extract something from a .pdf and whoever gave it to me won’t provide the source.
I’ve been curious about Corel for a while, so I may need to bite the bullet and get it sometime.
Illustrator is absolutely a byzantine mess lmao. The reason it’s so favored (I don’t want to say loved, but favored) is because of the depth of features, and also how fast it is to work in once you’ve learned it’s bizarre interface.
Some of it is definitely unfamiliarity, but I always find when using Affinity that things that are a single click or a hotkey + click in illustrator are multiple clicks without a hotkey in affinity. In isolation not a huge difference, but when you do it full time it adds up.
Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator’s, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.
You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don’t have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can’t conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can’t bind anything to Alt + F4.
You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.
That’s definitely good stuff. Affinity is also lacking in interface customization I’ve found.
I fucking loved Corel, I’ve never really found an adequate replacement for it. Guess I’ll be giving InkScape a try, thanks
This functionality with PDFs is natively built into MacOS. One of the reasons I chose a Mac for my latest PC.
At my old job we used Macs for two reasons: Preview and Outlook on MacOS. I know it sounds silly to people who don’t have to work with email or pdf’s as much as I had to, but it was absolutely the right call for the work we had to do.
Also, depending on your use case it’s crazy how much worse Outlook is on Windows. Local indexing is far worse on Windows, and trying to search a big mailbox brings the app to its knees.
Then why do you use this shit software?
It’s even worse with the "new " Outlook, so you might need to look for something else anyway
Oh yeah, I wouldn’t use Outlook myself lol, especially the newer version.
Preview? Am I missing something? I hate that you can even navigate through photos with left right arrows, I never use preview for anything if I can avoid it.
Preview is a fantastic pdf viewer and basic editor, which is what we used it for.
I had no idea Inkscape could work with PDFs like that. Thank you!
Ok …. Your enthusiasm about the pdf ripping has won me over. I’m trying this shit asap
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
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 mainatiners, 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.
Also shouting out Krita as a Photoshop alternative for digital painting, digital art.
How is its CMYK profiles in your opinion?
Hitchhikers Guide on the bookshelf, nice.
I see Pratchett, Making Money up there, too. I like this guy.
Why is his Ubuntu book in Chinese?
Making Money, the best Moist Von Lipwig book. Even better.
He’s a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.
Open source software does not cause a loss of $ it causes everyone else gain.
Kudos to Mr. Owens and all Inkscape developers. Inkscape is a masterpiece.
Inkscape is goated and so is Martin, respect 🫡
The only time I used Adobe Illustrator was when it was brand new, in 1987. I may have used early versions of Photoshop, but never as my “daily driver.” So I might not be the most knowledgeable about Adobe software.
But the thing I MOST resent Adobe for was buying and killing Macromedia… I really really liked Macromedia Fireworks (raster, vector, and object graphics editor). Fireworks could do a lot of the things Adobe software could for a fraction of the price AND without having to use multiple applications to get the job done.
Inkscape is remarkable, and maybe someday someone will merge some raster image object tools into it, and then it might begin to resemble the Fireworks of 20 years ago when Adobe killed it.
People like him are why I still have hope in tech. May the machine bless him eternally.
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.
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.
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.
He has a Samson Meteor microphone. Same as mine. He is cool in my book :D
I have the same shityy little speakers too, good for the price point though
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.
