Sounds like they have a interesting history behind the creation of Penpot:
> Penpot was (effectively) born in a Kaleidos personal innovation week (PIWEEK, aka recurring hackathon) in 2018. Back then we had been recently forced to break one of our sacred rules at the company “only open source tools and platforms are allowed to build technology” due to F1gm4’s overwhelmingly productivity boost for designers at the company. “We are second-class citizens in open source, it’s frustrating and it’s painful!” they cried, and they were right.
Gonna be exciting to see where Penpot moves from here. I'm a 100% Figma user who just signed up for Penpot and gonna see if it's possible to adopt for my own workflows.
Particularly interesting for me as a Clojure/Script developer is that Penpot is written in Clojure and ClojureScript, but the average user won't care about that. But will also be interesting to see if they'll be able to keep iterating at the same speed as they currently are, and how the language will affect it.
I don't see how Clojurescript is a good thing here, it's probably the most inefficient and with the most overhead of all the compile to JS languages (with out talking too much about react with penpot uses), even highly optimized pure JS won't come anywhere near the performance of Figma's C++ engine. Yes, performance for this tools matters.
Time will tell. Currently Penpot is using SVG for rendering the canvas, while Figma is using HTML <canvas> element for rendering the canvas, with their own custom engine. I don't know anything about what Penpot is planning, but I'm still excited to see what a SVG canvas could possibly do in competition to Figmas own renderer.
And then the rest of the UI is just basic HTML which any framework/compile-to-js language could handle. It's all about the canvas, and browsers are arguably pretty efficient at render SVGs so again, time will tell what happens.
I've been testing penpot, and yes, you can feel a performance penalty for using SVG instead of Canvas... but only after having like 20 screens or more.
For smaller projects, weirdly enough it's even faster than figma. Specially initial loading times, and switching between project selection, and loading the project. I think I'm gonna use it more for when I have a quick idea, and want to draft something quickly before lose it, just because of that.
Clojuescript is definitely not the most inefficient compile-to-js language. For example, the default data types will be well-designed with persistent data-structures instead of eg singly linked lists. But maybe you’re limiting to some subset in which clojurescript is the slowest.
This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
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.
> Won’t you wish you’d invested in yourself, org, and community?
Many might prefer to have shipped features/products in a timely manner instead and how their performance reviews would look, as opposed to some notion of community.
The situations where you can say: "I'm blocked and am waiting on the library/tool developer to have a look at my GitHub issue, so no new release will be shipped until then," are probably not plentiful. Situations where the person in question can contribute a solution of their own are also not as plentiful as we might like. Situations where the person in question is capable of either solving the problem just for themselves (with a custom build of the tool/library) are also not as plentiful as one might hope, due to possibly different skillsets.
Making the functionality someone else's problem behind a contract of some sort feels like a decent choice in an enterprise setting, which is why you see many purchase something like RHEL licenses because of the support, or why many prefer to overpay for cloud services instead of running everything on prem, or even use paid tools that are "standard" within the niche of the industry that they work in.
For many, the circumstances in which they'll adopt FOSS primarily centers around someone else already having done the majority of the work and the solution being good enough: something like MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL in the database space and something like Angular/Vue/React in the front end space, or any number of libraries/frameworks for back end development, tools like Visual Studio Code or Git, OSes like GNU/Linux or other Linux distros and so on.
One might also argue that a lot of the successful FOSS projects out there actually have corporate backing, but perhaps that's besides the point.
Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee - absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic !
That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ...
I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?
Do you actually do professional software development ? Even huge tech companies fail development projects spectacularly, non-tech companies trying to develop business critical software when superior alternative is available at reasonable prices ? You'd have a self inflicted competitive disadvantage. With first you might have a recruiting gimmick.
Sure, this is ideal given unlimited time and money, but hiring dedicated devs for tooling is going to be expensive. And once they fix "the problem," they're still on payroll. Yay they'll keep fixing problems and improving the software, but it's basically the most expensive software subscription model imaginable.
Contracting requires the devs to get up to speed on the software and your company needs. On the other hand, a private company selling commercial software has a comparative advantage in already knowing the codebase and user needs.
10 companies each contracting 1 dev for an open-source project is a less-efficient allocation of resources than 1 company hiring 10 devs for their commercial software project.
I'd appreciate it if you could provide some evidence for your claim that comparative advantage is "lost in the noise."
Efficient allocation of scarce resources is best achieved with comparative advantages. A commercial software team has shared context, management, and knowledge that cannot be as efficiently achieved by a decentralized community of contributors. So the commercial team can produce the same software at a cheaper cost. This is a good thing for the economy.
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.
In the long run, a company that wastes money on purchases will be beaten in the market by a company that isn't so wasteful. Marketing and sales is not wasteful, but actually creates profit.
I don't believe either of those are true. As it happens, the largest companies capture so much of the market that they can afford being inefficient, and they still have the power to push the competition into a corner.
There are small-margin markets where this doesn't happen, bit then those markets don't have huge companies either.
- 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.
Often it's not just "rough around the edges", but fully missing features that are necessary (or STRONGLY desired) for a regular professional's workflow
In biology almost nobody pays for software. A lot of it is really rough around the edges (I have to install and try to run some of it as part of my job).
It’s kinda interesting, most development is by grants and such, they don’t offer much in the way of support funding. A lot of development is fooling around taking output from a and making it work for b.
> Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available. There is no business continuity risk.
I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. There are many open source projects that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been looking for such a long time for someone else to take over because they don't have the time really means the library is just kinda existing.
There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even know that?
One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers complain about is people asking if their project is dead or not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained, when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead.
Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that they won't be maintaining it, etc.
It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at your own risk.
> I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk.
I feel the opposite, open source gives people and companies options and the ability to soldier on if someone loses interest in a technology. This site is littered with notices from companies that they intend to discontinue some paid product or service suddenly with very little notice. If a group of people or companies really care about an open source technology, it's easy enough for them to ensure the continued maintenance of something they're getting for free. Also, if you care deeply about a technology, chances are others do as well and those projects will continue well past what a commercial vendor would maintain.
You know why the site isn't littered with open source projects announcing they're getting abandoned? Because majority of the time the maintainers don't even care enough to announce it.
> They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
So, you've never had a commercial proprietary library your core product depends upon, being obsoleted and ceased support, without a license nor access to the code to keep maintaining it in-house? Because it happens, and I have.
And it's not just because the library was commercially inefficient, but because it got bought by a competing large corporation, who wanted to replace it in the market with their own solution, and wouldn't bother to support the library for its old users.
When this happens, at least the open source license allows you to keep supporting your use case by yourself, instead of being forced into the new solution being pushed by the vendor.
So the library got replaced with a new version? Happens in open source and often with less notice than with commerical products. And the idea of supporting the use case by yourself gets shot down. Also, you'll find money talks in these scenarios and you can pay for more support it just costs so much no one wants to do it.
No, the new library promoted by the vendor was utterly incompatible with our system, being based on totally different assumptions. So the library got replaced by an open-source library that did the same as the original and had a permissive license, which allowed my company to build a wrapper around it at an affordable cost.
until users get too dependent on it and the maintainers stop maintaining it... or the maintainer goes rogue... or there is a vulnerability/bug introduced by someone... and you can't easily switch to another platform
I'm excited to see alternatives to Figma, because using it is like an emotional rollercoaster for me. There are times when I'll open a massive project file with hundreds of frames, each with thousands of graphical nodes. And even then, I can zoom in and out with no friction at all, it's just buttery smooth. I've been a developer for over a decade, and I have no idea at all how they're able to pull that off. It's a technical marvel.
On the other hand, it's far from what I would want for a modern design tool. Managing tokens, or anything from the "design system" world, is an absolute headache. Compared to the efficiency of the dev tools I use, it feels like Figma (and every other design tool) is just light years behind.
Even when I use a tool that's built specifically for that purpose, like Supernova, I still feel pretty underwhelmed. I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, but I know that the current landscape doesn't cut it for me.
Which can make sense on the short term, but on the long term I'm sure browsers' SVG renderer will catch-up and use GPU rendering in the spirit of pathfinder, piet-gpu, etc.
This is why I think it is wise for Penpot to use the native browser SVG renderer. They can spend their limited ressources on making a cool app while the browsers will inevitably improve their vector renderer on their own
I like Figma but everything in the design tools space feels like it light years behind dev tool. Particularly around anything to do with tokens.
Tokens are just variables. Ideally you should be able to reference one token with another token (ala variables) and NO DESIGN TOOL DOES THIS. It's maddening.
Right??? I just want to say "here are my colors, here are some spacing values, here are some font families". Then I want to be able to compose them into text styles and the like, etc etc. It feels like this shouldn't be a hard thing to build.
Another great open source product from the company. Their open source project management software, Taiga (taiga.io), is a fantastic tool that I have used for several years. Feature-wise it’s the most matured software out there, and runs blazing fast.
It's really a fantastic tool, we are using it since several months in replacement of figma and Adobe XD. The prototype feature is working great as well.
It seems like no :( I'm a big fan of the auto layout feature in Figma and Framer, in fact I've started getting the designers at my workplace to use it in lieu of fixed pixel values. Would love to switch to a FOSS solution, but that one missing feature is a blocker for me, for now.
Well a good move on penpot would be to see how to get this figma file import [1] feature some resources, maybe even open a fundraising for this feature. I am pretty sure the general dismay would help gaining some momentum for any kind of funding.
While I find it awesome to see Penpot getting some recognition right now, it is not at the point of being a Figma replacement just yet. But I'm very hopeful that it will eventually be. Once they get a plugin system implemented, I'll be recommending it to all my colleagues.
- It is a good copy of figmas UI. With much open source software, it often seems the UI comes last in priority and interest; Penpot’s UI is well working and looks good.
- Basic features are all there
- The team has build an open source online platform before, so they know what they do.
Bad:
- In design systems particularly at variants and states of components, it is not on figma’s level yet
Interesting:
- You can self-deploy (cause open) or use their free instance
- Front- and backend are written in clojure/clojure script
I love that FOSS exists and helps fight centralization and stagnation, but I worry that it will be seen as an example of competition. I have to wonder if this is one of the driving forces behind the epidemic of relicensing to be able to compete. If you can't seriously compete in a marketplace because the competition is overpowered, then taking some of the most popular FOSS solutions private and paid ends up being one of the only real ways to compete, and one of the only ways for those contributors to feel adequately compensated for their efforts.
I have to wonder if stricter antitrust could help push back against some of the erosion of FOSS licenses (IMO) that we've seen in recent years. The whole "build something to compete with X and get your exit by being acquired by X" strategy can't be long-term sustainable, can it?
I was just thinking that I should finally learn to use Figma, but now I think that I might as well learn PenPot, hopefully the recent news will make this open source tool grow (I didn't know it, for starters).
They seem to be working as a company. Does anyone know what their business model is? I'm interested in contributing but I want to know this before I do.
As I understand it, they're a startup with an astonishing ability to convince investors to fund open source tools, and they're able to set up an economically sustainable environment around those.
I am an avid Penpot convert, but from Sketch App, that I have been using since so many years now. I set up a system so we can install Penpot in no time self-hosted in house, including dns setup and ssl certificates. There are still some rough edges on Safari, such as text not displaying in place, so I may switch to Chrome or Brave for it.
The fact they claim it’s the first open-source design tool demonstrates the ignorance they have for the craft. GIMP has been available as an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop for a while, supports more and popular programming languages, and yet, hasn’t supplanted Photoshop just because it is open source.
Penpot lacks the sophistication required from a design tool that’s difficult to notice if you’re not a designer working in these tools daily to do your job.
The open-source spirit for design isn’t unique to Penpot and won’t be enough to galvanize the design community into adopting it for everyday use. At best, it will be used by developers and product managers working on simple workflows for apps, but can’t withstand the demands required for designing sophisticated tools.
Maybe I’m using it wrong and it was never intended for this, but when I tried Penpot about a year ago, I had no way to export the diagram as one file like PDF or JPG. I could only export a layer. Did I miss something or am I not understanding what Penpot is for?
Not true. Figma lets you select an element ("layer") and export just that element (and its children as it appears on the canvas) to all of its available formats SVG, PNG, JPG, etc. and even offers 1x-4x scaling at export time.
The biggest issue I see with this is that it is web-based. It should be decentralized and have a native desktop client. 70% of the world has crappy internet, and if your connection goes down you are sol.
It has a desktop app that you can use offline. My problem with any webapp SaaS app is that you loose control of the data. That is one thing I don't like about figma
No - there was some discussion on such a feature, but im/Export from/to such complex formats is very difficult and often impossible to get perfectly right.
That's unfortunate. I have one large file that contains everything for a particular project. I migrated from Sketch to Figma a couple years ago and did so using their import. It was not perfect, but was better than nothing. It took a few days to clean it up again, but was a good starting point for migration. As the file has years of work in it, starting over would be a significant amount of work.
I've always heard that "perfect is the enemy of good" and in my experience as long as the tool communicates "I did what I could, and didn't know what to do with the following elements" then clear communication can go a long way toward allowing users to make informed decisions
Folks seem to fail to realize that open source project fail when it comes to collaboration products, not because the tech is worse (many times the open source tech might be better), they fail because of the lack of network effects they have achieved.
This is why Slack/FB/Github flourish, while open source alternatives don't.
> As usual, when money talks, we get FOSS posts with a subset of the capabilities of the real thing.
This. They're right you know. The same thing happened with LibreOffice, GIMP and InkScape. Even if you have an installed version of them, they don't come any where near the features of 'the real thing' and users will complain why it is not Office® 365 or the real Photoshop®, or actually Figma®.
On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps.
The only exception to this is Blender, but as always with specialist software it is used by a small amount of users compared to the applications that I have described.
As for Penpot, it just tells me that the Figma users that are 'upset' over Adobe today are just going to keep using Figma anyway and are just reacting over the news of the acquisition, since Penpot still doesn't meet the requirements and vast capabilities of Figma.
> On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps.
An online version of LibreOffice has been available since 2017 and now there is even a WebAssembly version in development.
> On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps.
The point of FLOSS software is not to prevent proprietary tools from existing, it's to make sure that a Free&Open alternative exists if you don't want them.
> Penpot was (effectively) born in a Kaleidos personal innovation week (PIWEEK, aka recurring hackathon) in 2018. Back then we had been recently forced to break one of our sacred rules at the company “only open source tools and platforms are allowed to build technology” due to F1gm4’s overwhelmingly productivity boost for designers at the company. “We are second-class citizens in open source, it’s frustrating and it’s painful!” they cried, and they were right.
https://kaleidos.net/ seems like an interesting place to work as well.
Gonna be exciting to see where Penpot moves from here. I'm a 100% Figma user who just signed up for Penpot and gonna see if it's possible to adopt for my own workflows.
Particularly interesting for me as a Clojure/Script developer is that Penpot is written in Clojure and ClojureScript, but the average user won't care about that. But will also be interesting to see if they'll be able to keep iterating at the same speed as they currently are, and how the language will affect it.