7 ms·

Penpot, Open Source Figma alternative, raises $8M in funding

567 points by simulo 4y ago

rvz 4y ago
Here comes the same VC scam again. Like what happened to Keybase, also what happened to Bitwarden and is now happening to Penpot. With all of this, it will just end up just like Keybase as investors will race for an exit.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Bitwarden is still okay.
- devteambravo 4y ago
  What are you using instead of Bitwarden?
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I use KeePassXC, with Seafile (paid hosting, not my own server) for syncing my database across devices.
  - number6 4y ago
    Vaultwarden
- lbotos 4y ago
  I'm sorry, what? Why is this a "VC Scam?" A competitor just got aquired for $$ and a startup raised funds to attempt to compete in the space. I don't see anything here that looks like a "scam" to me. Keybase as an idea was much more pie in the sky vs. "an open source figma clone".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rchaud 4y ago
    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.
- rapnie 4y ago
  Is Bitwarden a recent event? I planned to take a paid subscription, but this may withold me from doing so.
- skyfaller 4y ago
  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/ 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."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dharma1 4y ago
Tried it - pretty straight up Figma clone - doesn't feel as polished but it's not bad. Nice addition to open source design tools. Would be great to be able to import .fig files
- simulo 4y ago
  They announced that an import for figma files will be added soon: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563
- __d 4y ago
  So you can finally migrate off Xfig?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shishy 4y ago
> 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?
- marapuru 4y ago
  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.
  - shishy 4y ago
    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.
devonnull 4y ago
That's impressive growth. I just hope that Penpot can quickly scale to support such sudden growth.
ricardobeat 4y ago
Whats the end game? Doesn’t taking VC money spell a similar ending to Figma (acquisition)?
- jacooper 4y ago
  Well at least its fully open source
  - rapnie 4y ago
    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.
    - jacooper 4y ago
      SASS is the way to go for almost every FOSS startup
  - jahewson 4y ago
    For now.
- atoav 4y ago
  What is the end game for e.g. the Blender Foundation? Looking back on a crazy good software project when the Nuclear war starts?
  - Pulcinella 4y ago
    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!)
throwaway1777 4y ago
The cycle begins again.
- equilibrium 4y ago
  Which cycle are you referring to exactly?
  - 0x457 4y ago
    - Company X makes a product - Product become popular - Company X takes VC money/get aquired - Company Y makes an alternative product that is cheaper and maybe Open Source - Company X makes product worse due - People switch to product from company Y - Now repeat everything, but Company Y is now Company X. Not long ago, Figma was Company Y in this cycle.
    - dskrvk 4y ago
      A few years later: “Sparky, Open Source Penpot alternative, raises $128M in funding”
    - diacritica 4y ago
      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!
      - 0x457 4y ago
        I mean...no one is implying that those two are related. The point is that this is the cycle.
- joecot 4y ago
  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.
mritchie712 4y ago
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.
- Zealotux 4y ago
  I care much more about Adobe's ability to destroy products' quality than prices really.
  - mritchie712 4y ago
    yep, that's coming too!
- caloique 4y ago
  Pricing is one aspect, but OSS solutions bring community and a level of transparency that most closed source companies don't.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Until the VCs turn the screws and they don't anymore.
    - arvonle 4y ago
      If that happens, fork. It's (literally) free.
      - hbn 4y ago
        Does that ever work in practice? Has there been a standard fork of Audacity that everyone flocked to since they got purchased by Muse?
        capableweb 4y ago
costcofries 4y ago
Future Webex (Cisco) acquisition, said it here first!
- nerdponx 4y ago
  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.
  - jansan 4y ago
    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.
  - rvz 4y ago
    Cisco will probably buy Penpot and maintain it the same way after how Zoom bought Keybase. Microsoft will just buy Lunacy instead [0]. [0] https://icons8.com/lunacy https://icons8.com/lunacy
  - diacritica 4y ago
    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.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      LOL, that's encouraging! Better keep those VCs at a safe distance!
    - romeoblade 4y ago
      Crap, now I'm positive I shouldn't have gotten rid of my AOL coaster collection.
pen2l 4y ago
The folks behind Penpot also make a kanban management tool, kind of like Trello, called Taiga: http://taiga.io/ 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.
- debacle 4y ago
  We just switched to Taiga for our task management platform. It's enjoyable to use, opinionated but just a little, and works great out of the box. As an aside, does anyone know what software this page is running: https://community.penpot.app/ https://community.penpot.app/ It looks like a taiga plugin but I don't know what it's called.
  - pen2l 4y ago
    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.
    - rapnie 4y ago
      I agree. I use many different Discourse forums, and this one annoying to scroll through the list of latest topics because of that.
tbatchelli 4y ago
This project is mostly ClojureScript. That's quite of an endorsement of the clojure ecosystem.
- b0afc375b5 4y ago
  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/ 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.
  - swyx 4y ago
    > After trying out Typescript and Svelte, I think I want to go all in on ClojureScript. ouchhh what a burn haha
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      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.
  - getcrunk 4y ago
    Yea what's the tldr on clojurescript
    - b0afc375b5 4y ago
      My tldr would be: - simple (lisp) syntax - immutability - 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. NOTE have not finished the book yet.
  - 4y ago
throwthisbro1 4y ago
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.
- s1mon 4y ago
  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.
  - no_circuit 4y ago
    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. [1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6388102?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6388102?hl=en&co=GENI... [2] https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-new-google-docs_22.html https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-n...
petercooper 4y ago
As an aside, that is a really nicely skinned Discourse instance. I had to view source to double check it even was Discourse.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  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.
  - petercooper 4y ago
    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(!))
    - WaffleIronMaker 4y ago
      Link to original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33009657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33009657 Link to Discourse post: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563
- diacritica 4y ago
  Thanks! That was the work of Juan de la Cruz, one of the Penpot UI designers!
o0-0o 4y ago
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.
- pixxel 4y ago
  How many users has Figma taken from Adobe? Perhaps that’s the 20 billion dollar question.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    Enough that I had to use it via Fiverr projects to Enterpise in-house projects.
js4ever 4y ago
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.
karaterobot 4y ago
This is great news, congrats to Penpot! 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.
Tostiman 4y ago
flanbiscuit 4y ago
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7D0tSNmEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7D0tSNmEg
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- monkin 4y ago
  There’s nothing there that would tell how it compares to Figma.
thrillgore 4y ago
Is it gonna stay open source, though?
- simulo 4y ago
  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.
  - marapuru 4y ago
    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.
    - MisterSandman 4y ago
      Then the version that was last open-source would be spinned off and worked on by others in the community.
Kukumber 4y ago
What a mistake, they should have setup a developer fund VC funding = it'll become Figma
- erikpukinskis 4y ago
  What’s a developer fund?
SSLy 4y ago
Because you can't read it because of their broken "consent" intersitial https://archive.ph/0ekuT https://archive.ph/0ekuT
jjcm 4y ago
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.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  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.
  - LightG 4y ago
    Annoying, ganky UI's don't just build themselves, ya know.
  - jjcm 4y ago
    It's pretty easy actually! Take a look at this page for just a button component: https://i.imgur.com/TodWS0r.png https://i.imgur.com/TodWS0r.png 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 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 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.
iamwil 4y ago
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.
- MisterSandman 4y ago
  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.
swyx 4y ago
> 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%. wow. check out their growth https://star-history.com/#penpot/penpot&Date https://star-history.com/#penpot/penpot&Date
rikroots 4y ago
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 https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/2195

567 points by simulo 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

Here comes the same VC scam again. Like what happened to Keybase, also what happened to Bitwarden and is now happening to Penpot. With all of this, it will just end up just like Keybase as investors will race for an exit.

jacooper 4y ago
Bitwarden is still okay.
devteambravo 4y ago
What are you using instead of Bitwarden?
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I use KeePassXC, with Seafile (paid hosting, not my own server) for syncing my database across devices.
- number6 4y ago
  Vaultwarden
lbotos 4y ago
I'm sorry, what? Why is this a "VC Scam?" A competitor just got aquired for $$ and a startup raised funds to attempt to compete in the space. I don't see anything here that looks like a "scam" to me. Keybase as an idea was much more pie in the sky vs. "an open source figma clone".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 4y ago
  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.
rapnie 4y ago
Is Bitwarden a recent event? I planned to take a paid subscription, but this may withold me from doing so.
skyfaller 4y ago
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/ 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."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dharma1 4y ago

Tried it - pretty straight up Figma clone - doesn't feel as polished but it's not bad. Nice addition to open source design tools. Would be great to be able to import .fig files

simulo 4y ago
They announced that an import for figma files will be added soon: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563
__d 4y ago
So you can finally migrate off Xfig?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shishy 4y ago

> 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?

marapuru 4y ago
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.
- shishy 4y ago
  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.

devonnull 4y ago

That's impressive growth. I just hope that Penpot can quickly scale to support such sudden growth.

ricardobeat 4y ago

Whats the end game? Doesn’t taking VC money spell a similar ending to Figma (acquisition)?

jacooper 4y ago
Well at least its fully open source
- rapnie 4y ago
  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.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    SASS is the way to go for almost every FOSS startup
- jahewson 4y ago
  For now.
atoav 4y ago
What is the end game for e.g. the Blender Foundation? Looking back on a crazy good software project when the Nuclear war starts?
- Pulcinella 4y ago
  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!)

throwaway1777 4y ago

The cycle begins again.

equilibrium 4y ago
Which cycle are you referring to exactly?
- 0x457 4y ago
  - Company X makes a product - Product become popular - Company X takes VC money/get aquired - Company Y makes an alternative product that is cheaper and maybe Open Source - Company X makes product worse due - People switch to product from company Y - Now repeat everything, but Company Y is now Company X. Not long ago, Figma was Company Y in this cycle.
  - dskrvk 4y ago
    A few years later: “Sparky, Open Source Penpot alternative, raises $128M in funding”
  - diacritica 4y ago
    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!
    - 0x457 4y ago
      I mean...no one is implying that those two are related. The point is that this is the cycle.
joecot 4y ago
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.

mritchie712 4y ago

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.

Zealotux 4y ago
I care much more about Adobe's ability to destroy products' quality than prices really.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  yep, that's coming too!
caloique 4y ago
Pricing is one aspect, but OSS solutions bring community and a level of transparency that most closed source companies don't.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Until the VCs turn the screws and they don't anymore.
  - arvonle 4y ago
    If that happens, fork. It's (literally) free.
    - hbn 4y ago
      Does that ever work in practice? Has there been a standard fork of Audacity that everyone flocked to since they got purchased by Muse?
      - capableweb 4y ago

costcofries 4y ago

Future Webex (Cisco) acquisition, said it here first!

nerdponx 4y ago
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.
- jansan 4y ago
  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.
- rvz 4y ago
  Cisco will probably buy Penpot and maintain it the same way after how Zoom bought Keybase. Microsoft will just buy Lunacy instead [0]. [0] https://icons8.com/lunacy https://icons8.com/lunacy
- diacritica 4y ago
  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.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    LOL, that's encouraging! Better keep those VCs at a safe distance!
  - romeoblade 4y ago
    Crap, now I'm positive I shouldn't have gotten rid of my AOL coaster collection.

pen2l 4y ago

The folks behind Penpot also make a kanban management tool, kind of like Trello, called Taiga: http://taiga.io/ 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.

debacle 4y ago
We just switched to Taiga for our task management platform. It's enjoyable to use, opinionated but just a little, and works great out of the box. As an aside, does anyone know what software this page is running: https://community.penpot.app/ https://community.penpot.app/ It looks like a taiga plugin but I don't know what it's called.
- pen2l 4y ago
  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.
  - rapnie 4y ago
    I agree. I use many different Discourse forums, and this one annoying to scroll through the list of latest topics because of that.

tbatchelli 4y ago

This project is mostly ClojureScript. That's quite of an endorsement of the clojure ecosystem.

b0afc375b5 4y ago
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/ 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.
- swyx 4y ago
  > After trying out Typescript and Svelte, I think I want to go all in on ClojureScript. ouchhh what a burn haha
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    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.
- getcrunk 4y ago
  Yea what's the tldr on clojurescript
  - b0afc375b5 4y ago
    My tldr would be: - simple (lisp) syntax - immutability - 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. NOTE have not finished the book yet.
- 4y ago

throwthisbro1 4y ago

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.

s1mon 4y ago
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.
- no_circuit 4y ago
  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. [1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6388102?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6388102?hl=en&co=GENI... [2] https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-new-google-docs_22.html https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-n...

petercooper 4y ago

As an aside, that is a really nicely skinned Discourse instance. I had to view source to double check it even was Discourse.

nerdponx 4y ago
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.
- petercooper 4y ago
  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(!))
  - WaffleIronMaker 4y ago
    Link to original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33009657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33009657 Link to Discourse post: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563
diacritica 4y ago
Thanks! That was the work of Juan de la Cruz, one of the Penpot UI designers!

o0-0o 4y ago

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.

pixxel 4y ago
How many users has Figma taken from Adobe? Perhaps that’s the 20 billion dollar question.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  Enough that I had to use it via Fiverr projects to Enterpise in-house projects.

js4ever 4y ago

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.

karaterobot 4y ago

This is great news, congrats to Penpot! 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.

Tostiman 4y ago

flanbiscuit 4y ago

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7D0tSNmEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7D0tSNmEg

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
monkin 4y ago
There’s nothing there that would tell how it compares to Figma.

thrillgore 4y ago

Is it gonna stay open source, though?

simulo 4y ago
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.
- marapuru 4y ago
  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.
  - MisterSandman 4y ago
    Then the version that was last open-source would be spinned off and worked on by others in the community.

Kukumber 4y ago

What a mistake, they should have setup a developer fund VC funding = it'll become Figma

erikpukinskis 4y ago
What’s a developer fund?

SSLy 4y ago

Because you can't read it because of their broken "consent" intersitial https://archive.ph/0ekuT https://archive.ph/0ekuT

jjcm 4y ago

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.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago
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.
- LightG 4y ago
  Annoying, ganky UI's don't just build themselves, ya know.
- jjcm 4y ago
  It's pretty easy actually! Take a look at this page for just a button component: https://i.imgur.com/TodWS0r.png https://i.imgur.com/TodWS0r.png 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 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 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.

iamwil 4y ago

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.

MisterSandman 4y ago
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.

swyx 4y ago

> 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%. wow. check out their growth https://star-history.com/#penpot/penpot&Date https://star-history.com/#penpot/penpot&Date

rikroots 4y ago

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 https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/2195