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Martin believes everyone should have access to free quality software.
Thanks so much🙏
OMS! He looks awesome. Totally someone I could see hanging at a con with.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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HMS represent. Fuck the republican traitor filth.
inkscape is great, I use it all the time
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.
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.
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I like his hat.
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.
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
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.
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Open source software does not cause a loss of $ it causes everyone else gain.
I made nearly all the 2D assets in my game with Inkscape. It wouldn't have been possible without it.
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'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.
- Inkscape is awesome
- Much like Gimp, Inkscape is not at all a competitor to the adobe suite if you are a professional
- A hobbyist using hobbyist software is not loss of money for The most feature rich professional oriented software out there
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.
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.
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.
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 bought a lottery ticket and didn't win. I lost 50 millions dollars!"
- adobe
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.
Just put in your credit card for the 7 day trial! Totally easy to cancel, pinky promise
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Companies talk about lesser earnings as losses all the time.
And they're wrong all the time
Certainly!
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This guy is a hero. Inkscape is so much better than Adobe. Also, I couldn't have done some recent PDF to AutoCad conversions without that software. Autocad chokes on pulling vectors out of PDFs for some reason. It does it, but it is a mess. The bad thing is I know it could do better because if you just pull in the same PDF that it struggled with as an external source, it renders it fine, including all the vector information. I could be doing something wrong, but it shouldn't be that hard.