1810
You are a hero
Nice. Anyone who takes money from Adobe is a hero to me.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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Thank you, Mr. Owens. From the bottom of my heart. InkScape is my favourite graphics tool.
Is Mr Owens British perchance?
I've designed banners and flags in Inkscape, convention signage, even electoral campaign materials like business cards, handcards, campaign signs. A great tool
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.
those dollars were not adobe's to lose but users' to save
This is the heart of the matter. You can't lose what you never had.
Kudos to Mr. Owens and all Inkscape developers. Inkscape is a masterpiece.
Hitchhikers Guide on the bookshelf, nice.
He's a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.
I see Pratchett, Making Money up there, too. I like this guy.
Making Money, the best Moist Von Lipwig book. Even better.
I urge you to watch his update videos, he's such a neat guy, and he rocks a ska/dandy style
Not all heroes wear capes.
Some wear bowler hats
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.
Just put in your credit card for the 7 day trial! Totally easy to cancel, pinky promise
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 bought a lottery ticket and didn't win. I lost 50 millions dollars!"
- adobe
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.
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.
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Inkscape is goated and so is Martin, respect 🫡
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.
Bingo! I doubled the amount of business I was doing with my side-hustle PC repair by doubling my price. Also, my customers weren't such a pain in the ass.
I don't use Inkscape, but that is a good hat.
Inkscape user here. Thanks Martin!
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.
Have you tried LibreOffice Draw? I love it for that same reason.
I have, but in general I find Inkscape to be superior overall. The last time I tried the LibreOffice component it did not handle multiple pages very well.
I fucking loved Corel, I've never really found an adequate replacement for it. Guess I'll be giving InkScape a try, thanks
I had no idea Inkscape could work with PDFs like that. Thank you!
I've always used LibreOffice for that purpose. It's more familiar if you're used to office software vs graphics design software.
Just don't try it with a 60MB+, 200 page+ file.
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Open source software does not cause a loss of $ it causes everyone else gain.
Hadn’t heard of it. Will download later.
Looks like a great guy. I use inkscape when I need nice looking graphics at home for all sorts of things. I've never paid a lot of attention at the names on the about page. Meeting him like this on a photo is pretty cool!
Nice to meet you unilaterally Mr Martin. Thank you!
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