3 ms·

> Same will happen for graphic designers. I'm not so sure about that, I know quite a few graphic designers who've either reverted to the pirating ways of their

> Same will happen for graphic designers. I'm not so sure about that, I know quite a few graphic designers who've either reverted to the pirating ways of their youthful years, many years ago - or have moved over to Affinity's offerings. The latter's still a bit rough around the edge - I can't work with Designer (I've been using Illustrator for too many decades to), but I've stopped paying for old rope and nixed my once-beloved Photoshop as it's frankly a waste of cash. Affinity Photo's got some quirks and has a wholly different workflow that I struggle with, but it does the trick in the end.

zippergz 4y ago
The point is, if Affinity gets too good or competitive, Adobe will acquire them too.
- detritus 4y ago
  But they're a British company! British companies NEVER sell out to forei... oh.
- quest88 4y ago
  Let's reword it: The founders may want a payout and sell to Adobe too.
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  This kinda highlights the real solution. Instead of investing in a product which will eventually get bought up by some monopoly and used to hold the users hostage, people should be donating to FOSS tools and/or paying for support contracts with FOSS companies. Eventually the FOSS alternative becomes competitive and then outright better. It happened quickly in the SW space given that SWEs could dogfood the tools but it's slowly happening in almost every other industry as well. Blender is probably the best example while Krita (raster drawing), QGIS(GIS), Qflow(HDL synthesis tooling collection), FreeCAD(2D/3D CAD), KiCAD(EDA), Darktable(RAW editor, photography tooling) and Ardour (Audio mixer and nonlinear editor) are all catching up in their various spaces. And there's a reasonable chance that some industries won't be able to develop their own FOSS tooling for whatever reason. In those cases it may be worthwhile for governments to step in and fund open source tooling (like the EU does) to protect their industries from the whims of a foreign company.
mynameisvlad 4y ago
As an amateur who didn’t have extensive use of Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign, Designer/Photos/Publisher have been godsends. Relatively cheap, quality usable software. Could not praise Serif enough for what they’ve done. I gladly paid the license on Mac and windows.

zippergz 4y ago

The point is, if Affinity gets too good or competitive, Adobe will acquire them too.

detritus 4y ago
But they're a British company! British companies NEVER sell out to forei... oh.
quest88 4y ago
Let's reword it: The founders may want a payout and sell to Adobe too.
CuriousCosmic 4y ago
This kinda highlights the real solution. Instead of investing in a product which will eventually get bought up by some monopoly and used to hold the users hostage, people should be donating to FOSS tools and/or paying for support contracts with FOSS companies. Eventually the FOSS alternative becomes competitive and then outright better. It happened quickly in the SW space given that SWEs could dogfood the tools but it's slowly happening in almost every other industry as well. Blender is probably the best example while Krita (raster drawing), QGIS(GIS), Qflow(HDL synthesis tooling collection), FreeCAD(2D/3D CAD), KiCAD(EDA), Darktable(RAW editor, photography tooling) and Ardour (Audio mixer and nonlinear editor) are all catching up in their various spaces. And there's a reasonable chance that some industries won't be able to develop their own FOSS tooling for whatever reason. In those cases it may be worthwhile for governments to step in and fund open source tooling (like the EU does) to protect their industries from the whims of a foreign company.

mynameisvlad 4y ago

As an amateur who didn’t have extensive use of Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign, Designer/Photos/Publisher have been godsends. Relatively cheap, quality usable software. Could not praise Serif enough for what they’ve done. I gladly paid the license on Mac and windows.