5 ms·

The cycle begins again.

by throwaway1777 4y ago

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.
- lol768 4y ago
  > 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. Doesn't matter - it's an open source app, I can clone it and run it on-prem or locally (and I already have - and opened a PR!). FLOSS simply eliminates a great deal of SaaS risk. They can delete their repo tomorrow, go full-proprietary, sell out to the highest bidder, get taken over by Adobe. None of it matters, I can still work on my designs.
  - joecot 4y ago
    Open source is only part of the equation. The other part is having maintainers and community. Being able to fork it is great, but if there's no community fixing bugs, if there's no security fixes, if there are no improvements, if the main product changes drastically from the open source version and the files are not compatible in between, there are serious problems. Many open source products stagnate and die, whether or not they were popular, when the company is no longer involved. Community is not automatic or instant.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Until they change their license from FOSS to something source available or proprietary like many OSS projects are doing these days. If it's successful, it won't be open source for long.
    - DesiLurker 4y ago
      Yes thats true, however, it also means the baseline features till the lockdown were open sourced & are secured for public. Now they have to value add over those. this process is slow but surely moves more basic/hardened stuff to public domain so should reduce rent-seeking behavior. if nothing else it will make likes of adobe to keep shelling out cash to squash any existential risks like figma. I'll take that. The only really evil things can come from the likes of google anti-fragmentation agreement where essentially you are marked with a Scarlett letter if you didn't go all-in into google proprietary ecosystem. But we have FCC to protect us from that, right?
devteambravo 4y ago
I'm sure they won't get acquired

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.

lol768 4y ago
> 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. Doesn't matter - it's an open source app, I can clone it and run it on-prem or locally (and I already have - and opened a PR!). FLOSS simply eliminates a great deal of SaaS risk. They can delete their repo tomorrow, go full-proprietary, sell out to the highest bidder, get taken over by Adobe. None of it matters, I can still work on my designs.
- joecot 4y ago
  Open source is only part of the equation. The other part is having maintainers and community. Being able to fork it is great, but if there's no community fixing bugs, if there's no security fixes, if there are no improvements, if the main product changes drastically from the open source version and the files are not compatible in between, there are serious problems. Many open source products stagnate and die, whether or not they were popular, when the company is no longer involved. Community is not automatic or instant.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Until they change their license from FOSS to something source available or proprietary like many OSS projects are doing these days. If it's successful, it won't be open source for long.
  - DesiLurker 4y ago
    Yes thats true, however, it also means the baseline features till the lockdown were open sourced & are secured for public. Now they have to value add over those. this process is slow but surely moves more basic/hardened stuff to public domain so should reduce rent-seeking behavior. if nothing else it will make likes of adobe to keep shelling out cash to squash any existential risks like figma. I'll take that. The only really evil things can come from the likes of google anti-fragmentation agreement where essentially you are marked with a Scarlett letter if you didn't go all-in into google proprietary ecosystem. But we have FCC to protect us from that, right?

devteambravo 4y ago

I'm sure they won't get acquired