4 ms·

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 or

by 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?
    - joecot 4y ago
      Without a community, an open source code repository is text files you can use to run or compile an application. An open source project needs maintainers, active contributors, a roadmap, etc. Github is full of very popular open source projects that have been completely abandoned, and forks of those projects that are also abandoned. An open source project having maintainers after a company has abandoned it is not the default. Sometimes it happens because the company nurtured an open source community before abandoning it, sometimes it happens because the project is crucial enough it scratches enough itches to attract volunteers. Sometimes it happens out of spite. But those are exceptions, not the rule.
- jboy55 4y ago
  Well, you can work on it with the existing functionality, with the trust that everything that's hosted on Penpot is first released to the current version on Github. Eventually they will diverge though, and the source code will be a version behind what's on their site. At first the files will be backwards compatible, but soon there will be a must-have feature on the hosted site that will make files incompatible. Then the VC funding will dry up, the hosted site will become paid, and those features and backwards compatibility won't make it to the open sourced code since there won't be the resources to work on the community version. Now you will be stuck, your designs will require the paid software.
rvz 4y ago
> 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. Correct. They broke their promise as soon as they took VC money. Same with Keybase and same with Bitwarden. They cannot be trusted on their 'promises'. > 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. This. 'Open Source' is a marketing term and illusion which is 1/4 of the equation with it being hijacked for a different purpose. There is a possibility that there could be a private fork that has different features to the open source version. As soon as VCs get involved it is basically a race to the exit at all costs, even if they have to close or omit some features from the open-source version if they have to.
rglover 4y ago
Great articulation of the problem. Had to take a screenshot for when this inevitably comes up later.
diacritica 4y ago
One thing I didn't share on my community post here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 was how tough was to find the right VC for us. The conversations started back in Nov 2021 and we received a ton of calls from excited (yet misaligned) VCs. Being used to enjoy total freedom as an employee-owned consultancy company we would quickly turned down most of them because we did see this path that you're describing crisp clear in front of us. I think what is key for us here is that we, as a company, don't actually own the whole thing. That our open source license and a strong community lead us to a very successful business without having to revert to traditional playbooks. TBH, my biggest concern right now is not trying to convince you that you have to trust us, that would insult your intelligence. No, my biggest concern is how to create an open source community with both designers AND developers (I touch upon this here https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all-communities-are-created-equal-what-lies-ahead-for-penpot/103 https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all-communities-are-creat...). This is my personal dream and it has been since I sent $15 to the Free Blender Campaign in 2002 while still a Physics undergraduate. For all these years I thought someone else would create something like Penpot but it kept not happening and some us got a bit nervous, I guess. Thanks for your thoughtful post!
- joshmanders 4y ago
  The problem is that once you accept VC funding you are no longer doing it for the customers but for the shareholders. It doesn't matter what your end goal is, their end goal is to 10x or more their investment, full stop. Whatever you do that gets in the way of that will result in you being removed. So congrats on the funding I guess?
  - diacritica 4y ago
    I've made my professional career out of rejecting false dichotomies and I've made sure to be surrounded by like-minded people, they'd had to remove everyone I guess, including the community. I understand where you're coming from and all I can say at this point is that I also write comments like yours elsewhere.

by joecot 4y ago

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?
  - joecot 4y ago
    Without a community, an open source code repository is text files you can use to run or compile an application. An open source project needs maintainers, active contributors, a roadmap, etc. Github is full of very popular open source projects that have been completely abandoned, and forks of those projects that are also abandoned. An open source project having maintainers after a company has abandoned it is not the default. Sometimes it happens because the company nurtured an open source community before abandoning it, sometimes it happens because the project is crucial enough it scratches enough itches to attract volunteers. Sometimes it happens out of spite. But those are exceptions, not the rule.
jboy55 4y ago
Well, you can work on it with the existing functionality, with the trust that everything that's hosted on Penpot is first released to the current version on Github. Eventually they will diverge though, and the source code will be a version behind what's on their site. At first the files will be backwards compatible, but soon there will be a must-have feature on the hosted site that will make files incompatible. Then the VC funding will dry up, the hosted site will become paid, and those features and backwards compatibility won't make it to the open sourced code since there won't be the resources to work on the community version. Now you will be stuck, your designs will require the paid software.

rvz 4y ago

> 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. Correct. They broke their promise as soon as they took VC money. Same with Keybase and same with Bitwarden. They cannot be trusted on their 'promises'. > 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. This. 'Open Source' is a marketing term and illusion which is 1/4 of the equation with it being hijacked for a different purpose. There is a possibility that there could be a private fork that has different features to the open source version. As soon as VCs get involved it is basically a race to the exit at all costs, even if they have to close or omit some features from the open-source version if they have to.

rglover 4y ago

Great articulation of the problem. Had to take a screenshot for when this inevitably comes up later.

diacritica 4y ago

One thing I didn't share on my community post here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 was how tough was to find the right VC for us. The conversations started back in Nov 2021 and we received a ton of calls from excited (yet misaligned) VCs. Being used to enjoy total freedom as an employee-owned consultancy company we would quickly turned down most of them because we did see this path that you're describing crisp clear in front of us. I think what is key for us here is that we, as a company, don't actually own the whole thing. That our open source license and a strong community lead us to a very successful business without having to revert to traditional playbooks. TBH, my biggest concern right now is not trying to convince you that you have to trust us, that would insult your intelligence. No, my biggest concern is how to create an open source community with both designers AND developers (I touch upon this here https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all-communities-are-created-equal-what-lies-ahead-for-penpot/103 https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all-communities-are-creat...). This is my personal dream and it has been since I sent $15 to the Free Blender Campaign in 2002 while still a Physics undergraduate. For all these years I thought someone else would create something like Penpot but it kept not happening and some us got a bit nervous, I guess. Thanks for your thoughtful post!

joshmanders 4y ago
The problem is that once you accept VC funding you are no longer doing it for the customers but for the shareholders. It doesn't matter what your end goal is, their end goal is to 10x or more their investment, full stop. Whatever you do that gets in the way of that will result in you being removed. So congrats on the funding I guess?
- diacritica 4y ago
  I've made my professional career out of rejecting false dichotomies and I've made sure to be surrounded by like-minded people, they'd had to remove everyone I guess, including the community. I understand where you're coming from and all I can say at this point is that I also write comments like yours elsewhere.