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To expand on my motivation for open-sourcing Inkpad and Brushes: The biggest reason is the ideological element. For all the usual reasons, I’ve come to feel th
by ssprang 13y ago
To expand on my motivation for open-sourcing Inkpad and Brushes:
The biggest reason is the ideological element. For all the usual reasons, I’ve come to feel that software should be free/open-source. I feel really good now that these apps are free software. I can’t remember the last time I felt this happy to be working on them. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I can pursue other values in life besides dollars. Turns out I really like GitHub stars.
In addition to that, I experienced serious burnout after we spent a year (2012) rewriting Brushes to be a more modern iOS app. This was in response to Procreate which, in my opinion, blew all the existing painting apps out of the water. (Now that Brushes is open-source, I can feel free to compliment a competitor.)
Despite our own impression that we had radically improved Brushes with minimal UI changes, the update was poorly received by many existing users. At that point I essentially lost all motivation to pursue it as a business.
Ultimately, I decided that rather than letting the apps rot on the store, or trying to sell them to another developer, releasing the source code was the right thing to do. I’m hoping to collaborate with other developers, and keep Inkpad and Brushes alive as open-source projects for as long as there is interest.
- thomasjoulin 13y agoCongratulations. This is an amazing app (that I discovered only because you put the code on GitHub). And going through the code is very interesting. It's sad you went through burnout, but I can see why. Any chance you will blog a bit about the technical challenges you faced? There is quite a lot of code, I'm sure you have a lot to write about.
- smnrchrds 13y agoThank you for doing this. I wish all software were released as open-source at their end-of-life instead of just being abandoned. There are so many software I wish were available to the community: Opera, SkyOS, Classic Mac OS, etc.
- _random_ 13y agoA grain of salt: "I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I can pursue other values in life besides dollars" - all your competitors will be much less fortunate now, going free is a kind of price dumping. I wish all the $.99 => 80/20 game/app damage was undone...
- ssprang 13y agoI really doubt this will have much effect on any of the competing apps. Brushes was already downloadable for free (with an optional in-app purchase). Many other painting apps of various capability are available for free too. Perhaps more damage will be done in the vector space, where there's not a lot of money to be made in the first place... but I'd still be surprised if it puts anybody out of business. At any rate, I don't believe anyone is entitled to any particular business model. More people are better off with open-source software.
- calosa 13y agoThanks for posting this description. Good to understand the thinking behind your decision!