This is Martin Owens. He is a leading developer of Inkscape, a free open-source vector graphics editor. Adobe has lost millions of dollars because of his work. Thank you Martin 🫡

for me, anyway, they didn't lose money because if i couldn't pirate it, I just wouldn't watch. I'm told this is a common thought process

Not the gotcha you think it is. They said competitors, piracy makes them use your own product and not pay you for it.

Would a kid buy photoshop if they had to? Probably not. Would a sketchy company? Yup.

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...

And they're wrong all the time

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.

I use both Corel and Illustrator for work but I'm very much more "fluent" with Illustrator. I'd say they have a bit different focus. While I hate Adobe with a passion, I'd say Illustrator is a lot better. My co-worker who works with large format printing, likes Corel more.

No idea, unfortunately. I have not touched any of the professional Adobe products in any detail since abandoning Premiere Pro back in probably around 2009. I briefly dabbled with a pirated version of Illustrator when I first got my X1 Yoga and discovered that it did not work correctly with the inbuilt stylus, full stop, and I abandoned it on the spot. I haven't looked back since.

I did not choose the Corel suite on purpose at the beginning but when I was starting out working professionally it's what the company worked for used in house, and I've stuck with it ever since due to CorelDraw and PhotoPaint doing everything I need and my continued familiarity with it. From what I understand Illustrator is more complex and for that reason some people insist it's more "powerful," but I suspect that really just means it's more byzantine and harder to use. I've never not been able to do anything I needed to do with the Corel suite, except:

CorelDraw is to this day useless for editing .pdfs. Which is pretty damn rich for a professional graphics editing suite that costs $400 for a full license. I mean, it can, insofar as the file open and import dialogs will let you choose and load one, but it basically never works right and tends to produce a broken mess. Somehow Inkscape always works for me. So I have a copy of it around on all my machines alongside Corel, for those instances where I need to tweak or extract something from a .pdf and whoever gave it to me won't provide the source.

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.

At my old job we used Macs for two reasons: Preview and Outlook on MacOS. I know it sounds silly to people who don’t have to work with email or pdf’s as much as I had to, but it was absolutely the right call for the work we had to do.

Also, depending on your use case it’s crazy how much worse Outlook is on Windows. Local indexing is far worse on Windows, and trying to search a big mailbox brings the app to its knees.

or pdfarranger works well, too.

• bowler hat
• face that works with a bowler hat
• window with view of nature
• healthy looking indoor plant
• awesome book collection
• sweater of medical higher education he is obviously proud about.
• intact and healthy conscious (presumably)

This guy is rich as fuck. No wonder the billionaire class is so pissed.

I really do like OSS, but I have to say this train of thought isn't particularly helpful. Especially in professional and prosumer software that just doesn't cut it. If the free version is worse, then it's not the version you want to use. The end reseult ends up being that cheaper but proprietary software like Affinity's suite or DaVinci Resolve catch up, become dominant and the cycle of enshittification starts anew.

Instead of naively making disingenuous arguments about existing alternatives I'd be more concerned with figuring out ways of getting OSS to keep up with the joneses. I'm often less excited about a solo dev doing "freeway out of the kindness of his heart" and more interested in seeing OSS software gather around a foundation scheme with some corporate sponsors, Blender-style

Right now, there are 79 people on the Inkscape source code project. One would think that 79 people are more than enough to create a good software in 22 years.

You have the right to have an opinion.

Well thank you, that's generous.

Also, your opinion have zero value for others.

Thank you for your valuable opinion about my opinion.

No argumentation, no reasons, just : inskape is worse than X.

Worse to use. The UI is a mess, the application is slow and last time I checked, it crashed more often than not (at least on Windows).

"It's free" does not mean "it can't be improved".