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Sounds like they have a interesting history behind the creation of Penpot:
> Penpot was (effectively) born in a Kaleidos personal innovation week (PIWEEK, aka recurring hackathon) in 2018. Back then we had been recently forced to break one of our sacred rules at the company “only open source tools and platforms are allowed to build technology” due to F1gm4’s overwhelmingly productivity boost for designers at the company. “We are second-class citizens in open source, it’s frustrating and it’s painful!” they cried, and they were right.
https://kaleidos.net/ seems like an interesting place to work as well.
Gonna be exciting to see where Penpot moves from here. I'm a 100% Figma user who just signed up for Penpot and gonna see if it's possible to adopt for my own workflows.
Particularly interesting for me as a Clojure/Script developer is that Penpot is written in Clojure and ClojureScript, but the average user won't care about that. But will also be interesting to see if they'll be able to keep iterating at the same speed as they currently are, and how the language will affect it.
I don't see how Clojurescript is a good thing here, it's probably the most inefficient and with the most overhead of all the compile to JS languages (with out talking too much about react with penpot uses), even highly optimized pure JS won't come anywhere near the performance of Figma's C++ engine. Yes, performance for this tools matters.
> kaleidos.net seems like an interesting place to work as well.
Yes they are, their culture and project portfolio is awesome.
This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
rough at the edges
That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
>It might be rough at the edges
Often it's not just "rough around the edges", but fully missing features that are necessary (or STRONGLY desired) for a regular professional's workflow
In biology almost nobody pays for software. A lot of it is really rough around the edges (I have to install and try to run some of it as part of my job).
It’s kinda interesting, most development is by grants and such, they don’t offer much in the way of support funding. A lot of development is fooling around taking output from a and making it work for b.
> Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available. There is no business continuity risk.
I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. There are many open source projects that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been looking for such a long time for someone else to take over because they don't have the time really means the library is just kinda existing.
There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even know that?
One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers complain about is people asking if their project is dead or not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained, when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead.
Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that they won't be maintaining it, etc.
It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at your own risk.
FOSS has risks too.
I'm excited to see alternatives to Figma, because using it is like an emotional rollercoaster for me. There are times when I'll open a massive project file with hundreds of frames, each with thousands of graphical nodes. And even then, I can zoom in and out with no friction at all, it's just buttery smooth. I've been a developer for over a decade, and I have no idea at all how they're able to pull that off. It's a technical marvel.
On the other hand, it's far from what I would want for a modern design tool. Managing tokens, or anything from the "design system" world, is an absolute headache. Compared to the efficiency of the dev tools I use, it feels like Figma (and every other design tool) is just light years behind.
Even when I use a tool that's built specifically for that purpose, like Supernova, I still feel pretty underwhelmed. I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, but I know that the current landscape doesn't cut it for me.
In 2015 one of the founders wrote a really interesting post about how they did it [0].
> Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser.
[0] https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
I'm exactly the same as you @danielvaughn.
I like Figma but everything in the design tools space feels like it light years behind dev tool. Particularly around anything to do with tokens.
Tokens are just variables. Ideally you should be able to reference one token with another token (ala variables) and NO DESIGN TOOL DOES THIS. It's maddening.
"I have no idea at all how they're able to pull that off"
Just 2D hashing. Wrote a viewer once for chip topology files [0].
Another great open source product from the company. Their open source project management software, Taiga (taiga.io), is a fantastic tool that I have used for several years. Feature-wise it’s the most matured software out there, and runs blazing fast.
Wow i hadn't heard of this and looks like the right solution for a particular need I have. Thanks a bunch for mentioning!
Checked Taiga, looks decent. On a side note glad to see your username pop up here. Where are you these days? Let's catch up.
I'm dismayed at the Figma news. I do not like Adobe. Hi PenPot, will be switching to you. I wish your name wasn't so close sounding to polpot.
It's really a fantastic tool, we are using it since several months in replacement of figma and Adobe XD. The prototype feature is working great as well.
Can you do auto layouts? And components like figma?
Well a good move on penpot would be to see how to get this figma file import [1] feature some resources, maybe even open a fundraising for this feature. I am pretty sure the general dismay would help gaining some momentum for any kind of funding.
Adobe trying to pay $20B dollars to buy a designer tool meanwhile I am still pushing in prod code I wrote using vim
Is it code for a designer tool that Adobe just paid $20B for?
Haha this. And now someone put copilot in vim.
If you want to ask questions, have feedback, Penpot recently started a community on this Discourse forum: https://community.penpot.app
holy bright pink, batman :-(
Shameless plug but I interviewed Pablo for my podcast https://flagsmith.com/podcast/pablo-muzquiz-penpot/
He's a mega interesting guy; it was a super fascinating 50 minutes of my life!
While I find it awesome to see Penpot getting some recognition right now, it is not at the point of being a Figma replacement just yet. But I'm very hopeful that it will eventually be. Once they get a plugin system implemented, I'll be recommending it to all my colleagues.
so, who has actually tried this and has anything to say about it? (besides the fact that is very funny to see it #2 with the sale of figma being #1)
I tried it!
Good:
- It is a good copy of figmas UI. With much open source software, it often seems the UI comes last in priority and interest; Penpot’s UI is well working and looks good. - Basic features are all there - The team has build an open source online platform before, so they know what they do.
Bad:
- In design systems particularly at variants and states of components, it is not on figma’s level yet
Interesting:
- You can self-deploy (cause open) or use their free instance - Front- and backend are written in clojure/clojure script
I love that FOSS exists and helps fight centralization and stagnation, but I worry that it will be seen as an example of competition. I have to wonder if this is one of the driving forces behind the epidemic of relicensing to be able to compete. If you can't seriously compete in a marketplace because the competition is overpowered, then taking some of the most popular FOSS solutions private and paid ends up being one of the only real ways to compete, and one of the only ways for those contributors to feel adequately compensated for their efforts.
I have to wonder if stricter antitrust could help push back against some of the erosion of FOSS licenses (IMO) that we've seen in recent years. The whole "build something to compete with X and get your exit by being acquired by X" strategy can't be long-term sustainable, can it?
I was just thinking that I should finally learn to use Figma, but now I think that I might as well learn PenPot, hopefully the recent news will make this open source tool grow (I didn't know it, for starters).
They seem to be working as a company. Does anyone know what their business model is? I'm interested in contributing but I want to know this before I do.
I am an avid Penpot convert, but from Sketch App, that I have been using since so many years now. I set up a system so we can install Penpot in no time self-hosted in house, including dns setup and ssl certificates. There are still some rough edges on Safari, such as text not displaying in place, so I may switch to Chrome or Brave for it.
I just wrote a blog post on how to install it here: https://blog.setip.io/foss-subscription-savings/
The fact they claim it’s the first open-source design tool demonstrates the ignorance they have for the craft. GIMP has been available as an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop for a while, supports more and popular programming languages, and yet, hasn’t supplanted Photoshop just because it is open source.
Penpot lacks the sophistication required from a design tool that’s difficult to notice if you’re not a designer working in these tools daily to do your job.
The open-source spirit for design isn’t unique to Penpot and won’t be enough to galvanize the design community into adopting it for everyday use. At best, it will be used by developers and product managers working on simple workflows for apps, but can’t withstand the demands required for designing sophisticated tools.
Maybe I’m using it wrong and it was never intended for this, but when I tried Penpot about a year ago, I had no way to export the diagram as one file like PDF or JPG. I could only export a layer. Did I miss something or am I not understanding what Penpot is for?
For people looking at this post in the future, here's why it's so funny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850178
How they pay the hosting and storage fees? What is the business model?
Interested in if anyone tried to self-host Penpot locally.
How was the speed/experience compared with using figma online?
Interesting choice in tech they are using, I wanted to contribute but I don't know any clojure or clojurescript.
Is there a FOSS version of webflow?
The biggest issue I see with this is that it is web-based. It should be decentralized and have a native desktop client. 70% of the world has crappy internet, and if your connection goes down you are sol.
I'm super excited about Penpot. It has a unique opportunity ahead to unite design and development workflows that I think very few people realize.
Looking forward to what's coming next!
Thank the lord. After the acquisition, this is definitely something I'm looking into.
Looks like you can self host with a docker container. That's very cool.
Can I import from figma?
Right in time to become a good option now that Adobe is trying to acquire Figma.
It doesn't have the network effect.
Folks seem to fail to realize that open source project fail when it comes to collaboration products, not because the tech is worse (many times the open source tech might be better), they fail because of the lack of network effects they have achieved.
This is why Slack/FB/Github flourish, while open source alternatives don't.
As usual, when money talks, we get FOSS posts with a subset of the capabilities of the real thing.
Naturally everyone will do donations to support the upstream development going forward.