Krita fund has no corporate support • Hacker News Board

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#91

Post by cornholio » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

orlandohill wrote: post #60

cornholio wrote: post #30

This type of software is an excellent fit for "eventually open" licenses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492 This way, corporations and business users can pay to get the latest version and features just like commercial software, while the hobbyist community still gets a relative recent and feature-full release they can use for free, has source available and is guaranteed to become fully GPL code in 3-5 yea…

Another approach is to allow free non-commercial use, and to charge for commercial licenses. There are licenses that grant all the rights that non-commercial users want, but still require businesses to pay. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/ https://prosperitylicense.com/

But that's no longer open source, and offers no protection to the users against lock in. All it takes is some change of leadership or VC funding and the permissive license will be abandoned in favor of a proprietary revenue-maximizing model. Human nature and all.

What is needed is a non-repudiable commitment from the vendor that the software will be fully open source, and a business incentive for them to continue developing the commercial version; they have a few years to monetize any new features, and to continue making money they need to continue bugfixing and creating other desirable new features, as opposed to just milking the lock-in cow.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#92

Post by danjc » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:47 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #18

I'm migrating from Krita to Photoshop lately. Don't get me wrong, I love Krita. I used it for years and I wrote ~30+ bug reports. It's a positive thing -- I won't bother reporting bugs to Adobe cause I know they don't care, unlike Krita devs. However every time I need to collaborate with someone else, they use Photoshop. They use .psd like it's an interchangeable format[1]. Out of 10+ artists I've only seen one who d…

Seems that a near-perfect psd import/export would be the killer feature that enables it to compete with Photoshop. That would be huge.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#93

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:48 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #74

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tons of European startups and scaleups and mittelstands and b2b companies of all sizes that are successful and innovative. They're just not "infinite growth" global behemots If their business has no economies of scale, no. If it does, they won’t survive without subsidies. At a certain point, subsidising a low-scale domestic replica of an efficient international option breaks due to (a) the internet and consumer cho…

There are a lot of businesses that are great for a small shop and will make a lot of money, but they have no potential to grow larger. Those businesses are not a domestic replica of some efficient international option as there never will be an international option. If you to become a billionaire you have to start one of those international businesses, but if you are content with a million you can get that on a much s…

> lot of businesses that are great for a small shop and will make a lot of money, but they have no potential to grow larger

You’re describing businesses without economies of scale. They can compete simply by being local.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#94

Post by numpad0 » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:51 PM UTC

dmw_ng wrote: post #45

numpad0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's what it's for. Same story as Photoshop and GIMP splash screens.

I didn't think you meant that literally, but after paging through a few tens of google image search results for "krita samples", it seems the only thing Krita is actually used by people for is fantasy art. Compare to "corel painter samples" where the 2nd thumbnail is a fairly impressive Audrey Hepburn rendition Can't remember the last time I saw output of the style from the first search result being used to sell pret…

In case my comment sounded a bit harsh, no offense intended && taken at my side - I mean, it's an industry of its own and a rapidly exploding one, so there are enough reasons couple lesser known industry standard software exists.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#95

Post by footlose_3815 » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:52 PM UTC

If their text editor wasn't a UX disaster, I'd have moved to Krita. It's so bad and it drags down the whole program. The devs acknowledge it's not great, but have not done anything to make it good enough.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#96

Post by sofixa » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:55 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51

sofixa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to produce anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what the underlying reason for that is. There isn't a singular reason, it's a complex combination. Btw I'd like to preface this to say I'm not sure most Europeans actually want a Google or a Meta, there is aversion to "too big to fail" companies in most sectors. * investment money - VCs bet on tons of stupid thing…

> tons of European startups and scaleups and mittelstands and b2b companies of all sizes that are successful and innovative. They're just not "infinite growth" global behemots If their business has no economies of scale, no. If it does, they won’t survive without subsidies. At a certain point, subsidising a low-scale domestic replica of an efficient international option breaks due to (a) the internet and consumer cho…

If the market was theoretical and all things were absolutely equal, yes, maybe, but that's not how things work in the real world.

For a good example, Walmart failed miserably in Germany because they failed to understand the local market in any way. You can have a successful regional chain of supermarkets without it needing to become Walmart-scale. Just being local, having a strong local presence and understanding of the market, and having local costs can be a massive advantage. A Bulgarian startup has economies of local labour costs that can trump the economies of scale of Google. Spotify are quite successful even if their competitors (Apple, Google, Amazon) are massive. Not to mention there are big market segments where economies of scale across markets simply do not apply. Legalstart, a startup doing "law services online" for small and medium enterprises in France cannot apply pretty much anything to any other country due to the different legal systems. If there was some massive behemoth in that space globally, Legalstart still wouldn't have an "economies of scale" disadvantage.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#97

Post by phone8675309 » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:56 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #71

phone8675309 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but I bet if you contact them that they can give you one.

But then you have to waste a salesguy's time generating a quote for a product that I'm not likely to purchase. I hate doing that. I'm basically stealing from them just because I'm trying to shop around for the best product. I'm calling salesguys and giving all of them my information and getting several different quotes, but I'm only going to execute on one of them. And now they're spamming my inbox every time their c…

So you'd rather someone else subject themselves to that for your own benefit than do it yourself?

Seems kind of selfish, does it not?

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#98

Post by chpatrick » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:56 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #71

phone8675309 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but I bet if you contact them that they can give you one.

But then you have to waste a salesguy's time generating a quote for a product that I'm not likely to purchase. I hate doing that. I'm basically stealing from them just because I'm trying to shop around for the best product. I'm calling salesguys and giving all of them my information and getting several different quotes, but I'm only going to execute on one of them. And now they're spamming my inbox every time their c…

The reason they make you do this is because different companies pay orders of magnitude different amounts for services like this.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#99

Post by jandrese » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:56 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #88

jandrese wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you have to waste a salesguy's time generating a quote for a product that I'm not likely to purchase. I hate doing that. I'm basically stealing from them just because I'm trying to shop around for the best product. I'm calling salesguys and giving all of them my information and getting several different quotes, but I'm only going to execute on one of them. And now they're spamming my inbox every time their c…

1) Use a throwaway email for that quote 2) Write up what you want, and email ALL the companies you want a quote from... CCing them all in the same email. Make sure to indicate a close date for them "and all other possible bidders" to submit by. Now they all know who their competitors are, AND, they know there could be other, extra competitors, AND they know to price as competitively as possible. The sales people at t…

I wonder if this is one reason many companies have web forms to request the quote. So you can't mass email for them.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#100

Post by miniupuchaty » Thu, Oct 05, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

masukomi wrote: post #13

scrpl wrote: post #2

That's just sad. Open Source support really needs to be normalized in corporate environment. Now it's more of an exception than the rule.

I agree, but in this particular case i have to ask... how many companies are actually USING Krita? My impression is that the vast majority of places that need software like that use Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator, or Affinity Photo/Designer.

I see it used by concept-art artists in gamedev studios from time to time.