By the Affinity and Canva Teams

An update from Affinity and Canva on the acquisition of Affinity/Serif by Canva. They have made 4 pledges, including to maintain perpetual licenses.

  • ProdigalFrogEnglish
    48•8 months ago

    The industry has shown us how they absolutely cannot be trusted, while FOSS applications have shown us they are sustainable and will always put the user’s interests at heart, with Blender being a prime example.

    We have to stop funding closed source software, enshittification is inevitable.

    If we all donated the price of Affinity’s perpetual licence to Krita, Kdenlive, and Inkscape, we’d have a suite of tools that could outcompete them all, and never have to worry about another acquisition.

    • @asdfasdfasdfEnglish
      17•8 months ago

      Totally agree, but the thing that makes me angry is that many, many open source projects miss this opportunity because of absolutely garbage UI/UX.

      Look at LibreOffice, for example. Lots of features that do more than what people need from MS Office most of the time, but even I cannot bring myself to use it long term because it’s UI/UX is trash.

      The open source industry has the problem that its devs think functionality is 99% of what matters, and most users disagree.

      We need to have some project that is crowd funded to hire some awesome designers and UX people and have them constantly working on important open source projects. I’d sponsor that in a heartbeat.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•8 months ago

        This is why I love the Gnome desktop, while some decision are definitely controversial, they really put the user experience first. All libadwaita apps have the same basic styling and layout, so it’s always clear what you can and can not do. Libadwaita apps are just a joy to use, although some are a bit too basic for my liking

      • ProdigalFrogEnglish
        1•8 months ago

        I’ve actually been pretty impressed with LibreOffice as of late. It’s fairly easy to adjust the theme (they have proper dark theme support now!) and layout to something pretty darn cozy feeling. Maybe for a power-user it’s not enough, but for my simple needs, like fiction writing and simple documents, I honestly can’t complain, they’ve done a solid job. Could it be better? Sure. But it’s in a good place, IMO.

        I think GIMP is a better example of a really user-hostile UX. That, almost more than any other open-source app, needs a UI overhaul.