Martin believes everyone should have access to free quality software.
Thanks so much🙏
You don’t lose money when people use a competitors service/product over yours. That money wasn’t yours to lose.
Yet, the companies cry about losing money due to online piracy. At this point it’s eźtremally funny
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
“If I couldn’t easily grab it off the table and walk away with it ,I wouldn’t have stolen it.”
Screw the media companies for the price gouging and being general dicks dragging people through the courts, but it’s still knowingly working around and accessing content that someone else paid to create. I dunno why people can’t be honest “I did it because it was easy and the chances of being caught were nominal. The risk / reward was in my favour”.
it’s not theft if you can’t legally own it. They willingly change the TOS to say that you’re basically renting it, and they can take it away for any reason, at any time. If they can take away something I paid money for, it’s not wrong to pirate it.
That’s a different argument though. If you have paid for a license to the content and they remove the distribution method or kill the drm that allows access to it. I’d say it’s fair game that you find an “alternative” copy of the content or work around to keep access to what you paid for. Unless you are knowingly buying it on a 1 off rental basis.
Don’t get me wrong, the current system is not weighted in the consumers favour at all and it’s a good reason to not play the game and avoid netflix, buy drm free computer games, etc but I just object to the argument the people who pirate are somehow noble robinhoods in a legally sound position. You’re still knowingly accessing something that someone paid to create and you’re gaining a benefit from that in entertainment. You’re just finding a way to justify doing so that sits right with your own moral code.
If everyone pirated, the entertainment industry would cease to exist or at least be greatly reduced the remaining people would only be doing it as a hobby. Big budget moves and TV series, AAA computer games would no longer find funding if no one at the consumer end is paying for it.
You’re still knowingly accessing something that someone paid to create and you’re gaining a benefit from that in entertainment.
And how do you feel about adblockers? By using one you’re depriving sites of the ad revenue they’d gain off of you reading their article or watching their video, etc. Do you use one or are you raw dogging the internet so that the content servers can harvest your data which they sell to serve you targeted ads?
I use a pihole.
What I won’t do is write a diatribe about how what I am doing isn’t going to deprive websites of a ad impression or that the websites deserve it because of how many ads whey paste across their site. I do it because it’s simple for me to setup on my network I have control of and it makes my browsing expriance better, I fully accept that if everyone acted like me then most websites will end up behind a full paywall.
Its people who pretend what they are doing is justified and moral over just being easy to do with nominal risk to themselves. Just own it bro, that’s all I ask. You do it because you can, it’s easy and you’re unlikely to get caught.
Not to mention, it’s not theft because the original is still intact.
If I go steal a car, I’m taking the physical item and depriving the owner of said item.
If I download a movie, the movie is still there, it has been copied at best, not “stolen.”
It’s like watching a baseball game from the fence, sure you didn’t pay for the ticket, but you’re not occupying a seat so that someone else can’t pay to use it.
If I download a movie, it doesn’t take it off netflix so nobody else can enjoy it.
Okay so its forgery? Who gives a fuck, its all a type of stealing shit.
No.
Your gonna get down votes and people crying about how words can mean anything, but entirely true. Risk/reward is 99% of it. Its also socially acceptable to talk about owning pirated media, which reduces the risk.
Of course it is and you’re also not physically going somewhere to steal the content it’s just ones and zeros that are landing on your storage device.
I can certainly agree with the argument that the content owners create an environment that makes piracy more likely to occur, but they are just making a judgement that current subscribers will keep paying higher fees and that some piracy will occur from those that won’t pay.
But those that do pirate making out that have moral justification for doing so is bullshit.
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.
Would a sketchy company? Yup.
Completely irrellevant to the discussion and nice ragebait, but whatever.
I don’t see how it is. A kid that can’t afford to buy photoshop won’t buy it any more than a sketchy company would, just like how facebook much rather steal material than pay their way for it. The difference obviously being that the sketch company might very well have the capital to pay their way, they’re just used to get away with it.
Tell that to all of the monopolies that have totally captured a market segment.
Also shouting out Krita as a Photoshop alternative for digital painting, digital art.
How is its CMYK profiles in your opinion?
those dollars were not adobe’s to lose but users’ to save
This is the heart of the matter. You can’t lose what you never had.
People like him are why I still have hope in tech. May the machine bless him eternally.
I am a Corel kind of bird myself, having used it both professionally (which is how I got started with it) and at home for a couple of decades now. I will say two things about that:
In its current version Inkscape is roughly on par with were CorelDraw was in its 4.0 state or thereabouts (which I still have a copy of, on like seventeen 3.5" floppy disks!) which sounds like damning with faint praise but it really isn’t considering that Inkscape costs nothing to use.
However, one factor that I think most people don’t think about is that Inkscape is currently the best software I’ve ever used, bar none, for ripping apart .pdf documents made by other software, for the purposes of monkeying with their contents. And that’s a ten story tall flaming middle finger to Adobe, and completely obviates the need for 99.9999999% of all users to ever have to pay for the “pro” version of Adobe Acrobat or whatever they’re calling it this week just to be able to made minor adjustments to a .pdf.
I had no idea Inkscape could work with PDFs like that. Thank you!
Great for text, also. Easy to orientated in any direction… Excellent for quick one-off wiring diagrams.
Just don’t try it with a 60MB+, 200 page+ file.
I’ve always used LibreOffice for that purpose. It’s more familiar if you’re used to office software vs graphics design software.
This is good to know!
You may not know if you exclusively use Corel, but where do you think Corel stands compared to Illustrator these days?
I’m a pro graphic designer, so you can be as technical as you like.
I’ve been messing around with Affinity Designer a bit lately, and while it’s gotten a lot better over the years (and some features have surpassed Adobe), the little things and workflow stuff is still such a step down I find it hard to want to use it still.
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.
Appreciate that perspective. I also can’t wait to kick Adobe to the curb someday, but I usually have the same experience when trying alternatives.
Adobe stuff is slowly falling apart though it feels like. It’s coasting on the brilliant work of the original devs pre-creative cloud, and while there have been a few genuinely good features added over the years, I hate to say that most new features they add feel like amateur hour to me. They just lack the level of polish and attention to detail that old features had. It doesn’t feel like the people making it understand the workflow of a professional anymore. They’re also just getting slow. Whenever I open Affinity I’m struck by how much more performant it feels!
Yes, slowly falling apart is a good description. I’m actually thinking of just switching careers. I work in print, so Adobe is pretty much a standard, there are very few viable alternatives.
I do a lot of print design too so I feel it
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’ve been curious about Corel for a while, so I may need to bite the bullet and get it sometime.
Illustrator is absolutely a byzantine mess lmao. The reason it’s so favored (I don’t want to say loved, but favored) is because of the depth of features, and also how fast it is to work in once you’ve learned it’s bizarre interface.
Some of it is definitely unfamiliarity, but I always find when using Affinity that things that are a single click or a hotkey + click in illustrator are multiple clicks without a hotkey in affinity. In isolation not a huge difference, but when you do it full time it adds up.
Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator’s, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.
You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don’t have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can’t conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can’t bind anything to Alt + F4.
You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.
That’s definitely good stuff. Affinity is also lacking in interface customization I’ve found.
I fucking loved Corel, I’ve never really found an adequate replacement for it. Guess I’ll be giving InkScape a try, thanks
Ok …. Your enthusiasm about the pdf ripping has won me over. I’m trying this shit asap
Have you tried LibreOffice Draw? I love it for that same reason.
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.
Huh, last time I tried I had the reverse impression. But it’s been a few years.
I was just needing to rip apart a pdf for content the other day. Good to know.
This functionality with PDFs is natively built into MacOS. One of the reasons I chose a Mac for my latest PC.
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.
Then why do you use this shit software?
It’s even worse with the "new " Outlook, so you might need to look for something else anyway
Oh yeah, I wouldn’t use Outlook myself lol, especially the newer version.
That’s hilarious, because less than 10 years ago Outlook on Mac was so fucking broken that I started a list of the weirdest and funniest bugs at the time.
Also it seems frankly insane to me that people would actively choose a Mac for this reason, and I say that as an M4 owner. But I guess it’s true that for most users the OS barely matters as long as their 2-3 apps and the browser work fine.
Lost dollars because of free software and lost dollars because of piracy are both imaginary numbers.
It seems just fitting that he wears a hat that you need bezier curves to draw perfectly with vector graphics!
I appreciate him very much, OSS maintainers and devs dont get enough praise. Also I dont get the intense entitlement some people have towards unpaid OSS devs and mainatiners, they think that they somehow deserve a product equal to that of a corporate offering while not offering any money or code.
It’s because they haven’t thought about it.
They’re so used to the paradigm. I pay money. I get product. I get support.
So when they get the product but they don’t pay money, their brain short circuits and thinks they deserve some kind of support.
In a capitalistic world, communistic projects are confusing. Which is sad.
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.
Bingo! I doubled the amount of business I was doing with my side-hustle PC repair by doubling my price. Also, my customers weren’t such a pain in the ass.
FYI, their Mastodon account is here.
Hitchhikers Guide on the bookshelf, nice.
I see Pratchett, Making Money up there, too. I like this guy.
Why is his Ubuntu book in Chinese?
Making Money, the best Moist Von Lipwig book. Even better.
He’s a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.
Kudos to Mr. Owens and all Inkscape developers. Inkscape is a masterpiece.
He has a Samson Meteor microphone. Same as mine. He is cool in my book :D
I have the same shityy little speakers too, good for the price point though
Ive used both inskape and illustrator and inkscape is better and has been better ux wise since day 1 for me.
The only time I used Adobe Illustrator was when it was brand new, in 1987. I may have used early versions of Photoshop, but never as my “daily driver.” So I might not be the most knowledgeable about Adobe software.
But the thing I MOST resent Adobe for was buying and killing Macromedia… I really really liked Macromedia Fireworks (raster, vector, and object graphics editor). Fireworks could do a lot of the things Adobe software could for a fraction of the price AND without having to use multiple applications to get the job done.
Inkscape is remarkable, and maybe someday someone will merge some raster image object tools into it, and then it might begin to resemble the Fireworks of 20 years ago when Adobe killed it.
Inkscape is one of my favorite applications out there. I use it almost daily, both for my day job and hobbies. Thanks Martin!
