Is there a reason (or am I wrong about it) that the most common and most liked tools for developers are mostly Open Source, while there are almost no Open Source tools aimed for designers making it big?
Think about integrating a Design System, a developer framework (React, Vue,) creating simulations/prototyping directly with the artboards (like click this button and see it navigate to this other screen).
On top of all that there's cloud access and management for all these designs, and collaborative editing.
All I'm saying is that the big players aren't just trying to build a piece of boxed software. They're going for platforms and a connected suite of services. It's hard to have all that as open source.
High fidelity collaboration between product, eng, design, and all other stakeholders is EXACTLY what's missing from today's tooling.
Figma has great multiplayer support, and we've worked hard to add it to MintData as well (bias[1]: founder here), and I think this is just the start.
In general, we need better integration of this tooling with CI/CD systems and the human workflows that naturally occur today in any org of > 50 people in technical roles.
There is also counter-examples: KiCad is an EDA tool which is very, very close to the commercial ones.
But it's a great point, we could look at the counter-examples - good Open Source tools not aimed at developers - to maybe find out why they exist and how to do it.
Browsers come to mind, Android in some regards. But hopefully we can find something else than ad-delivery infrastructure.
GIMP? Inkscape? Blender? Libre Office? Firefox?? Chrome??
I'm actually not sure what you're suggesting. There are no great open source projects outside those written for development? That's clearly false.
Libre Office is simply copying features from MS Office, and is rarely used in commercial settings anyway.
Chrome is open source (well, Chromium, Chrome is not), but it is basically 100% developed by a commercial company which does not generally accept community contributions.
I don't know enough about GIMP, Inkscape and Blender to give an opinion on how well they can be held up as examples of Open Source community tools that can replace commercial tools.
Edit: actually, thinking more about this, Firefox and other browsers are much more a tool for web development than a tool for users directly - the functionality that users use is much smaller in terms of implementation than the functionality that web developers use (the layout and JS engines, and the debuggers, profilers & other development .
Both of which are known to have notoriously unintuitive UI's, especially when compared to their commercial competitors.
> Libre Office
Literally just copy & paste M$ Office UI, and honestly still manages to screw that up putting things in different places.
This changed lately for both products.
GIMP, Inkscape, and LibreOffice aren’t competitive with their commercial alternatives.
Which leaves Blender, which is the exception of a high quality open source tool that’s not for developers. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I think they’re two reasons it exists: 1. The comparable commercial tools are very expensive, e.g., thousands of dollars per year, versus a bit over a hundred a year for something like Photoshop. 2. Developers have a particular affinity to 3D modeling, e.g., it’s the biggest gatekeeper to various types of development like games programming and AR/VR.
But I agree 100% that Blender is a fascinating exception, and I’d love to hear more theories about what’s made it so successful.
This was specially the case when blender was new and AFAIK command line driven. In those days a SGI machine alone was more expensive then the car of the average Blender user.
and perhaps not coincidentally, GIMP is infurating trash from a UX perspective.
That's usually the driver of quality, even if pure software engineers could easily find stuff to criticise.
I think you're right & the open-source issue could be because closer coordination is needed between product & engineering.
And while I'm biased [1] (as the founder of MintData), I think the future is instead:
- The line between Engineer & Designer gets BLURRED -> 0
- The line between Prototype & Software gets BLURRED -> 0
In the end, I think powerful tools that redefine how software is created will win out, but this will take some time*
Hat tip to LightTable, Subform, Figma/Sketch, Framer/X, Visual Basic 6, and all the other tools that have provided us with the right inspiration.
Plus, designers aren't exactly positioned to just go make their own OSS design tool the same way developers are.
But it is true, outside of developers, nobody cares at all about Open Source and you mostly get weird looks if you try to explain. We are probably still bad at explaining it.