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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

> Point is, don't jump from Figma to PenPot thinking everything will be better, they will go the same route within 3 years if they're successful.

Doesn't matter - it's an open source app, I can clone it and run it on-prem or locally (and I already have - and opened a PR!). FLOSS simply eliminates a great deal of SaaS risk.

They can delete their repo tomorrow, go full-proprietary, sell out to the highest bidder, get taken over by Adobe. None of it matters, I can still work on my designs.

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Open source is only part of the equation. The other part is having maintainers and community. Being able to fork it is great, but if there's no community fixing bugs, if there's no security fixes, if there are no improvements, if the main product changes drastically from the open source version and the files are not compatible in between, there are serious problems. Many open source products stagnate and die, whether or not they were popular, when the company is no longer involved. Community is not automatic or instant.

Until they change their license from FOSS to something source available or proprietary like many OSS projects are doing these days. If it's successful, it won't be open source for long.

Yes thats true, however, it also means the baseline features till the lockdown were open sourced & are secured for public. Now they have to value add over those. this process is slow but surely moves more basic/hardened stuff to public domain so should reduce rent-seeking behavior. if nothing else it will make likes of adobe to keep shelling out cash to squash any existential risks like figma. I'll take that.

The only really evil things can come from the likes of google anti-fragmentation agreement where essentially you are marked with a Scarlett letter if you didn't go all-in into google proprietary ecosystem. But we have FCC to protect us from that, right?

Without a community, an open source code repository is text files you can use to run or compile an application. An open source project needs maintainers, active contributors, a roadmap, etc. Github is full of very popular open source projects that have been completely abandoned, and forks of those projects that are also abandoned. An open source project having maintainers after a company has abandoned it is not the default. Sometimes it happens because the company nurtured an open source community before abandoning it, sometimes it happens because the project is crucial enough it scratches enough itches to attract volunteers. Sometimes it happens out of spite. But those are exceptions, not the rule.

Well, you can work on it with the existing functionality, with the trust that everything that's hosted on Penpot is first released to the current version on Github. Eventually they will diverge though, and the source code will be a version behind what's on their site. At first the files will be backwards compatible, but soon there will be a must-have feature on the hosted site that will make files incompatible. Then the VC funding will dry up, the hosted site will become paid, and those features and backwards compatibility won't make it to the open sourced code since there won't be the resources to work on the community version. Now you will be stuck, your designs will require the paid software.

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