Figma is now free for all US school students | Hacker News Reader

Figma is now free for all US school students

engadget.com

27 pointsksec13 comments

Of course they should do this. It has worked well for Microsoft.

But that's bad news. Schools ought to avoid trapping themselves and their students into closed solutions, and teach use open source products instead, like penpot [1].

It might be a sign that Figma is afread of alternative solutions by the way.

[1] https://penpot.app/

Schools should teach their students relevant skills. If the industry wants Figma, schools would be doing a disservice to students by not teaching it to them.

I think there is some balance. In most cases the skills are quite transferable. If there is any industry standard tool and you are in a specialized program than it may well make sense to teach using that tool. They will be "ready to work" in the most common program and can transfer their skills when necessary. However if the program isn't as specialized it may make more sense to teach tools that the user can take full advantage of such as open source programs. Then they can use those skills for the rest of their life. Or if they want to do it professionally they can still transfer the knowledge to a specific tool used by a company that they are interested in.

For example if you are teaching some middle-schoolers how to edit photos GIMP may be a really good choice. But if you are running a UI designer bootcamp Figma may make more sense than a less commonly used open-source tool.

That's the best you can get as a student, just think what was acceptable 5 years ago

> But that's bad news. Schools ought to avoid trapping themselves and their students into closed solutions, and teach use open source products instead, like penpot.

It depends. For low-income and underprivileged high school students, learning open source graphics and design tools often works against them, since job listings and internships rarely call for skills in GIMP or Penpot. Most community colleges teach design software that's widely used in business, which isn't open source.

Support is a huge issue as well. Unless students are part of a community that's self-suporting (or have parents who work in IT, web development, etc.), getting help with open source software isn't as accessible as it is for commercial software.

Meanwhile, virtually every library has books on Photoshop, Figma, etc.

Yes, the skills are generally transferable but that's not always readily apparent.

Get ‘em hooked young.

It’s laissez-faire pirated Photoshop all over again.

How is this any different from Jetbrains or Autodesk products being free for students?

It isn't, just the execution (explicit examples you mentioned vs looking the other way wrt PS and Adobe).

It's a good move. I pirated Photoshop as a 10-18 year old, when there was no way I could afford it at all, and I'm now at least partially a professional designer because of it. (Though, I no longer use Photoshop, simply because it's not great for UI development.)

Catch them young, and when they graduate and become professionals, they'll start paying for your software.

Anyone know if this is coming to the UK?

Oh no, a zero-rate problem in disguise.

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