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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Thank you (long-time Affinity user and fan, and Canva employee here :)

Re. on-device AI features: these still have significant training costs; and Canva as a whole has paid hundreds of millions to date in royalties to creatives, including for AI training.

Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.

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> Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.

It's free until you guys stop supporting it or go out of business, then it disappears.

I don't think it disappears - the copy I have will still be on my machine, and free to use as well. Unless they implemented something to remotely delete it?

Legally, you can't redistribute it

Unless you freeze your machine in its current state, software that isn't maintained will eventually stop working.

That doesn't mean it disappears though - it still exists, just in a non-working state.

And proton and the community do well to keep old things working.

Dosbox is a testament to that.

This is only true for very badly written software, and/or on platforms that maintain very bad backward compatibility. It's not some natural law of software--it's choices that (IMO) bad developers choose to make over and over.

This already happened with Affinity Photo v1 on iOS; a lot of functionality did not work after an iOS update. It feels like Apple changed something in their libraries, so it doesn't even matter how robust your software is if the underlying OS doesn't honor compatibility.

ok, but if you depend on software for work or business, you do not update your OS until you can guarantee and verify that your software will work.

The original iOS version worked. Maybe don't update iOS if you want to continue using affinity's software?

The Apple ecosystem, in general, is notorious for this: If you update your OS, some 3rd party applications will suddenly no longer work, because Apple keeps introducing breaking changes. But, if you don't update your software, other 3rd party applications will quickly abandon you and block you from using their software until you update. So, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Complicating this is: if your hardware is "too old" (as deemed by Apple), you can't update your software, so eventually you're left in the dust. You can't win.

Unfortunately there's also security people who work day and night to break old software and hardware that cannot keep up with the latest security standards.

It’s not just the case of badly written software. It will work until they shut off the license servers.

Adobe CS2 is a highly-capable software suite that would happily run on today’s computers. I remember when Adobe shut down the license servers for CS2. They released a version that you didn’t need to activate to assure people that they would still be able to use the software they bought in the future. But then they got tired of hosting the download servers, so they stopped, and that was it.

This is how things have worked since programmable software was invented.

your gripe is valid but misdirected. I also own a copy but, the one-time validation requires a validation server. Once that server goes offline, i can no longer install Affinity on a new machine.

It's not free, it's a lure. There is a hook hiding somewhere.

The real cost of tools like these is not the upfront price, but the time invested learning the tool and incorporating it into your workflow.

Krita is clunky, but good enough for me, and it really is free.

Update: Changed my analogy to lure.

I am sorry, but for me the app just died. That may sound dramatic but the promise at acquisition was that nothing would change. The picture that was drawn is that we would get a v3. Sure I would suspect some canva integration, but again, not a whole redo and relaunch that seems at first glance nothing like what we had, and completely taken over into the Canva system.

Also free is never free.

This really hurts to see, everything for the whole month has shattered trust in a way that is hard to believe. Any chances we can see some reversals?

What changes for me as iPad user?

Does the account required mean I can’t use it offline anymore?

So can I finally import krita files? Especially those with vector layers?

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