After Raising $235K, Abode Remains Committed to Taking on Adobe
petapixel.comImportant: This is not VC funding. This is a Kickstarter project [1].
Honestly, this feels like a scam. Their logo and name is stupidly similar to Adobe which would obviously result in trademark lawsuit. I think they are just scrounging up money from the Kickstarter and will just disappear after a while.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/culturehustle/abode-a-s...
You could have read the whole article, then you wouldn't have missed this paragraph:
"The other, perhaps more urgent issue is the threat of Adobe’s legal department. The marketing and branding of the software looked a little too on the nose for the multi-billion dollar company to ignore. Semple says he’s ready should Adobe decide to flex its legal muscle.
“I have lawyers, and I’ve taken advice. We have solid plans in place. I would also point out that nobody has seen the final branding and no software that infringes on any of Adobe’s trademarks has been produced,” he says.
Examples of the software icons Abode displayed on its Kickstarter. “I have successfully challenged IP owned by Tiffany and Co, Pantone, Mattel, and others over the years. I feel we have a good and thorough understanding of where the legal line is and an ability to get as close to that as possible without overstepping it.”"
No part of what you’ve quoted changes my view an iota.
I’m not sure what has in your mind justified that immensely snarky response.
This is the equivalent of a perked-up overconfident guy bragging about his MMA skills to an uninterested date. This is the equivalent of a Tesla salesperson telling you not to worry because the car will DEFINITELY hit its stated range.
It all means nothing.
Anyone with a measly $200k or thereabouts wouldn’t be looking to waste a single cent of it on unnecessarily legal costs all to…blatantly copy a brand. This is a naive whoever looking to kick up some publicity with a meme vapourware product. Anyway, if a court ruled in Abode’s favour, it would quite frankly be a disgusting perversion of trademark law. It doesn’t pass the smell test at all. Adobe being evil doesn’t change that fact.
Despite also reading the full article, I also have the same impression as the earlier poster.
Regardless of what this person says, my own experience and knowledge of trademark law tells me he's full of it.
My knowledge of software development seconds that thought, as does my knowledge of the software packages he's aiming to replace.
It's a scam, I'll happily eat my hat if he achieves -anything- close to what he's promising.
> I feel we have a good and thorough understanding of where the legal line is and an ability to get as close to that as possible without overstepping it
Honestly, that statement doesn't sit well with me.
Most sensible business people like to have a generous buffer between themselves and the legal line.
If you make it your business model that you constantly try to test the boundaries legal line, then one day it is going to come back and bite you in the backside. The history books are littered with examples.
It also means in practical terms that most of your $235k is going to disappear on lawyers fees.
I agree. This quote is the "we have acoustic sensors that detect impending hull failure" of IP lawsuits.
> One specific case of interest comes from British artist Stuart Semple who is both challenging and protesting the concept of “owning a color,” through the release of a purchasable paint offering dubbed “Pinkie” — which he says is the “barbiest pink.”
https://hypebeast.com/2023/7/stuart-semple-barbiest-pink-mat...
I assume this is the Mattel reference.
Trademark disputes can be won by just not competing in the trademark realm. If Mattel is protective of toys that are a certain pink and you release paint that color they won't/can't come after you.
Bringing out software that is a direct competitor while using a marking similar isn't just harder, it is effectively what trademark was designed to prevent.
Unless you can win a lawsuit where Adobe says "people assumed it was a cheaper version of my normal product made by me" you will lose in court.
Honestly my view is also someone fleccing given the whole Ventablack story being him making a mountain out of a molehill when a manufacturer gave one artist access to avoid having to work with a ton of people on a distraction from their usual work.
Additionally wouldn't GIMP and other open source tooling be good enough if Adobe tools could be cloned for a year's Salary of a Senior Engineer plus overhead?
>I have successfully challenged IP owned by Tiffany and Co, Pantone, Mattel, and others over the years
So their rip off versions of Tiffany and Co, Pantone, and Mattel presumably failed? Or surely they wouldn't need a kickstarter for this one. Doesn't inspire a ton of confidence in me.
Pebble didn't need to use Kickstarter for their second watch and did so anyway
> no software that infringes on any of Adobe’s trademarks has been produced
Yeah but a damn company that infringes on Adobe's trademarks has been produced
Semple is a very serious person - in a very British, deadpan humour way. But he delivered what he promised w.r.t. the extreme pigments he developed.
What is partially sounds like he just did this for the crowdfunding and has a rebranding ready. But you could be right.
Remember those "day in the life of a Google Project Manager" videos, where they do nothing but hang out on Zoom meetings and pig out on free food and snacks?
Yeah, in many cases, those folks make roughly $235k/year. (And consume another $100k/year in lobster, shrimp, smoothies, and snickers bars.)
$235k is absolutely nothing for software development, and you probably won't be able to hire even one talented developer -- let alone a team -- with a war-chest that size.
This type of attitude is exactly why silicon valley is primed for failure The bloat and the expense of silicon valley is going to be their downfall.
plenty of regions in the US and other nations have many talented developers that are willing to work for far less and make a far better product than what you get for silicon valley wages
> other nations have many talented developers
Yes there are other nations that have talented developers. But anywhere that has genuinely talented developers, the developers will still want a decent salary.
I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you, but I think most of us here have experienced the poor quality coding output from those developers. The Quality Control simply is not there, normally because the company doing the outsourcing is too cheap to pay for proper supervision and quality control.
> I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you,
I hate this crap. Some of the absolute worst code I've seen in my career was written by US programmers working out of tech hubs, as is some of the best code.
> But anywhere that has genuinely talented developers, the developers will still want a decent salary.
You're assuming that all "genuinely talented developers" are motivated solely by money and will move away from home, friends and family for a "decent salary". A salary of £80k in the UK (ignoring london just for a moment), or $100k USD is reasonable for a senior level engineer in the UK, will give you a very comfortable standard of living, and is less than you'd pay a junior in many parts of the US.
> The Quality Control simply is not there
That's not because of an "outsourcing nation", it's because you paid for a shitty outsourcer. See healthcare.gov [0] for a textbook example. Similarly, I've worked with "outsourcing nations" via EPAM with contractors in Mexico, Belarus, California, Hyderabad Romania and Bangkok, and the quality of code has not been tied to the location, it's been tied to QC at the relationship level.
>some of the worst
Sure, but code put out by US coders I’ve hired has been consistently better than code that has been outsourced outside of the US.
Obviously, there are “diamonds in the rough” occasionally, but skilled people tend to get snapped up by a recruiter willing to file an immigration form for them very quickly.
We were all that crappy developer at some point…
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that someone who has 5+ years professional experience writing C++ shouldn't be writing `auto buf = new std::vector<int>()` to avoid heap allocations.
Sure but a decent salary is far different from "235k/year. (And consume another $100k/year in lobster, shrimp, smoothies, and snickers bars.)"
If You can't see that there is a middle ground between impoverished wages and what was quoted above that I can't help you
> If You can't see that there is a middle ground between ...
I can see a middle ground. Most people would probably name it as Europe. And you would have to go looking in Eastern Europe.
And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more.
And you need more than one or two developers on your team if you're going to be competing against Adobe.
And then you need to pay taxes, pensions, accountants and lawyers.
And then you need to pay other business expenses.
And if you decide you need an office, then god help you ...
The numbers soon add up .... $235k will disappear within the year, probably within a single quarter.
Software development is capital intensive.
> And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more.
That's a very much extreme statement I think you confabulated. Take this developer median data from back in 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1222324/developers-media... and reanalyze your statement.
And also compared to https://www.reinisfischer.com/average-monthly-salary-europea... where 60k euros a year tends to be above the average monthly salary in many EU countries. And if a junior doesn't get out of bed for less than that, well I have some bad news for them and their expectations.
Are you actually in Europe?
You won't get qualified devs for much less than 60k around here. Especially since that is the amount of money people expect on their payslips before taxes.
On top of that employers have to pay additional stuff, that won't even make it on the payslip, like parts of the health insurance which are not considered to be parts of the compensation.
Quick Example from Austria:
* Cost to Employer 77k€
* Employee's Taxable Income: 60k€
* Income After Taxes: 40k€
* Childcare and University: 0€
> Are you actually in Europe?
I'm actually in Europe, and EU, but not Schengen (thank you Austria & Netherland governments for the veto vote).
> You won't get qualified devs for much less than 60k around here.
The ridiculous claim was about juniors that won't even approach the job for less than 60k, and I took that information that I found first with a Google search to illustrate that 60k euros is more than the average salary in most EU countries.
Of course you could share more precise numbers from one of your national institutions that reports this information, but on the website listed the monthly average gross salary stated for Austria is around 4540, which comes to 54480 a year.
I could count on one hand the number of junior developers I've encountered that I would call exceptional, and deserving an average salary right from the get-go.
I wouldn't worry too much about the average salary. Those numbers usually include people working part time.
And, stating the obvious: Software developers tend to earn above average salaries.
> Most people would probably name it as Europe. And you would have to go looking in Eastern Europe.
Affinity[1] is a good example, I believe that’s created in Europe and its very reasonably priced.
Pixelmator too — based in Lithuania?
>And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more.
You realize that 60k usd after tax is 240k PLN which is like 6.6 times minimal wage?
This is good cash, not top, but good.
Junior people earn 36-120k PLN, so half of that.
> And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more.
Let me tell you that you are far off the reality. I live in Paris and junior developers don't get near as much as €60k/year. The 35-40k range is more realistic for juniors, and senior ones can get what, 90k? That's alread considered really good for an engineer here.
Of course you can make six figures, but that implies working for a silicon valley company that hires remotely in europe. And those that have offices in europe adjust their compensation accordingly.
Just for demonstration I looked at Datadog on levels.fyi for the three they accept to show me:
- Paris, $77k-$94k (so €70k-€85k)
- New York $180k (for level 1 SE, senior is through the roof)
I'm not sure why you're comparing the cost of one SV dev with the cost of a while business unit in Europe.
Located in France. A senior developer who performs bad work with a wage of 65k€ costs 100k€. Plus the office, wfh, computer, etc.
So $235k is 200k€ so one developer and one PM, because the dev alone has a brownian behavior concerning progress (unable to take initiative).
> I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you, but I think most of us here have experienced the poor quality coding output from those developers.
I've experienced "poor quality coding outputs" caused by outsourcing in general... regardless if it was abroad or not.
With properly hired employees, in my experience, what they output is actually quite impressive both qualitatively and quantitatively. And their average salary is a fraction of mine, which is in turn a fraction of a US one (I'm West European).
I'll name it. You need at least 25000$ to hire a "decent" Software Dev and 50k for Senior Dev in India. They can produce much better output compared to US counterparts both in terms of Quantity and Quality.
The hiring needs to be direct or else the "agency" will eat most of the money and give you 3000$/yr "senior" devs further perpetuating the stereotypes.
With 235k, you can make an incredible 5 people team + cloud costs for an year.
do you expect a year of 5 stellar devs will be enough to re-implement photoshop?
I am doubtful.
No, 1 stellar dev for 5 years. https://www.photopea.com/
Photopea dev hasn't worked a day in your run of the mill company. You won't find devs like that on a market.
> Master's degree in theoretical computer science / artificial intelligence
Yeah, that’s definitely not your standard coder.
Previous thread where he posts:
In Europe at least, developers having a Master's degree (~5 years of tertiary education) or equivalent is fairly common. From the stats I could find, that's roughly 50% of developers.
Its not the skill of the developers thats the problem with offshoring. Its the communication breakdown and difficulty of specifying what you actually want built.
You need at least 25000$ to hire a "decent" Software Dev and 50k for Senior Dev in India. They can produce much better output compared to US counterparts both in terms of Quantity and Quality.
If that dev can't even put a dollar sign in the right place, then I'm not sure the quality is everything you claim.
Attention to detail matters. Especially in coding.
Laughable attempt to discredit someone.
> Attention to detail matters. Especially in coding.
Let me guess, you're one of those people who think nitpicking on every small thing leads to "quality" code?
At least Europeans put the currency sign after the number.
If a dev cannot be United States centric and condescending, I'm not sure of their worth as an engineer.
The discussion is specifically about American salaries, so yes, the position of the dollar sign matters when someone is trying to brag about the quality of their work.
They are talking about American salaries so they can us that money in India. The US is in the subordinate position here.
> can us that money
Can ask?
Can use?
Can what?
When discussing other cultures you arent expected to conform to their ways of doing things, are you?
That's just absolutely unnecessary nitpicking.
Different conventions exist. Personally, I put the unit after the quantity without exception.
Yeah, I always found this to be an utterly strange convention. Do you say, "that'll be dollars one hundred", when you tell someone a price? Would you write, "I'm lbs200"?
I suppose it does give away the cultural difference, but this is one where the Indians (and a lot of others) get it right.
$566 is right. SI and everything else got it wrong. Most significant figures should come first. Unit is the most significant figure.
"Five hundred...." is meaningless. "dollars five hundred..." is a useful preliminary approximation.
When I think about it, I have to agree.
It would make for a fast mental shortcut in preparation. For example: you need to move an item. How much does it weigh?
Grams… ok, pocket
Kilograms… might need to put it in the trunk.
Very true, but a decent salary in, say, Poland is much less than in California.
Decent salary is 100k in Europe, for example.
Irrelevant and based on very specific US salaries (actually, no, US tech hub salaries), along with absolutely no guarantee of having talented developers even at prices above. Otherwise, Google would be filled with talented developers, and we all know that's not true.
The creator of the kickstarter lives in the UK. Even assuming the absolute worst of London salaries, you can pay for two developers, full time. If you look at other places in the UK or Europe that aren't overinflated with capital-city-salaries, there are a shitload of talented developers that will cost you anywhere from 50 to 100k a year. Eastern Europe is filled with extremely talented people.
In most countries for the majority of developers, $235k is a LOT of money and enough to finance a startup for the first two years or so with 2 developers.
There is this romantic notion that the huge company gets it all wrong and a couple of guys in a garage with the right approach can dethrone them. The Apple story all over again. This success story is actually exceedingly rare in practice despite how much we like it.
But Abode isn't even that. They appear to want to create what Adobe creates, but with a small team. Something many other companies have failed to do with bigger teams and more funding. It's basically competing with Adobe at Adobe's game, but with a tiny fraction of the resources. Well, good luck to them, but meanwhile expect to pay Adobe's tax for a few years still...
Everyone misses that Adobe is not whatever software they are selling, they are that and a modern 16 deck luxury cruise ship completely loaded with marketing professionals. It's not only the software that has to be beat but that gargantuan marketing machine. It's that marketing machine that wins software battles these days - it sure ain't the software, as too much of it is not what the marketing claims.
True, but affordability and word-of-mouth can go a long way. It's not a foregone conclusion.
> Something many other companies have failed to do with bigger teams and more funding.
Even well-established companies once Adobe decides it wants in.
Remember QuarkXPress ?
It was THE desktop publishing software. Anybody who was anybody would use it. They had the monopoly.
Then along came Adobe with InDesign ... Quark are still around, but a shadow of their former shelves.
If anyone is interested, QuarkXPress to InDesign is one of the case studies in my piece on software transitions https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...
It is however true that the friction, internal bureaucracy and absence of accountability makes large companies typically slow and delivering far inferior products and services than the talent they employ are capable of.
Maybe, if you're surviving on Ramen. That said, I wouldn't want to go up against Adobe with a team of two Ramen-fueled developers in Bulgaria.
I don't doubt you can make a cell phone app for that money, but something that would compete with Adobe's incredibly polished and well-funded software suite... I'm thinking the odds aren't good at all.
$100k salary puts you in the top 5% of the society in Bulgaria. I wouldn't call that being "Ramen-fueled". I don't want people to get wrong ideas.
I agree with you that $235K is a small budget to build a serious software though.
It's actually a lot less than that. It's more like $50k. Just saying.
Good luck taking on Adobe with 2 engineers.
Adobe seems exeptionally unproductive with incredible product stagnation so this doesn't seem that infeasible to me.
Exceptionally unproductive? What are you on about? Could they make larger swings? Sure. Are they exceptionally unproductive? Compared to whom? They dominate pretty much all market segments they're in. For example, they took on Apple, after a grudge, and won (Apple had something to do with that too). AI showed up, Adobe is pretty much the only major established player that put it in consumer hands ASAP and in a way that is both legal and makes great sense. Others (majors), if they even showed up with anything AI leaned on others (Microsoft -> OpenAI).
Adobe is moving at a steady strong pace which one cannot ignore. They don't have ferocity or (sometimes) velocity of a hungry small player.. yet, there aren't any in their space. There's Autodesk (lol) and of smaller in video there is The Foundry (if you want to see exceptionally unproductive, at small scale).
> Compared to whom? - Procreate
- Figma
- Blender
- Maxon
- Davinchi
- Autodesk
- Stability
Honestly hard to name a company in the space shipping less than Adobe.
I'm the last person to stand behind Adobe (where my linux apps at?), but:
- procreate - yes, I agree. They do compete there and procreate is iPad only. Pricing is what sets them apart and Adobe being a bit stupid there
- Figma - yes and it's Adobe now.
- Blender and Maxon are in different space. Unless you consider Blender's subpar video capabilities and Maxon's buying of video plugins (for Adobe programs). Also, Maxon.. come on, talking about stale. C4D "light" is also part of After Effects.
- Blackmagic is in hardware business. Their Fusion (bought) is stale af. AVID might be a better comparison.
- Autodesk - only overlap is between Flame and Lustre. Flame is in another space where they don't compete and Lustre has been stale (just like Adobe's CC offerings, seems both ceeded to free DaVinci Resolve)
- Stability - look at how wonderfully Adobe actually did put out AI and integrated it well with Photoshop!
Dunno how anyone can un-ironically call anything stale next to Adobes 10 year track record.
> Pricing is what sets them apart
Nah the whole app is built on modern technology, Adobes dusty old apps chugging away on single cores struggling to draw a paint stroke are pretty laughable compared to Procreate. All this is stuff Adobe could have shipped 10-15 years ago in Photoshop if they cared at all.
> Blender and Maxon are in different space
It's all the same space, if you're differentiating 3D from 2D design you're living in the past. Besides we're talking about creative tools shipping features so it's irrelevant as long as its a tool.
https://www.photopea.com/ started as a hobby project of a single guy and is surprisingly close to at least the core functionalities of Photoshop, certainly better than most open source applications.
Well Figma started eating their lunch in 2015 having started with a 4 millions seed round and 15 employees for two years so it’s clearly is doable to take on Adobe with far less money that they themselves spend provided your offer is good.
Please man, use your brain at least a little bit.
$235k and 2 engineers is completely different to $4M and 15 employees. Not to mention that it was 5-7yrs before Figma had any revenue.
"While Figma was founded in 2011, the first five years were spent trying to get to product. The company printed its first dollar in revenue in 2017 and will hit $400 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2022"
https://futurumgroup.com/insights/adobes-stock-got-slammed-f...
Figma is an outlier. "it's clearly doable to take on Adobe with far less money", he says about one of the fastest growing decacorn startups in history.
> Please man, use your brain at least a little bit.
Thank you for being condescending. If you expected being a bully might shield you from tearing apart your argument you will be very disappointed.
15 people is a lot closer to two than to Adobe which is the point of my comment you entirely fail to grasp.
Every companies taking out a large companies is an outlier by definition. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist and remains a clear counterexample to your extremely wrong original opinion.
This discussion is finished as far as I’m concerned by the way. You have clearly demonstrated you are not worth talking to. I will let you massage your fragile ego by yourself.
Your timeline is wrong (Figma wasn't even released until 2016). I have a piece covering Photoshop to Sketch to Figma that I think illustrates in detail how the rise of Figma happened https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...
Yes, you are right. I was confused by what I read as they started offering a free preview in December 2015 and was convinced they released at the same time they did their serie A.
Meh. You can get a good developer for 50-150k without lobster. You can't force them to all live in san francisco but I could hire two devs and have some marketing money left over with 235k with a year and a half ramp.
Well, no. If everything is open source, $235K is good for perks and incentives - and to ensure that the project is alive and active.
People will do a whole lot when the incentive is not the paycheck.
Gimp and Paint.net have probably benefited from a million hours of open source labor and yet their capabilities are nowhere near Adobe's products.
People underestimate how much work commercial software takes by many orders of magnitude. This kickstarter is maybe performance art but if they're serious there is no chance in hell they will actually produce software that is actually competitive with an Adobe suite product.
No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp.
The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers.
Sure the Adobe tools have a lot to explore, a lot of buttons and options hidden in millions of submenus.
But a good portion of computer users have only a limited need for tools like this, no interest in that constant learning curve after major updates and no use for all those advanced features.
Imagine I learned using these tools 20 years ago, and while they heavily improved they still work exactly the same. Every time I meet Photoshop it 180d their design and button placements...
My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point.
> No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp.
> The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers.
Good for you. I can assure you that you'll find thousands of creative workers that will find what's missing from those tools.
> My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point.
That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools.
> That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools.
Depends where you go. If you go to a CCC event or a Linux shop I am sure they are.
And yet gimp does not have the productivity to be used in a creative agency. So while you find gimp useful. It’s useless to pretty much every agency in existence.
As a counterexample, I would say Blender is even more complicated and is doing very well with the same model. Of course, it started as commercial software but still.
Perhaps this project will spend it's funding on a fork of Gimp that is more similar to the Photoshop UI and closes some of the gap in features.
It's not open source
Isn't the $235k only really needed to get them through their first prototypes?
When they can show working progress they can then do more fund raising, or maybe outright sales of the early releases?
They need $235k to get to their next round of funding. Which could be selling the prototype, more crowdfunding or other investment.
I was going to say "what a weirdly US-centric" vie, but it's not even that. Most of th US population is nowhere close to that pay grade.
Silicoln Valley is living in a bubble. There are millions upon millions of talented developers out there earning a fraction of that but still enjoying a higher than cost of living wage.
You can EASILY get talented dev for 235k from cheap countries
I use Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, ... Except blender the others don't have any funding near those 250k and yet they compete very well to Adobe (I know many would deny that, but for me they do)
Money alone doesn't make good software.
but the guy who started this kickstarter obviously does not feel that Gimp, Inkscape, Paint.net... are good enough, or he would not plan to build new tools.
So a zillion people working on gimp could not do it, while a handful with 250k in funding can?
This is performance art, not a project.
you probably won't be able to hire even one talented developer -- let alone a team -- with a war-chest that size
Maybe you're not aware of this thing called equity, and how it's often a part of an offer to a founding engineer..
As someone who was trained extensively on Adobe products and is using them regularly, I can just recommend to give the Affinity tools a look. (They also got a summer sale running right now, so you can grab the whole suite for a $150 one time payment.)
They work really well, some things are just the same as in the Creative Cloud, and I'am not missing anything so far.
Sadly, the commercial world will mostly stick to Adobe, so I'll have to use that at work, too. Pricing for the Creative Cloud is just too high if you want to do it "for fun", though.
Yep long time happy Affinity perpetual universal license customer, who uses their products on Windows, macOS/M2 and iPad.
As a dev, Adobe’s premium tax is irrational.
Really confused by this.. $235K is not nearly enough to make even one of these apps. Unless they can get devs to work for free it's not happening.
Also Affinity exists, their suite has basically the same apps as they claim they will build, they have one-time very reasonably priced licenses. The only potential difference is that you need to pay for major version updates, from 1 to 2 took a bit under 10 years if I'm not mistaken.
Affinity has allowed me to not use Adobe for a long time, (until they bought Figma.. but well).
And it seems odd to me to clone very old software in a world that has evolved.
Anyway, always pro having more options, so good luck to them!
I have to assume they’re gonna fork GIMP, make the UI look more like photoshop, and call it a day.
$235K ? Yeah, erm, sure you're not missing a few zeros at the end of that ?
First people want well written software that has ongoing support and updates. $235K will barely get you to a workable beta version that competes with the Adobe suite.
Secondly, that's a hell of a risk calling yourself "Abode" and having a logo that could be argued to be "confusingly similar". Even if Adobe don't take you to court over it, they could still easily make you rack up $235K in out-of-court lawyers fees.
$235K does not seem like the amount of money needed to take on Adobe. At the very, very best this gets you 4 developers and an artist for a year, I don't see how that is enough to even compete with the numerous FOSS alternatives.
This is an artist wanting to make multiple high effort products. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some serious confusion about what it takes to develop software going on here.
I also don't think that having Adobe, but without subscriptions, is really the solution to the problem. There are already usable, if not good FOSS alternatives out there. Maybe building up those is more productive?
Stuart Semple is kinda known for pulling stunts like this.
Whenever Vantablack was released to the world, the artist Anish Kapoor got exclusive artistry license rights for the pigment. Semple was rather upset about it, so he then made a pigment called "Pinkest Pink" and one of the terms and conditions of buying it is that you agree to never share it was Kapoor.
I don't know what his intention is with this project, but I'm sure it'll have an interesting outcome.
Sure. But at this point around 3000 people have given him money for a product.
I imagine a branding change will be in order before actually delivering anything to users?
While I could believe in the artist and their history of fighting off legal challenges, I am sceptical around the ability to (re)build even one of the mentioned tools for the budget. Adobe has an immense moat (hence its complete gall around subscription pricing) for a reason. Otherwise everyone would just be using GIMP.
Actually, Serif has ventured surprisingly deeply into Adobe's territory.
I know professional designers that prefer Affinity for many projects. They still pay for Adobe, still use Adobe often (and agree that when they need it - Affinity is not yet close), but actually prefer Affinity for some projects.
Now, even taking on Affinity will cost more than a few hundred thou, but if you can get traction the sky is the limit.
One idea would be to fork Gimp, focus mostly on the UI, and allow for all changes to be pulled back upstream. That would essentially turn them into the steward for GiMP, but may give them access to talent that otherwise would be out of reach and that would split the community.
>> I imagine a branding change will be in order before actually delivering anything to users?
I certainly hope not. I don't think companies should expect to be able to hijack a common word as their company name and then complain when another company uses a different word as its name.
Inkscape and Graphite have contributors...can the whole community be galvanized behind 'the one to rule them all'?
I haven't heard of Graphite. But yeah, Inkscape, Gimp, Dark Table, Blender, etc. World class programs. There's no need for this.
As someone that has used three of those applications, and actively uses two of them I think simply having documented workflows for how to produce certain industry standard outputs from the programs would be of great benefit. If the kickstarter campaign just produces some utilities to support that I think it would benefit a lot of artists.
This is a good point. Anything to lower the barrier to entry, and UI is the biggest complaint I keep hearing.
I don't get many of the UI complaints because I have always used Inkscape, so I have the same problem but in reverse. So, I get it.
I mean, all that money could be put to better use and fund Gimp or Inkscape for instance, instead of that vaporware. But I guess people are more willing to give money to these Kickstarter marketing pitch.
"Let's invest money to continue enhancing existing solutions, which are free and open for all" sounds just so much less exciting than "we are going to end Adobe with $235k from our backers".
Maybe the $235k should be spent on paying Stuart Semple to market the existing solutions.
And Krita!!!
I dislike Adobe more than most people and feel more strongly than most that it's essential we have viable alternatives.
But the whole way this has gone about seems incredibly naive both to the realities of building piece of software like that and not to mention just trying to make the "Open Office" to Adobes "MS Office" is really shortsighted considering what modern tools look like.
Feel the ultimate end of this is running out of money probably with barely a prototype and causing a lot of bad blood with the artists and illustrators who trusted him with their money, also naive to how much this stuff actually costs when the founder can't create anything towards the goal themselves.
Oh I also notice they fell into amateur crowdfunding trap of offering merch for a tier as low as £129. Getting those produced will cost at least £30 each for only 320 of them, shipping anywhere in the world, hoodies are heavy and bulky can go up to £50, the time/money wasted organizing the logistics of it isn't worth it. By the end of it you've probably lost money.
I get and appreciate the joke but...
- $235k is sweet FA
- Going after Goliath out of gate is a rookie mistake. Niche down as tight as possible. They should be looking for niche Adobe is missing and then continue for there. Don't compete with Adobe. Instead, move into a blue ocean with as little competition as possible.
It'll be interesting to watch but that funding needs a zero or two added to the end.
I feel like the inevitable trademark dispute would not be in Semple's favor. He seems to think it's fine, probably because he's gotten away with it in the past due to "parody", but when you're actually selling a product that is the same as the product the other company is selling, I think it will be much harder to use that defense.
Hahah. Love it. However I would suggest to already start raising money for the upcoming lawsuit.
Better yet, get all the money in real currency, then go burn it outside an Adobe office.
$235K sounds about right. With regard to the legal fees they'll burn through for their humorous "trademark".
A lot of people continue to use Adobe, no matter how much they rip them off, because there is no alternative, for better or worse, and when someone somewhere says they are going to make apps that can compete with Adobe, I don't think professional quality apps will actually be developed.
$235K and 16 months? What are they going to do, rebrand open source software? I really doubt anything will come of this project. I really like this guy (or his PR), but I can't see this project to succeed in any way.
Hold my beer.. Leeeeeroy!
There is a Photoshop alternative already (Photopea), but its maker chose to keep quiet about battling corporate overlords and such matters. Obviously a marketing noob, compared to this fiery kickstarter.
This is such a bad take. There’s already a bunch of apps that don’t operate on subscription models - like Affinity Photo, Pixelmator Pro - and free apps like GIMP
Not only that, they cost more than the each of the apps I listed
While I love the idea of sticking it to Adobe, that’s not remotely enough time or money. That would barely cover the cost of a single skilled developer working for one year.
That demo had literally no technical features demoed.
I was excited for a second but that video really is for suckers. It looks like they didn't work on the product yet at all.
> WHO’S BEHIND IT?
> I’m Stuart Semple, I’m an artist and an activist. I come from the contemporary art world and have had several exhibitions around the world.
> More relevant to this is the fact I’ve been working with technology my whole life. I studied advanced art and design, and I have been using well-known software tools since the 90s.
> I’ve found an amazingly passionate team of geeks
> To make amazing word class software costs money. There’s no point doing this unless it’s really really good. The geeks are being extremely generous but they will need to be paid. So your pledge is going to be used to make sure they can live whilst they do the work.
> You can expect:
> ONdesign - a familiar and fully featured Desktop publishing application > illustrateIT - a vector drawing and illustration package, with all the bits you love using > photoPOP - photo editing > Impress - super-fast mobile app, full of templates.
I don't think the artist/activist with no business experience, programming ability, who has found "a team of geeks" will succeed in building a full replacement of the Adobe suite.
The extent of this endeavor seems to be the thought "I feel like Adobe products should be cheaper than they are. They must only be expensive because of capitalism" and then the creation of a kickstarter grift.
Totally confused as abode is also the name of a smart home security product — goabode.com
Wow the naming is rough for dyslexic people.