Welcome to the forum!
Please feel free to ask, if you need help with Inkscape.
My goal is to be an open-source-first studio. What I mean by that is if we can use a tool that is free and open source over a proprietary tool to accomplish what we need, we'll use it. Right now Blender is our primary 3D rendering and animation tool, with great results (https://youtu.be/GEf6cTb3KhI). Gimp, Krita, Scribus, and Inkscape (of course) are other tools in our toolbox, but we're frankly much less experienced with these. I'm hoping to change that.
cool. what was the motivation for such a goal? would be nice to see some pieces of (inkscape-)art in the future too.
@Ryan: This testimonial sounds really wonderful! Is there a chance that you would turn it into a guest post in a news article at inkscape.org?
(sorry to chip in into this really interesting conversation)
Sure. I'd be glad to write something up if that will help out. Let's exchange contact info over PM.
I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me has been the trend towards software-as-a-service. That model is fantastic for businesses and terrible for consumers. Businesses already dominant in their market love SAAS, because it lowers the cost of adoption of their software, thus increasing their dominance over smaller competitors, while raising the barrier-to-entry for new competitors who will not have a large enough user base to compete at that low-cost, high-volume game. In the absence of competition, and without the need to motivate customers to upgrade to a new version every year or two, profits skyrocket because less money now needs to be spent on software improvements and marketing. In the process consumers who thought they were getting a great deal in the beginning, are now dependent upon tool providers who no longer need to do a whole lot to keep them around.
This is exactly what has happened since Adobe has moved to a SAAS model. New releases are no longer about innovations, but rather new methods to create interdependence between their tools and their growing number of services. I cannot remember their last Creative Cloud release that really made my job easier or my work better. I'm not paying less and I now have thousands of files that I can only edit by subscribing to an additional 12 month license. I'm just not interested in it anymore, and I think designers need to take a stand and support the only real alternatives, which are free and open source tools that cannot just be bought out as soon as they pose some threat to the status quo.
There are other, more personal, motivators for me. Free and open source software is a way to foster a more egalitarian world where people are unencumbered by their limited means or access to expensive tools. The whole of humanity is improved when talented people are able to communicate and create. If I can by some small means contribute to that cause, I would like to do so. By building awareness of, donating to, and otherwise contributing to free and open source software I feel like I am helping create that world.
I wish I could just get everyone to get on board, but even within my own company it is hard. But open-source-first is my goal, and something I'm going to keep working towards.
today, a lot of people still use SAAS products and are happy with the low cost access to tools you'd have spent thousands of $ ten years back. i had a big discussion with a friend of mine, an independet filmmaker, about SAAS products and espc. Adobe's "Premiere" last year. although he is short on money, he stated that Adobe's tool meets standards regarding usability and codecs which open-source-tools wouldn't and which he needs for his professional work, so he is willing to pay for it. why not.
if you strip it down and have a look at the counterparts on the open-source-side, there is and will be a race for standards the software has to match for professional environments and features it needs to be usable. for example i've been reading a lot of complains at other cgi - forums about the new GIMP and the new Inkscape too - long development cycles, almost no new features, small to no improvements on perfomance. you could have written the same about Adobes tools, but they seem to meet standards most professional people in cgi are missing with the open-source-counterparts. if this is so, it's also a good reason to stick to properitary software however. who cares?
@ha1flosse: open source developers don't generally go hungry, that's a common misunderstanding. Linux experts are sought-after people. Many develop and work with the tools in their day job. Like Bryce, Martin, my partner and many more people I know. Open Source is not really gratis, there are people and enterprises paying for a big part of it.
The standards you describe are often only more-or-less de-facto standards, created by having a large userbase, not by the standards being standardized and accessible to everyone. It's like 'everyone is using tool X, and so, the next link in the supply chain also only accepts things created with tool X'.
E.g. SVG is a standard, while AI is not. SVG allows you to choose the program that you want to use to open and edit the file, AI doesn't really. That's because it's proprietary, and you need to pick the file format apart, if you want to have a useful file, instead of a binary blob that just takes space on your disk, but cannot be used after the subscription ends. That situation is called vendor lock-in.
(yeah, I know Inkscape doesn't know pdf X or CMYK, but Scribus does)
There's not quick and easy solution to this problem. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it, but here is what I've come up with thus far:
Build awareness. As it relates specifically to designers, I think we need to demonstrate excellent work with FOSS in order to break down perceptions about the capabilities of the tools and their use by professionals. We must also insist that our public institutions, which have a mandate to serve the greater public interest, are building proficiency among students and staff with these tools. We can also introduce these tools into our existing workflows, even side-by-side with proprietary tools, as a way to inform peers and employers about their availability.
Facilitate learning. We have to understand that in many cases we are going to have to teach people already familiar with proprietary tools how to use tools that are sometimes very different in their logic and layout. For this to work we need to make learning easier, which goes beyond relying upon random tutorials on the internet, but collecting the very best resources and making them easy to find.
Improve usability. Just today I was trying to get a fellow designer working on Inkscape for essentially the first time, and the experience installing and running the software on MacOS was a real turn off. At the most fundamental level FOSS has to run to be adopted, and sometimes it doesn't. Ultimately though, it needs to become easier to use by people who have not been using it for years, or they're not going to stick with it.
Dream bigger. It won't be enough in the long-run for FOSS to simply achieve parity with proprietary tools, it needs to be better. Why not figure out how to attract more of the very best talent? Why not create methods to discover and enact the best ideas faster than Adobe, Autodesk, or whoever? Our underlying argument is that sharing and collaborating yield better results, let's prove it!
I know none of these things are easy. I can point them out, as I'm sure many have before, without the power in-and-of myself to bring any of them entirely about. But I can try, and you have to start somewhere.