TL;DR:
Semple, a multi-disciplinary British artist, promised to build “a brand new suite of world-class design and photography tools, with an uncanny similarity to the tools you’ve been indoctrinated in.”
“There’s a really urgent need for a suite of creative tools for creators that they actually own rather than rent. In a way, this first started when Adobe and Pantone decided to paywall the Pantone colors and I created Freetone — which was a free color plugin so creators could continue to access their palette,” he says.
“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,”
“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.”
I think he’ll just deliver some reskinned FOSS projects at best.
Its one thing to make a color chart, its a whole other thing to make all of Adobe.
This wouldn’t be a bad thing. If someone had the money and time to alter GIMPs interface and layer handling to work more like PS and reduce the learning curve, it would be very nice.
Yeah, after working with photoshop for some time, switching to GIMP takes a huge effort to learn. It’s just so alien.
Check out photopea
I mean, PhotoGIMP exists, I’ve tried that.
He says it will be closed source on the kickscammer page
So ultimately the goal is to just lock people into his own ecosystem. Nice.
I am not a fan of closed source either. They’re planning to sell lifetime license of the whole suite around 150 USD. From reading the FAQ, it seems like they want to at least make the components open source.
Well Stuart Semple is someone who has generally been quite reliable in what he does and a fairly prominent artist, so he presumably understands how the Adobe tools work. He probably doesn’t have the technical know-how on how to build it. The article mentions that it’s a team of sixteen people right now without the funding presumably.
I mean the worst case is they pick an existing project like gimp, krita, darktable or inkscape and brings in enough features to Adobe parity. That isn’t a bad outcome at all.
The worse case you mention is probably actually the best case scenario tbh. If they deliver beyond that it’ll be a bonus. Right now, this is just looking like yet another Kickstarter self-filling water bottle scam in the making.
As it’s going to be closed source, the project is worthless
SPEZ)!!
GIMP + Inkscape UI refresh and I’d fund the shit out of that.
I don’t know about inkscape but with GIMP I get the feeling that the devs are happy with how it is. Someone will probably will need to fork for a significant paradigm shift to happen