I like this list, I like that Sketch is #2, and #1 is an OSS self-hostable solution, https://penpot.app/ -- https://github.com/penpot so we can't quite get burned like we did with Figma.
From some cursory review, it seems pretty good! And there's now effort underway to be able to import Figma files.
edit: okay, I've gotten signed up with penpot, made rudimentary sketches, it seems solid and promising. I'm now a fan and I think this seals the deal for me, I'm glad that it was an easy decision. And I will give them the benefit of the doubt when it's not exactly up to par because 1) they seem to be new and characterize themselves as still being in beta and 2) it's self-hostable OSS and the inherent security of this offering is something I value deeply.
I've said this before elsewhere and was downvoted to hell. We're about to enter the golden age of bitrot. Software, due to its immense chain of dependencies, requires constant maintenance. There is no guarantee *any software* --proprietary or FOSS--will survive unless some human gives a shit.
So penpot is a great alternative to Figma for as long as you're damn sure someone will be willing to keep it alive.
Everyone has become so used to pulling or downloading whatever random software and have it work and creating forks like wildfire (just look at how many ubuntu flavors there are) without considering what will happen if the devs just don't have the time anymore or don't care. And if something massive upstream changes like CPU architecture (hello M1) or some browser change or some migration to Oauth5, everything gets borked in one shot.
Also, what's going to happen when a package creator dies? The first generation of FOSS devs are still alive and well. Will the second generation decide to maintain their work or is it easier to rewrite things?
Personally this is why I started only pushing packages that have extremely small surface areas (a single function call) that I know I'm willing to maintain indefinitely.
This is also why I became so married to plain text.
I think the difference is that if Figma's website goes offline, you lose all of your figma stuff. If penpot gets acqui-killed, then you can just clone a version that you were comfortable with and keep going.
> why everyone feels OS means you'll have the app forever.
Your hyperboles aside, I don't think there's much to prove. Maintained and long lasting forks abound. Enough to instill confidence in the principle.
If Figma was open source, there would be a fork right now and a team of contributors forming around it as we speak. That and a migration of a substantial part of its community.
> This isn't true in my experience.
Could you share, so that the naive optimist could at least have some context?
>I'm not quite sure why everyone feels OS means you'll have the app forever. This isn't true in my experience.
It at least gives it a chance, unlike closed source where once it dies it most definitely is gone forever (barring some very dedicated and helpful people reverse engineering the code, this seems to largely happen with video games).
Meanwhile I'm running Strawberry, a fork of Clementime, which is a fork of Amarok, which probably has code from other projects older than me in it.
Will FOSS software always live on after the original maintainers move on? Of course not, but not only does it stand a much better chance, you'll still always have the source available to compile it yourself on newer systems, given the will.
It just feels like one of those things people want to believe no matter if it's true or not. For example, when New York shutdown a recycling plant because it was worse for the environment than not recycling and everyone protested to have it reopened because no matter what anyone told them they believed that recycling is good therefore, the recycling plant was good for the environment.
Most people here need open source tools to do their job in one way or another. They love the fact they don't need to pay for it and they can just use it. They've been sold on the free software ideogly that it's possible to fork means that someone will or they even they will do it. No matter how much their employers refuse to open source their code, refuse to pay for open source contributors they fully believe that using an open source library or tool means there is less risk for their company because they can make the changes themselves. However, the risk is often greater. Almost certainly their employer won't pay for it and they will have to look for a replacement. They won't have any support contracts that can enforce how much notice they get given to find a replacement. The open source tool will most often just be abandoned.
It also, a couple minutes later, devolves into a hilariously entertaining rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison and the perils of anthropomorphizing lawnmowers, and it's one of my favorite things ever.
Honestly, I don't think this is fair. If software is useful enough, there are people and other companies that are often willing to put in money and resources. For a pure community example, consider the story of Jellyfin, a fork of Emby.
Open source is not a panacea. But just because keeping the door open doesn't guarantee anyone will bother to use it doesn't mean having the door open is not ridiculously useful.
I think there Is a way to tell if an open source project is robust against shenanigans:
- The more stakeholders investing, the better.
- Projects with governance and copyright not assigned to a single company have a lot less chance of needing a fork to begin with.
I am not alive long enough to know many examples of open source dying after takeover. The most vivid counter example I can remember is Audacity fork Tenacity. Thanks to how hated muse group is, it generated quite a bit of momentum in the beginning (seems to die down a bit now, but I wouldn't call it dead)
What you say might be true, but at least open source give us second chance, no matter how miniscule (which I'd argue is not miniscule at all). If it's closed source it's pretty much game over.
Adobe acquiring Figma is like suddenly realising you're living on a floodplain. Sure your house might not be flooded right now but you better sure have plans in place for when it does, and honestly you're probably better just looking for a new house so you no longer have the stress of wondering when it will flood.
Are you waiting for Figma to get an Adobe-style pricing plan? The general sentiment is that it was a nice house, but now it is burning. Run while you can!
Anecdotally it looks like it's impossible to write good graphic design software without serious money for multiple employees.
Penpot seems to be funded by an interesting and unusual Spanish incubator. That's better than I expected, but still not great given there isn't a clear good path to profitability.
Sure it's open source, but there's no way I'm taking over development if they stop. That means them stopping their subsidy of the open source software is as bad for me as Adobe raising Figma prices.
Since 2012, through the eras of Photoshop, Sketch, InVision, XD, Figma, and whatever else, I've been using Antetype: https://www.antetype.com
For me, it's been a 10x tool since it was always the only piece of software that was designed from the ground up as a UI design tool, rather than being some other kind of app that was pressed into service for UI design. Auto-layout, responsiveness, and flexible components that can be edited per instance without breaking their link to the master component are all features that were present from day one rather than being awkwardly bolted on.
I've never heard of them but they seem to host a solid set of features, and being around since is 2012 is impressive. I think part of a products success is its availability on different platforms, I wonder how long they have hosted this page for? https://www.antetype.com/antetype-for-windows-web/
I took this opportunity to look at Sketch again and I'm shocked they still don't have a desktop version for Windows. They are stubbornly wed to their focus on a "truly native" mac app despite Figma proving over and over that cross-platform is what users actually want and need. Seems like another huge opportunity missed with Figma users scrambling for alternatives.
Genuinely asking: Do developers look at these styles as more than helpful tips? Surely these CSS/JS blobs that Figma outputs have to be correctly and carefully merged into the codebase?
Not a designer but an engineer that reads designs, and Figma really is a game changer. High quality collaborative designs, great UX, and rather inexpensive to users.
Exactly what Adobe would need to stay relevant because they’re usually the opposite on these fronts :-)
I can’t see switching being too realistic.
$20 billion is a lot of money. That’s worth more than Cloudflare, Snap, Spotify, and just $3b shy of Zoom’s current market cap.
I found Figma docs thrown over the wall from designers pretty hard to consume.
Perhaps it was just how that particular design team used it but
- they put a huge amount of information in a single document.
- lots of sticky note style additions that were not clearly associated with what they referred to.
- hard to search.
- hard to determine what a single unit of work could be. Again, maybe this was the team but they didn't have a concept of discrete tasking. It was just "here's the giant figma doc with everything from p0s to stuff we might not even want"
Interesting, we have a similar situation. A lot of information all at once, hard to navigate, search etc. Usually developers are so confused a figma doc is often used more like a prototype to show during a demo than a spec to share. Instead our designers make screenshots of it and put them in a well-organized Confluence document. I don't know what's the right way.
Figma will never be good at dev handoff because it isn't built on HTML/CSS rendering, so its code output is awful. No plugin or interpretation layer can fix this.
CSS is the language of design, yet for some reason every design tool completely ignores it.
Every top feature request on the Figma Forums is for HTML/CSS type features. We need a design tool built from the ground up on HTML/CSS rendering that has a Figma-like interface. Framer and Plasmic are sort of like this except made the mistake of wrapping everything in React code with tons of unnecessary abstractions that make the HTML/CSS output really messy.
I like the attitude relate.app (now Rainbow) has, but I don't see Figma being the final design tool, particularly when working with developers.
For scale: EV maker Lucid is worth 24 billion, and Apple recently had twice that in cash reserve. (Looked it up because of an unfounded rumor linking both.)
Yeah, I think the biggest improvement Figma made is that it made it so much easier to share and collaborate on artifacts from design with the engineering team. The previous process we used for taking Sketch designs and turning then into running apps was much more painful and cumbersome.
Except getting assets out of Figma is a huge pain. Trying to select the layers you need (if even possible), not being able to flatten layers into an exported image, not being able to compress the exported image...
Snap is losing money and doesn’t seem to have any path toward any decent profitability.
Spotify is a low margin business since no matter how much it makes in revenue, it will always have to give 70% to the labels - a company with high marginal costs that scales with revenue is the opposite of a successful tech company.
Cloud flare is also losing money.
Why would any of these companies besides Zoom be considered a successful company that should have a high valuation?
I really wish OmniGroup had the vision and resources to bring OmniGraffle into some kind of shared collaborative editing world, whether by developing a web app, or incorporating some kind of collaborative, versioned backend for "corporate" users.
It has one of the best overall general diagramming/graph layout engines and UI of anything I've used on the desktop and web. My experience in the diagramming, layout and technical-ish drawing realm includes Figma, as well as Illustrator, Photoshop, Pagemaker, Freehand, Deneba Canvas, Mac Draw Pro.
I still love Omnigraffle for flow charts, presentations, UML diagrams, and UI wireframes. It's not a 1:1 replacement for Figma, but it suits many of the same problems.
But its existence as a solo, mac-only, desktop-only app relegates it to my personal projects and I can never use it fully at work.
I was trying to figure out why I’d never heard of Omnigraffle and then saw this. Makes sense. It’s interesting that there are so many Mac-only design tools
It all started with Steve Jobs' focus on typography. There's a lesson to be learned there somewhere about serving a niche and benefiting from the network effect.
The number of feature areas where Figma succeeded and Adobe failed is astounding. The closest analogue I can think of is SpaceX and Boeing.
Figma solved online tooling, collaboration, interaction protoyping, design systems, and stakeholder review with a single product. Their renderer can handle hundreds of frames in the same screen with no performance degradation.
Meanwhile Adobe continues to struggle putting together version of photoshop or lightroom on a tablet that people like.
Adobe it's a classic case of Sales-led-development, which started to generate a huge organisation that is very slow and far away from it's users.
On the other hand you have a Figma, product-led, figuring out what's best for users, and kicking ass with a web-based solution that IS what designers/devs need. Legends!
> Meanwhile Adobe continues to struggle putting together version of photoshop or lightroom on a tablet that people like.
I'm sure there's more to it than this, but Figma started with a clean slate. Having a legacy codebase means a few things, and one that doesn't get talked about very often is that there is a lot of pressure to re-use code even if it would be more difficult than a re-implementation.
I've worked on legacy codebases, and it goes something like: you start working on a new feature. You realize you need to implement some extra detail you didn't think of. You mention this in standup, and your manager says something like, "oh, no problem, Steve implemented a function that does that back in '97. You should use that because the old code already handles all these edge cases." So then you spend the next 2-3 sprints struggling to get Steve's code working, because his code and your code both made some assumptions about the data model that are incompatible. It doesn't really help that Steve's code has some subtle reliance on global state, so you have to worry about saving that global state, changing it, calling Steve's code, restoring the saved state, all while praying to various gods that it doesn't break anything on another thread you didn't know about.
Or it would have taken just a couple of days to reimplement it in a way that already plays ball with your data model. Sure, it's not DRY, but dogmatic DRY can be a big source of pain in legacy codebase.
Adobe XD started with a clean slate but ended up being inferior to Figma. Even simple XD shared prototypes on the web are multiple times slower and less responsive than figmas.
My first thought is... how is this free if it's similar to FIGMA?
It sounds like they have basically bundled in a lot of their own icons/svg stuff and that's their business model? But even then building such an app seems like a huge investment if it's just a platform to sell your icons. So I must be missing something.
I have it installed, and while it's handy for opening Sketch files if you don't have a subscription, basic things like text handling and typography are rough. It's useful, but I wouldn't try and actually design in it.
You have correct observations and ask the right questions.
1. We do promote our content. It's not enough to support the development.
2. We could afford a generous freemium. Unlike Figma, Lunacy is resource-efficient and has no pressure from investors.
3. However, collaboration requires cloud, so we'll charge for cloud storage.
Might be worth pointing out that this is thanks to Sketch publishing specs[0] for their format, making it easy to write importers/exporters for. As far as I know Figma has yet to do this, so anything that reads Figma files is likely reverse engineered and prone to breakage when Figma inevitably changes their undocumented format.
If I were searching for a Figma alternative, its file format being documented would be a priority because otherwise, one is subjecting themselves to some degree of lock-in.
I really miss the early days of Sketch (DrawIt, anyone?)
As a developer it's been a bittersweet journey to see Sketch grow to be so popular amongst designers.
In 2012 I was excited to "buy" Sketch for $50, but I am less enthused to subscribe at $100/year. At this point I'm looking for a more lightweight and longer-lived solution. Figma is a nice alternative but the price is likely only going up from here.
Are we already abandoning ship? I wouldn't think Adobe is going to pull the plug or anything too drastic, Right?
Btw, I've been a happy Affinity [Designer, Photo, Publisher] user for many years now. Can't even believe I'm still getting updates with my years old licences. +1
They will almost certainly experience a mass exodus of their top engineering, design, and leadership talent. They'll never come back from that. So it isn't that figma will turn to crap overnight, but over years it is guaranteed to rot, terrible features will start adding up, and adobe will start doing everything they can to pull you into and trap you in their expensive and crappy ecosystem.
So yeah it's sort of like climate change. Probably ok for now, but you should definitely start making moves to live somewhere else in the next few years.
It's the principle, this was the first time in 17 years anything threatened Adobe and honestly Figma could have destroyed Adobe within 3 years with the right focus.
Figma threw every single artist and designer in the world that does 2D work under the bus when they could have saved us all and built better tools.
Actually I'd go beyond saying it's the principle, actually now it's personal all the money I spent on Figma, all the hours I spent pushing Figma in organizations and building our workflows around it has just gone to strengthen Adobe's grip on my livelihood.
This might sound dramatic but imagine for a moment how you'd feel if you could only work within your industry if you used VSCode, it was closed source and it cost $60 a month and the only chance of fighting against that had sided with the enemy.
But this is the thing, it’s not healthy to see Adobe as the permanent enemy. They are a reflection of their people and leadership and this is arguably a sign they are a changing company.
Your analogy once was true with Microsoft and Visual Studio in the 90s. It was the main IDE for Windows development (there was no Linux, not really). And it was expensive. There wasn’t much competition until Java took off.
These days Microsoft isn’t seen as the enemy as often. Github is doing fine for example. Companies can change.
Just about any time a competitive product is swallowed up by a large company that product is left to wither for a year or so before riding off into the sunset.
Or "Don't want to pay for", which includes me. The feature set that I use in my daily driver - Illustrator - has pretty much remained constant since CS2 or thereabouts, but I have to maintain a subscription solely to ensure that I can load files from clients without any concern about incompatability or breakage.
It's quite annoying paying good money for old rope for years and years on end.
From western world perspective, $85/month for a whole suite of powerful apps is absolute peanuts if they are used in a professional setting. An average carpenter probably spends more on tool upgrades each year.
Readit News
From some cursory review, it seems pretty good! And there's now effort underway to be able to import Figma files.
edit: okay, I've gotten signed up with penpot, made rudimentary sketches, it seems solid and promising. I'm now a fan and I think this seals the deal for me, I'm glad that it was an easy decision. And I will give them the benefit of the doubt when it's not exactly up to par because 1) they seem to be new and characterize themselves as still being in beta and 2) it's self-hostable OSS and the inherent security of this offering is something I value deeply.
Adobe can buy the company that is supplying the devs for penpot the same way it bought Figma.
Sure the source can be reused, but you think another collection of individuals will come along and host the project in the same way?
You think the codebase would be developed/maintained at all if all the original devs left? History says otherwise, from the examples I've seen.
So penpot is a great alternative to Figma for as long as you're damn sure someone will be willing to keep it alive.
Everyone has become so used to pulling or downloading whatever random software and have it work and creating forks like wildfire (just look at how many ubuntu flavors there are) without considering what will happen if the devs just don't have the time anymore or don't care. And if something massive upstream changes like CPU architecture (hello M1) or some browser change or some migration to Oauth5, everything gets borked in one shot.
Also, what's going to happen when a package creator dies? The first generation of FOSS devs are still alive and well. Will the second generation decide to maintain their work or is it easier to rewrite things?
Personally this is why I started only pushing packages that have extremely small surface areas (a single function call) that I know I'm willing to maintain indefinitely.
This is also why I became so married to plain text.
Your hyperboles aside, I don't think there's much to prove. Maintained and long lasting forks abound. Enough to instill confidence in the principle.
If Figma was open source, there would be a fork right now and a team of contributors forming around it as we speak. That and a migration of a substantial part of its community.
> This isn't true in my experience.
Could you share, so that the naive optimist could at least have some context?
It at least gives it a chance, unlike closed source where once it dies it most definitely is gone forever (barring some very dedicated and helpful people reverse engineering the code, this seems to largely happen with video games).
Meanwhile I'm running Strawberry, a fork of Clementime, which is a fork of Amarok, which probably has code from other projects older than me in it.
Will FOSS software always live on after the original maintainers move on? Of course not, but not only does it stand a much better chance, you'll still always have the source available to compile it yourself on newer systems, given the will.
Most people here need open source tools to do their job in one way or another. They love the fact they don't need to pay for it and they can just use it. They've been sold on the free software ideogly that it's possible to fork means that someone will or they even they will do it. No matter how much their employers refuse to open source their code, refuse to pay for open source contributors they fully believe that using an open source library or tool means there is less risk for their company because they can make the changes themselves. However, the risk is often greater. Almost certainly their employer won't pay for it and they will have to look for a replacement. They won't have any support contracts that can enforce how much notice they get given to find a replacement. The open source tool will most often just be abandoned.
It also, a couple minutes later, devolves into a hilariously entertaining rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison and the perils of anthropomorphizing lawnmowers, and it's one of my favorite things ever.
Look at OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. MySQL vs MariaDB. It can happen. At the very least it's more likely than if you're using commercial software.
Open source is not a panacea. But just because keeping the door open doesn't guarantee anyone will bother to use it doesn't mean having the door open is not ridiculously useful.
I think there Is a way to tell if an open source project is robust against shenanigans:
- The more stakeholders investing, the better.
- Projects with governance and copyright not assigned to a single company have a lot less chance of needing a fork to begin with.
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What you say might be true, but at least open source give us second chance, no matter how miniscule (which I'd argue is not miniscule at all). If it's closed source it's pretty much game over.
- freeze the versions, keeping using it until you find a better one. Practice shows it can be done for quite a while in many cases (years if needed)
- migrate to the different similar software, or hire an expert to do it for you
There were too many cases of wonderful proprietary products suddenly becoming ransomware overnight, holding your data hostage.
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Penpot seems to be funded by an interesting and unusual Spanish incubator. That's better than I expected, but still not great given there isn't a clear good path to profitability.
Sure it's open source, but there's no way I'm taking over development if they stop. That means them stopping their subsidy of the open source software is as bad for me as Adobe raising Figma prices.
https://kaleidos.net/what-we-do
For me, it's been a 10x tool since it was always the only piece of software that was designed from the ground up as a UI design tool, rather than being some other kind of app that was pressed into service for UI design. Auto-layout, responsiveness, and flexible components that can be edited per instance without breaking their link to the master component are all features that were present from day one rather than being awkwardly bolted on.
You sure about this? What about UXPin? XD? Axure?
[1]: https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
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Exactly what Adobe would need to stay relevant because they’re usually the opposite on these fronts :-)
I can’t see switching being too realistic.
$20 billion is a lot of money. That’s worth more than Cloudflare, Snap, Spotify, and just $3b shy of Zoom’s current market cap.
Perhaps it was just how that particular design team used it but
- they put a huge amount of information in a single document.
- lots of sticky note style additions that were not clearly associated with what they referred to.
- hard to search.
- hard to determine what a single unit of work could be. Again, maybe this was the team but they didn't have a concept of discrete tasking. It was just "here's the giant figma doc with everything from p0s to stuff we might not even want"
What are the upsides?
CSS is the language of design, yet for some reason every design tool completely ignores it.
Every top feature request on the Figma Forums is for HTML/CSS type features. We need a design tool built from the ground up on HTML/CSS rendering that has a Figma-like interface. Framer and Plasmic are sort of like this except made the mistake of wrapping everything in React code with tons of unnecessary abstractions that make the HTML/CSS output really messy.
I like the attitude relate.app (now Rainbow) has, but I don't see Figma being the final design tool, particularly when working with developers.
Maybe for web development, but people use Figma for mobile app designs too and those do not for the most part use CSS as the language for design.
Figma shows CSS code in the Inspect view. It's limited, but not ignored.
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Spotify is a low margin business since no matter how much it makes in revenue, it will always have to give 70% to the labels - a company with high marginal costs that scales with revenue is the opposite of a successful tech company.
Cloud flare is also losing money.
Why would any of these companies besides Zoom be considered a successful company that should have a high valuation?
It has one of the best overall general diagramming/graph layout engines and UI of anything I've used on the desktop and web. My experience in the diagramming, layout and technical-ish drawing realm includes Figma, as well as Illustrator, Photoshop, Pagemaker, Freehand, Deneba Canvas, Mac Draw Pro.
I still love Omnigraffle for flow charts, presentations, UML diagrams, and UI wireframes. It's not a 1:1 replacement for Figma, but it suits many of the same problems.
But its existence as a solo, mac-only, desktop-only app relegates it to my personal projects and I can never use it fully at work.
I was trying to figure out why I’d never heard of Omnigraffle and then saw this. Makes sense. It’s interesting that there are so many Mac-only design tools
Figma solved online tooling, collaboration, interaction protoyping, design systems, and stakeholder review with a single product. Their renderer can handle hundreds of frames in the same screen with no performance degradation.
Meanwhile Adobe continues to struggle putting together version of photoshop or lightroom on a tablet that people like.
On the other hand you have a Figma, product-led, figuring out what's best for users, and kicking ass with a web-based solution that IS what designers/devs need. Legends!
I'm sure there's more to it than this, but Figma started with a clean slate. Having a legacy codebase means a few things, and one that doesn't get talked about very often is that there is a lot of pressure to re-use code even if it would be more difficult than a re-implementation.
I've worked on legacy codebases, and it goes something like: you start working on a new feature. You realize you need to implement some extra detail you didn't think of. You mention this in standup, and your manager says something like, "oh, no problem, Steve implemented a function that does that back in '97. You should use that because the old code already handles all these edge cases." So then you spend the next 2-3 sprints struggling to get Steve's code working, because his code and your code both made some assumptions about the data model that are incompatible. It doesn't really help that Steve's code has some subtle reliance on global state, so you have to worry about saving that global state, changing it, calling Steve's code, restoring the saved state, all while praying to various gods that it doesn't break anything on another thread you didn't know about.
Or it would have taken just a couple of days to reimplement it in a way that already plays ball with your data model. Sure, it's not DRY, but dogmatic DRY can be a big source of pain in legacy codebase.
It sounds like they have basically bundled in a lot of their own icons/svg stuff and that's their business model? But even then building such an app seems like a huge investment if it's just a platform to sell your icons. So I must be missing something.
And how does it compare to Penpot?
You have correct observations and ask the right questions.
1. We do promote our content. It's not enough to support the development. 2. We could afford a generous freemium. Unlike Figma, Lunacy is resource-efficient and has no pressure from investors. 3. However, collaboration requires cloud, so we'll charge for cloud storage.
TLDR Lunacy will be a highly generous freemium.
If I were searching for a Figma alternative, its file format being documented would be a priority because otherwise, one is subjecting themselves to some degree of lock-in.
[0]: https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/
As a developer it's been a bittersweet journey to see Sketch grow to be so popular amongst designers.
In 2012 I was excited to "buy" Sketch for $50, but I am less enthused to subscribe at $100/year. At this point I'm looking for a more lightweight and longer-lived solution. Figma is a nice alternative but the price is likely only going up from here.
Btw, I've been a happy Affinity [Designer, Photo, Publisher] user for many years now. Can't even believe I'm still getting updates with my years old licences. +1
So yeah it's sort of like climate change. Probably ok for now, but you should definitely start making moves to live somewhere else in the next few years.
Figma threw every single artist and designer in the world that does 2D work under the bus when they could have saved us all and built better tools.
Actually I'd go beyond saying it's the principle, actually now it's personal all the money I spent on Figma, all the hours I spent pushing Figma in organizations and building our workflows around it has just gone to strengthen Adobe's grip on my livelihood.
This might sound dramatic but imagine for a moment how you'd feel if you could only work within your industry if you used VSCode, it was closed source and it cost $60 a month and the only chance of fighting against that had sided with the enemy.
Your analogy once was true with Microsoft and Visual Studio in the 90s. It was the main IDE for Windows development (there was no Linux, not really). And it was expensive. There wasn’t much competition until Java took off.
These days Microsoft isn’t seen as the enemy as often. Github is doing fine for example. Companies can change.
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It's quite annoying paying good money for old rope for years and years on end.