Hi, Pablo from Penpot here.

- New rendering engine should fix the performance issues. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY (older reference https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...) Open beta coming in the next few weeks, finally!

- Our business model is Open Nitrate (see https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-mod...). For the impatient, think of it as a reverse open-core. The current pricing model for SaaS is quite straightforward. The "unlimited storage" for Enterprise on SaaS is fine, believe me.

- This is a European startup that was founded in 2011 and pivoted to a product-centric actvity in 2021. We're 45 people. We believe open source is the right social contract. All employees use Linux as their operating system. Yes.

- In terms of our vision of AI, I published this whitepaper in August https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ If you want to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms, read it.

- 3 months later, we can demo our MCP server capabilities here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-mcp-server-showcase-as... but see also our internal folder with 1min clips here https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1CCuBqHEevWsp15bY... (my favourite is the flat design to design tokens and back to design). "design as a graph" is our ML-based applied research. We hope to have something cool ready at some point next year.

- The whole point of building Penpot was to unite designers and developers. New tools and platforms can play a role. We focused on declarative and semantic design paradigms departing from imperative design paradigms.

- We have 1.2M users, 25k Penpot new deployments every month, 30k new SaaS signups every month and a growing community of contributors and partners. Ironically, the early adopters are Fortune 500 companies knowing that a cycle is over and that they need to own their design assets. UI design is now as valuable as code, if not more.

- I don't like the "Open-Source Figma" label as we're building a superior tool but I understand it's a nice shorcut for now :)

- DM me on Linkedin if you have a couple of millions to spare :P

I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users

The closest analogy would be Sketch for macOS, which Figma simply copied at first, and then mostly replaced. I would love to see open source Sketch for open source systems.

Why don’t they provide a desktop version, similar to software such as GIMP, Inkscape, and others? Do they believe they cannot achieve the desired revenue through crowdfunding? Many projects—most notably Blender—have been highly successful using this approach. It seems unreasonable that an average designer should be required to learn server administration

Clojure huh???? never see that outside financial system