Unfortunately - this. I hate to be so cynical but they are by far not the first ones to buy a company and immediately pledge it just to shift their views slowly over time so it doesn’t make such high waves. 
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This! Why would any company post-acquisition post a press release saying “ok, we’re going to raise our prices, layoff our employees, degrade quality, and eventually disappear into the maelstrom of venture capital trading?”
To those taking the pledge seriously- don’t. It’s boilerplate corporate PR. It’s entirely meaningless
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Nailed it.
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Amid the frustration, we need to be reminded that this is not Cuba or North Korea where private businesses are (at best) required to stay very small (if they are allowed at all). Unless anyone here has proof that Canva acquired these companies by way of pointing a gun at the owner, then they all had the right to cash out and sell and Canva does have the right to get bigger.
I do agree that users have the right to have suspicions, but it is not like users are being forced to stay within the ecosystem or else either (which people here fortunately are choosing to practive by way of giving FOSS solutions a chance).
On that, in the area of 2D at least, FOSS is still in the need to really step up its game if they want to prove their model is better (which is why people still choose to put up with Adobe even amid their dislike).
Who’s saying this, though? You’re replying to a bunch of customers and others who are airing their well-founded suspicions and dissapointment, and pretending they’re saying something else?
‘Need we be reminded’? Doesn’t seem like it to me.
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Read the rest of the paragraph. I am not pretending they are saying something else.
I don’t argue that Serif had no right to sell their company to Canva, for $100 or $100,000,000. (ETA: It was actually $380 million.) It’s their company, they can do what they want with it. I have zero ethical problems with Serif cashing out, selling out, or whatever else. Take your profit and buy a yacht, or donate it all to cancer research, or go to Vegas and blow it on hookers and blow.
What they do with their company is entirely their decision, and their right to do so. Go do it. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world isn’t free to critique their actions.
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Pull the other one, but fine…
What Thorn said covers it pretty well.
Problems that I had:
- because of selling to some lame company, we lost trust in those products - we are uncertain what will happend to Affinity software, we invested money, time; this our workflow and no one wants drastic changes that will come, sooner or later, and this uncertainty is exhausting
- they know terms of acquisition, they talked with Canva management so they had right now information what ACTUALLY Canva wants to do with them and their products; we know for 100% that Affinity products would end with ONLY-SUBSCRIPTION model but obviously it is hidden - they had right to it, also there’s NDA; anyway they are lying
- smaller companies are more flexible, more efficient, independent - Canva is a public company so they are dependent from investors - Affinity products are not greatest profitable business so there’s big risk that Canva could shutdown this line of products in near future
Honestly, I’m really disappointed because it looks for me (as I said earlier) like it was a long term strategy (from 2015) to build some kind of user-base by grabbing people from Adobe for low price and make it a company for sale. If it is not profitable as indie company, what would do Canva with this product? Only make it more profitable, with minimal invest, and obviously it’s not customer-friendly way.
Nothing last forever… except Blender that I’m happy with more than 15+ years.
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Just like Twitter. I guess one should never ever make bold claims.
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No one’s for sale.
…until they are.
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Maybe so, but it is a pretty big statement and the Internet remembers. If they go back on that, they will get totally roasted.
Now, no doubt, some sort of subscription is coming, but that doesn’t mean, as per that statement, that perpetual is going away.
There’s one thing I’d pin my hope on and funny enough it’s there stated goal of competing with Adobe. If you just go all subscription and only subscription, then you aren’t competing with Adobe, you are just a second tier clone.
If the monthly cost is anywhere near the same then I think (as much as I hate Adobe), that most people would just pick Adobe and be done with it.
If the goal is to be seen as an alternative, one needs to actually offer a clear, different alternative.
Ace, don’t conflate unrelated things like that. NOBODY is taking that angle but you here. We are talking about distrust in a company that sold out, literally, to a crappy corporate product. Cuba ain’t got nothing to do with this.
The fact that the development slowed a bit and a lot of what I kept asking for in emails to them went in the “We will see this later on in development” column, that makes me distrust this acquisition as means of realizing the higher level of software that was to be. I’m happy to keep using Adobe for the clients that demand it while I continue to experiment with OSS solutions and possibly test the waters with Photoline as well.
The test for a software to really push back against Adobe is in actual Prepress solutions, concern about how the content is going to be used with real printers and with processing images for plate making for spot and for four color process plates. Adobe has stuff that works, OSS doesn’t. Only part of OSS that I got to work was using Gimp to calculate ink coverage by analyzing pixel count for color selection, something Affinity Photo failed at even with supposed bug fixes.
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Venture capitalists don’t care about internet roasts- see any previous instance of this.
It’s not a binary option- there’s a third option, which is equally as likely as either of those others- that Affinity will quietly disappear along with their software while some features from it get rolled into Canva’s subscription.
Don’t forget the fourth option as well- Canva goes bankrupt after their frankly ridiculous acquisition spree, and Affinity disappears along with their software (so similar to the third option).
If Affinity gets shuttered, they’re not breaking their pledge, after all 
if they die with their perpetual licenses six months from now, they honored their pledge perfectly
Canva will never compete with Adobe, except for perhaps a market that Adobe understandably ignored and hopefully continues to ignore.
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Is that really as likely tho, I mean Canva is a online ‘template’ driven ‘design’ solution, that’s a far cry from image/pixel editing photo’s or actually creating new/full page layouts (with all the text/graphics, etc) in a web browser. You aren’t going to compete with Photoshop/InDesign/Illustrator software by using in browser versions.
If Canva goes down the drain, then it’s assets get sold off and given it seems that Affinity is profitable, then that would likely be one of it’s more valuable assets for someone else to buy. Who knows, a few years later, even the original owners could buy it back at fire sale prices, not like that hasn’t happened before.
Likely not, but it seems they want to try, otherwise there’s no reason or point in buying the Affinity group of applications that I think you would agree are aimed at competing against the Adobe equivalents. How successful they are at doing that is no doubt up for debate.
I know Gimp is no longer in this place, but I remember years ago when you’d see some Gimp fanboi (hm, that’s a sort of creepy combo of phrasing) saying
“Gimp is just as great as Photoshop, you IDIOTS!”
Gimp doesn’t do CMYK.
What’s CMYK?
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Whatever they say now doesn’t matter. It’s all PR talk.
They’ve already went back on their word. Which was also their unique proposition. This is WHY people are pissed. We (Affinity paid users) just don’t trust them anymore to screw us even more down the line.
You can’t be a virgin twice. They’ve made their decision. Now all they can do is to deal with the fall out and figure out how to move forward based in what their TRUE goals are and not what they announce.
We, as users, have to do pretty much the same. Reevaluate what this means for each of us and our businesses and do necessary adjustments.
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It’s not common for acquired companies to be sold off- the acquired company was usually already shuttered long before the desperation point as a cost-cutting measure. Paying the salaries of 90 developers is a massive drain on resources - I promise most of them will be gone within the year, and with no one left to work on Affinity, why keep it around?
Assuming they make a (low) average of 80k a year, that’s 7.2 million dollars a year, not counting taxes and benefits, Canva is now on the hook for. If they run low on money, that’s the easiest possible way to get 7.2 million dollars. And again, with developers gone, what’s the point of keeping the software around? You can’t maintain it or make bug fixes. You can’t make updates or justify working on it