A design professor on replacing Apple and Adobe with open alternatives
We recently discovered an excellent article published by Brent Patterson (Assistant Professor of Design at State University of New York College at Buffalo) describing how open hardware and software have replaced the use of proprietary tools in both his creative process and approach to teaching. In particular, open solutions have supplanted Apple laptops and Adobe design software—and the results are thoroughly impressive.
Some of the many highlights from his article (which we encourage you to read in total):
- "[Open source design software is] getting easier to use, becoming more stable and often becoming more powerful than similar proprietary software."
- "[Adobe's] Creative Cloud subscription system is a response to the fact that one day their product won’t be as relevant. If you have built your work with Adobe products but cancel your subscription . . . you no longer can edit your work . . . you must continue to pay Adobe every month or whenever you want to access your own files."
- "Under heavy development for over ten years by the open source community, Blender is in many ways now more powerful, capable and stable than Autodesk’s [proprietary and expensive] Maya."
- "I can edit photos, edit video, create sophisticated 3D and 2D animations, design and layout publications for print, as well as design and produce music all with free and open source software running on a cheap home made computer running Linux."
- "By learning with free and open source, students learn to be more resourceful, more inquisitive, and they own the software in a much more meaningful way."
Patterson touches on many aspects of closed systems that we've blogged about before. These include the drawbacks of Apple's closed computer designs (which Patterson also calls out for unreliability, poor value-for-money, and an app ecosystem designed to keep customers locked-in), and the many risks associated with Adobe's Creative Cloud suite.
While the historical key attractive feature with open source was the zero initial cost, this is largely becoming secondary to open source products that are actually superior in features and functionality compared with their proprietary counterparts—not to mention the sustained, long-term cost benefits from using open document standards. We expect to see a growing number of examples similar to Patterson's in the near future.
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