In an earlier blog I wrote about Gravit Designer, a very extensive, professional, open source and free vector solution for Linux. Gravit Designer is a powerful design application that offers a good interface, is accessible to beginners but also offers enough for advanced users, offers many special functionalities, supports local and cloud storage and supports multiple platforms. I was very enthusiastic about this good looking tool. But now we received the news that Corel is taking over Gravit Designer. What is the impact of that?
In my opinion, the application Gravit Designer is so good that I wondered at the time of writing my previous post what the revenue model could be of the underlying organization to be able to justify the free provision of both a desktop and a web variant and also a free cloud environment.
Now the news: on 22 June software developer and provider Corel announced via the website of Gravit Designer that they have taken over this application from Gravit GmbH. The development team will be included in the existing team of Corel.
Corel itself indicates that the Gravit products fit well with the already extensive software portfolio for graphic and digital media with CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, Corel Painter and PaintShop Pro. Corel also indicates that current users can rest assured, because they are planning to keep a free version of Gravit available and are looking for a premium offer for those who want to go further.
The question is of course what the future of the free version will actually look like. Corel is a commercial company and in the first place, of course, offers products to make provit from it. Nothing wrong with this of course, but the driver behind the Gravit Designer software changes a bit more of a real passion to make something beautiful in a product driven by different and possibly conflicting forces. It is therefore the question of what the free version will then have to offer, since it is of course not normal practice to cannibalize the paid version too much. It is unclear to what extent Gravit Designer maintains the open source character: can developers still influence the source code in the future?
In my opinion, Gravit Designer is absolutely the best free open source vector solution for Linux. It would be a shame to have to deliver on that in the future. So wait and find out. I will keep you all posted in case of new news.
