Three stories of tools that refused to sell out
Middle finger coming out of a phone at a big bag of money
Lately I’ve been writing critically about the current state of tech. So much of it feels infested with ads, deceptive design patterns or erosions of privacy all engineered to squeeze every last drop of engagement out of our already overstimulated grey matter. So as a contrast, I thought it’d be worth remembering that not all technology follows this trajectory.
At this point, many of us have grown so accustomed to terrible treatment from our tech providers that we mistake it for the natural order of things. I wrote an article last week about YouTube’s slow shift from serving users to serving advertisers, and someone commented: “Sadly, as long as the internet is largely ‘free,’ then there will always be ads. Always 🫠🫠🫠.” And while I get the feeling. Sometimes it really feels like we’re like travellers stuck in an airport terminal, forced to accept whatever fate awaits us, because there’s nowhere else to go. But there are more examples than you’d think of technology that has stayed open, portable, and most importantly put people over profit!
I’ll be sharing the stories of three of my favourites: Blender, OBS, and Penpot. One uniting thread across all these apps is these tools were built out of necessity, born from frustration, and carried forward by creators who wanted something better for themselves and others.
Blender render with logo overtop
Blender, for those who don’t know, is an open-source 3D modeling and animation tool currently sitting near the tipy top of its category. It’s used by world-class VFX studios all over the world and, as of 2020, had over 14 million downloads, a number that continues to grow year over year. It’s an incredibly successful project and believe it or not you don’t have to pay the low-price of $12.99 a month to get a subscription to it. There’s no hidden upsell, no temporary trial access, no marketing funnel to trap you in. It is free, fully open source, and wickedly powerful.
Blender was originally created in the early ’90s inside a Dutch animation studio called NeoGeo. It began as an internal tool, something practical that made life easier for the artists who worked there. After the studio went belly up, Blender’s creator, Ton Roosendaal, tried to keep the project alive through a startup called Not a Number (NaN). He roped in some investors, made a splash, and then the dot-com bubble popped and evaporated the funding and stopped Blender in its tracks.
The tool was effectively locked away: trapped in the hands of investors, sitting unnoticed in a folder full of failed acquisitions gathering dust in some corporate archive alongside other abandoned experiments. That very well could’ve been the end of the story, but its creator Ton had seen the impact the tool had on the community. He knew what it meant for artists to have access to something this capable without needing to pay. So he did something wild at the time, he launched a campaign to buy Blender back from corporate limbo. Remember, this is pre kickstarter, grassroots tech funding movements weren’t all the rage. He needed 100,000 euros to reclaim the rights and release it from corporate exile.
Armed with a mailing list and a landing page he mobilized the community. Artists, hobbyists, students, tinkerers all threw a coin in the hat and in just seven weeks, he raised the entire amount. A regular ol’ Bernie-Sanders-style grassroots fundraiser. Blender was released as fully open-source software under the GNU license, and the Blender Foundation was born, a nonprofit stewarding a public tool.
Today, Blender is funded through a donation-driven development fund supported by companies like Ubisoft, Meta, NVIDIA, and thousands of individuals who believe in its mission. It remains one of the clearest examples we have of community-driven, people first software.
Another thing I found, across all these stories is that somewhere at the centre, there’s usually a quietly stubborn technical weirdo holding the line, resisting the gravitational pull of the cash-out. That’s certainly the case with OBS. For those who aren’t familiar, OBS is best-in-class when it comes to live-streaming. If you’ve ever watched a livestream, you’ve almost certainly seen OBS in action. And the “lowly technical saint” who built it goes by Hugh “Jim” Bailey. His aim wasn’t to create the most widely used tool for streamers, it was to try and build something better for himself so he could stream StarCraft II… That’s it. Just a programmer trying to share a game he loved.
But that’s what matters, oftentimes we forget that the DNA of the people who build these tools infuses into the technology. There’s a weird Frankenstein effect when it comes to technology. In my opinion, understanding who stitched the monster together often helps you understand how a tool ends up the way it does. I find that this is perfectly illustrated by Spotify. It presents itself as a music company, but its founders Daniel Ek, who sold his ad-tech company Advertigo to TradeDoubler, and Martin Lorentzon, the co-founder of TradeDoubler, one of Europe’s largest online advertising networks. They were not record crate-diggers or historians of music. They were ad-tech entrepreneurs looking for a scalable payload for programmatic advertising, and music simply happened to be the cheapest, most convenient content vehicle. Spotify is what you get when you pour ad-tech DNA into a music platform.
When Jim Bailey released OBS, he spent the first three years answering every forum post, every bug report, every direct message. He was in the trenches with the people using his tool. He saw the struggles of beginners. He saw the streamers who depended on OBS to earn an income or build a community. And because he was so close to the people using the software, he never once saw them as assets. He saw them as peers.
So when OBS exploded in popularity and Jim started receiving acquisition offers in the seven-figure range, he didn’t acquiesce. He thought about what it means to hand his peers, millions of them, to people who probably didn’t care about them the way he did. Jim is not a public figure, so finding quotes from him is rare, but in a podcast he did with Pete Wilkins on the Gaming Careers show, he put it plainly in two quotes that I love:
and the succinct, but dripping with his ethos:
This was clearly not a financially “smart” move. Today, OBS is maintained by a tiny core team and a smattering of volunteer contributors. OBS remained open not because it was easy, but because its creator refused to sell the people who depended on it.
The last example I want to touch should be near and dear to the heart of every product designer. Penpot! Penpot was created by a company called Kaleidos, a decade-old studio that originally operated as a kind of elite technical/research partner for hire. Their full name Kaleidos Open Source reflected a very real internal philosophy: they only used open-source tools, they built for their clients using open-source tools, and they carved out protected time to create their own open software.
Penpot logo surrounded by UI graphics
For years, Kaleidos was a developer-centric team. They outsourced most of the design work, and that worked fine, until one day they had to hire their first internal designers. That’s when their philosophy came face to face with reality. While developers frolic in an open-source oasis, designers were stuck with a collection of janky, slow, unpolished tools that barely, and I mean barely met professional standards. The truth was the design team simply didn’t have open-source equivalents of the quality that developers took for granted. So while the designers loved the ethos, the tools just weren’t good enough and they needed Figma. So Kaleidos conceded. They broke their own rule. But they broke it with a single condition:
“We’ll use Figma… but while we use it, we’ll build the Figma killer.” Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz, founder of Penpot & Kaleidos
And that is how Penpot was born! Early versions were rough, but Penpot has come a long way in just a few years. And since its release in February of 2021, Kaleidos fully committed to just working on their own tools and shut down their client-services business entirely!
They call themselves the Figma Killer because they’re an ambition team. Though maybe not the ambition we think of when we picture ambitious people. Not the Machiavellian business man dressed to the nines, stepping out of some expensive sports car working their way up a corporate ladder to give an inspiring talk at some conference full of suits. This is a different ambition, a moral ambition, which drives companies like Kaleidos to build products that put the power of tools into people’s hands. It’s hard to imagine being in a position of building a tool that you put blood sweat and tears into and not wanting the greatest remuneration possible, but the reason that all three of these founders are able to do it is because their ambition isn’t monetary, it’s about impact. They want people to feel like they have autonomy and are empowered.
When you step back from these stories: Blender, OBS, Penpot all show a pattern. They didn’t become popular because of market positioning or manipulative growth and monetization strategies. They became what they are because the people behind them had values that were strong enough to resist selling out their users.
Each of these tools carries the fingerprint of its creator’s worldview. Software is not neutral. It inherits the values of the people who make it. We treat platform decay as inevitable. But I think that inevitability story favours the people making the choice of profit over people.
And that’s why these three examples matter so much. They remind us that it is still possible, even now, even in this tech climate to build software rooted in generosity, openness, and respect. To build tools that don’t treat users like resources to mine and exist because someone cared more about enabling others rather than maximizing returns. We need more of that kind of ambition.
When software has integrity was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.