The perils of open source software

I like using open source soft­ware wher­ever I can. It’s not just a cost issue, I strongly believe in choice in the mar­ket­place and there are too many soft­ware monop­o­lies out there. But while open source may not cost any­thing to acquire, it doesn’t mean it’s totally with­out cost. For instance, Inkscape. It’s a vector-based draw­ing pro­gram (think Adobe Illus­tra­tor) that uses the open SVG stan­dard for files. Although it’s only a ver­sion 0.47, it’s been fairly usable for years. But usable as it may be, there are still times when it doesn’t work quite right.

Yes­ter­day I went look­ing for Inkscape logo tuto­ri­als and found one I liked here. It took a lit­tle work but I man­aged to fol­low it and cre­ate a logo I liked. I saved it and closed Inkscape. Then (cue dra­matic music) I tried to open it again. Yes, I was a fool. Because it can not be opened by Inkscape 0.47 on Win­dows 7. That’s right, it cre­ated a file it could not open. I have no idea why. I’d open a bug report with the devel­op­ers but there’s no infor­ma­tion avail­able other than the crash itself. So that logo style is out.

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