Penpot

Welcome to the #20th (🎉) edition of Open Pioneers - your weekly update from the forefront of open source. Today, we talk about:

• Penpot, an open source alternative to Figma

• New open source projects, including:

  • OpenGlass: Turn any glasses into AI-powered smart glasses.

  • Crawl4AI: Open source LLM-friendly web crawler & scrapper.

  • Dingify: Unlock the power of seamless real-time monitoring.

• Tax credits for open source developers

• Funding news from Jack Dorsey, LanceDB, and Pythagora AI

• And more open source content

Since last week, we have welcomed 47 new Open Pioneers. 👋 If you like this week's post, it would make my day if you would share it with a friend or colleague.

🔍 Spotlight: Penpont, an open source alternative to Figma

Penpot is an open source, web-based design tool that bridges the gap between designers and developers. It aims to streamline collaboration and eliminate the traditional "hand-off" process by allowing designers to create interfaces that are natively expressed as code (CSS, SVG, HTML). This enables developers to easily understand and implement the designs without translation issues. Some key features of Penpot include:

• Powerful design capabilities with tools for creating complex layouts, animations, and prototypes.

• Designs are built using open web standards like CSS, making them easily understandable for developers.

• Seamless collaboration between designers and developers through a shared codebase.

• Integration with existing developer toolchains via APIs and webhooks.

• A vibrant community contributing libraries, templates, and driving the project's development.

Penpot is gaining popularity among organizations of all sizes, including many open source projects, as it eliminates the traditional friction between design and development teams. Its open nature and adherence to web standards make it an interesting alternative to proprietary design tools like Figma.

Website | GitHub | Twitter

🔥 New open source projects started last week

💡Idea: Tax credits for open source developers

The idea of an open source tax credit is to provide a way for individual developers contributing to open-source projects to receive tax benefits, similar to how corporations can write off expenses related to software development.

Currently, individuals cannot claim tax deductions for their unpaid work on open source software, while corporations can deduct costs associated with developing both commercial and open-source software. An open source tax credit would allow individual developers to write off their time and expenses spent on open-source projects, incentivizing more contributions to the open-source ecosystem.

Read more about the idea in this article.

💰 Open source funding

• Jack Dorsey pledges $21M toward open source development to advance Bitcoin Link

• LanceDB raises $11M to build an open source multimodal AI database for app development Link

• Y-Combinator-backed Pythagora AI secures $4M for open source app development with AI Link

📚 More open source content

• The new fintech stack is... open source? Link

• Post-Open licensing could offer software devs funding alternatives Link

• Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps Link

• IBM releases Granite Code AI Models to open source community Link

• Establishing a security baseline for open source projects Link

• This Seattle AI startup is entirely open source Link

Until next week,

Jonathan (@jonathimer)