[Johnny555]

How exactly does one create designs of their own without importing them?

I'm not a Cricut user, but Cricut said:

“Any project created within Design Space with images or fonts found in Design Space can be modified and do not count as a personal image upload. If users want to use images from other applications, such as a .jpg or .png, and upload those images to Design Space, that counts as a personal image upload.”

And I didn't say anything about legal. It probably is, and I'm sure they're team vetted it too.

Then I think we're arguing the same point -- what Cricut did is bad, but probably legal and well within their rights and it is what happens when people embrace closed platforms without understanding the drawbacks.

It's the same thing that leads people to buy $80 inkjet printers that only work with DRM'ed inkjet cartridges that cost $60 for a set of cartridges that contain $3 worth of ink.

[ddingus]

Yeah for what it's worth I don't buy those shitty printers either.

My favorite printer of all time with a PostScript printer my tektronix, made later by Xerox. You could literally FTP a PostScript file to it. And it without put a page. Loved it.

Printers pissed me off so much I don't currently own one. And I have a need coming up so I'm shopping around for some open basic printer that I can get used, or even pay a little more for new, that doesn't hassle me in these ways, and that can be driven with relatively open data.

Otherwise, it's cheaper just by few pages down then, or print where there printers available and deal. Which is exactly what I've done.

[ddingus]

Ultimately, work done that way is work done entirely within the scope and limitation of their software.

Ask anyone in design about how good those kinds of solutions are. There's a lot better software out there for doing design work. That makes all of what you put here a very severe limitation on how useful the machine actually is.