Ars Technica reports that software developer Brandon Thomas, whose Artcraft brand began as a controllable AI image editor, has pivoted to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the interfaces and tools of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. Thomas said he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to build the clean-room replacements in Rust, with WebAssembly builds for the browser, and released the apps under MIT and Apache licenses. He told Reddit and Hacker News that development of the free apps would be funded by selling token-based access to the underlying Artcraft visual AI model and IDE, which appears inside the apps alongside third-party models, arguing that revenue stream keeps the project from becoming ‘some orphaned small-team project’. Commenters on Hacker News highlighted the early alpha’s shortcomings, and Thomas walked back an initial claim of reaching 100 percent feature parity within a month to say 99 percent parity would take months rather than years. Ars noted that while reverse engineering functionality without copying code has generally been found legally acceptable, the clones could face legal trouble if their trade dress too closely mimics Adobe’s interfaces, and that Thomas has since February coded exclusively with AI tools and predicts a near future of open source 1:1 equivalents of popular paid software.
"Software is over": Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones
Ars Technica reports that software developer Brandon Thomas, whose Artcraft brand began as a controllable AI image editor, has pivoted to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the interfaces and tools of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the clean-room replacements in Rust, with WebAssembly builds for the browser, and released the apps under MIT and Apache licenses. He told Reddit and Hacker News that development of the free apps would be funded by selling token-based access to the underlying Artcraft visual AI model and IDE, which appears inside the apps alongside third-party models, arguing that revenue stream keeps the project from becoming 'some orphaned small-team project'. Commenters on Hacker News highlighted the early alpha's shortcomings, and Thomas walked back an initial claim of reaching 100 percent feature parity within a month to say 99 percent parity would take months rather than years. Ars noted that while reverse engineering functionality without copying code has generally been found legally acceptable, the clones could face legal trouble if their trade dress too closely mimics Adobe's interfaces, and that Thomas has since February coded exclusively with AI tools and predicts a near future of open source 1:1 equivalents of popular paid software.
Source: Arstechnica