Open SourceBrandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
Lots of anti-AI sentiments in here and I get that, but I'd like to discuss the implications here, cause this is actually somewhat revolutionary.
If I can just take any software and reverse-engineer it or recreate it to a precision that is practically indistinguishable from the original (not saying it really is in this case, but for the sake of discussion) and I then have copyright over that copy, doesn't that turn things on it's head? Doesn't that make software essentially worthless? Any software you sell someone, they can recreate and distribute for free, legally (presumably). I suppose we've yet to see if this will really turn out to be legal, but it's hard to argue how this is illegal, I would say - how is this different than a human closely studying Microsoft Word and "simply" writing their own version of the same program?
I'm not sure if this is good or bad honestly, but it sure is interesting. Anyone else have thoughts around how this affects the worth of software?
In broad terms this is already covered.
If you made an exact clone of Photoshop by hand you'd get sued into oblivion, and that would be effective because of the barrier to entry ( in time and resources ) you'd need to get to that point.
Meaning you'd be betting all that upfront effort/resource on the a major corporation either not caring, or not being able to mount a reasonable litigation strategy.
Not many actors would be willing to risk that.
The difference here is that the barrier is now much lower and it tangles up a whole bunch of other potential issues around the legality of vibe code.
Regardless of how it shakes out it will almost certainly be a set of rules that only really apply to the peasants.
"If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.”
If you made an exact clone of Photoshop
Yes but you wouldn't actually need to make your clone very different for the copyright to be entirely different and then surely you wouldn't get sued? And I think in this case, it is definitely sufficiently different, it's a completely different tech stack and while the UI is similar, it's probably not identical (I haven't checked though). But also you can't really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
Also worth remembering that different countries may have different stances on this. I'm curious how the EU might handle it.
isn't Artcraft's products vide coded?
and yep they are
ngl its impressive Claude can replicate programs
Should this be allowed here in !opensource@lemmy.ml?
It is obviously built using Claude, ~~but it is not (as I first thought) a project that started a month ago - the first commit in the current repo is from a month ago but it refers to their previous ("multi-hundred GB" lol) git repo. So this is actually built on something with history going back to before the vibe coding era.~~ (edit: actually i take it back, i see now photocraft started on september 30 and the commit message on the second commit is "one-shot" 🫠)
I see the project lead's two most recent posts on the site formerly known as twitter are disparaging LibreOffice and Gimp and Kdenlive.
Until yesterday this part was under a "fair source" (meaning not open source) license but now it has been relicensed MIT + Apache 🤔
Have you actually tried any of these 12 apps yet, OP? Are they any good, or are they just marketing for a service reselling genAI tokens?
The second twitter one is infuriating
"Come on, y'all know this" is the best they could come up with to argue that their slopware is better than these long established huge open source projects that have been worked on for decades as opposed to a week
looks inside
slop
To be fair you'd get more or less the same result if you looked inside any modern microsoft product, and they'd ask you to pay for the privilege on top...
(Of course replacing slop with different flavour slop, even if it's cheaper, doesn't accomplish much; better to use properly developed software like LibreOffice.)
No I haven't tried any of these 12 apps, I am perfectly happy with Gimp, affinity photo and LibreOffice. I posted this because for one, the opensource community three days ago had a fervent conversation about photocraft, the same developer. Secondly, as written in the rules of the community it says "feel free to ask questions and share news, and interesting stuff."
I am not promoting anything AI, in fact I hate the direction it is going in and the threat it poses to real developers. That said, there is clearly a plenty of schadenfreude that comes from this, nobody can't deny its sweet to extend the middle finger to these megacorps.
Not sure where you get the idea that I posted this as a marketing ploy reselling genAI tokens?
Not sure where you get the idea that I posted this as a marketing ploy reselling genAI tokens?
Sorry if it seems like I meant to imply that that was your intention; i did look at your profile before asking and saw that you aren't a spammer :)
However, it seems like reselling tokens is the primary business model of the company which has presumably just spent a significant amount of dollars worth of tokens to vibe code this suite of software.
Whether they have actually produced a dozen useful apps which many people will actually use, or merely made something which is just barely functional enough to get a bunch of free marketing hype, is not yet clear to me. They have certainly succeeded in getting a lot of press, though.
I want to coin a new term: Slop’n’source
Sloppy sauce
I'm pretty happy with libre office. Not keen on AI code
While it's pretty funny that one of Microsoft's crown jewels gets shit on with AI, I don't want to start the pro- or contra AI discussion, but what now? They reverse engineered or rebuild, or however you want to call it, all of Office, Autodesk, hell, for the fun of it do SAP next. Even assuming a perfectly working copy, not getting sued into oblivion, and not the dude going into bankruptcy due to Claude token costs - but what now? There is no way they can manage several repositories of this size alone properly (no, claude doesn't count). There is no way this gets the community and traction to self-manage.
Apart from a ridiculous invoice from Claude and proof that frontier LLMs can reverse engineer / clone well (...duh), this is a big pile of nothing.
FOSS communities probably won't form around most of these projects, as you said. Assuming the software can be managed by a few people with LLMs, likely local in the very near future, it's quite possible that plenty end users who didn't use FOSS before would jump on these instead of paying money to MS or Adobe. That in itself is a huge win for the majority. Depriving MS from revenue that is. Then for community FOSS, this has potentially significant positive implications about our biggest challenge - dealing with proprietary formats and proprietary blobs. This could mean perfect .doc/.docx compatibility in LibreOffice. It could mean a perfectly working nouveau driver for NVIDIA GPUs. How about fixing the tons of bugs we workaround in motherboard firmware. Or fixing that corner case in Wine so it can run your fav obscure game. Or reverse-engineering communication protocol of cloud-connected IoT to integrate it in Home Assistant. Etc. Etc.
In short: FOSS is a social activity. Assuming this method can produce very good source from binaries, that itself won't create FOSS communities, but FOSS communities can use it to significantly improve the FOSS they care about.
While I personally think you are right, I don't think that any "serious" FOSS project will use sources from a fully LLM generated project.
They could go straight to the nuclear stuff and make a liberated version of Oracle's VirtualBox. Would become as popular as Robin Hood.
Well, there is no lack of good OpenSource Office suites out there, most made in Europe, LibreOffice, Calligra, OnlyOffice, CryptPad, Euro-Office, ZetaOffice. Collabora Office, Murena Workspace......
You can prey LaTeX from my cold dead hands....
not interested in openslop
So who’s going to go ahead and reverse engineer drop in replacements for all the proprietary tech that keeps these oligarch money engines alive on consumer and business markets for professional software protected by giant moats of development work?
From how I see the situation: same people as before: nobody.
I gladly welcome this AI slop. It doesn’t hurt us. Actually the opposite. This shit is a thorn in the side of the worst companies. Particularly, companies that are also shoving AI down our throats. Let’s shove a little AI down their throats for once, huh?
So who’s going to go ahead and reverse engineer drop in replacements for all the proprietary tech that keeps these oligarch money engines alive on consumer and business markets for professional software protected by giant moats of development work?
I’m aware of the the suite including LibreOffice. It’s not popular with exactly the user base we’re concerned with here. Mostly because of aesthetic and integrations. If you dumped a hundred thousand dev hours into it, I’m sure it could find its way there. Otherwise, it’s still an excellent choice for who would otherwise be Linux users anyhow.
However, LibreOffice shouldn’t have to copy Microsoft. It would be ashame if it did too much.
This project, on the other hand, is precisely doing a clean room copy of Microsoft’s (et al) software. Not only does it go further as a drop-in replacement, but it’s also a form of protest in itself.
Even if these are slop it forces the large ai pushers to make some decisions regarding copyright. I hope.
AI, fucked by the very things its copied off of. If AI companies don't get in trouble, neither should these clones/forks.
Same with pirating content. People only pirate because costs have continuously rose. Otherwise, if it were affordable, no one would need to pirate.
It is funny though. Microsoft being undermined by the very thing they’re using to undermine working class people.
Funny seeing people losing their shit yet again in front of "AI" claims...
Like all the other spectacular previous claims that is not mentioned: it's a bird with half wings - it does not fly.
I also created a Photoshop clone, the only caveat is it crashes at start, BUT I TOTALLY DID IT!
Did you try it? No. You concluded that if it works, your worldview breaks, so it cannot work.
But someone tried it.
https://lemmy.ml/post/53794973
(Don't look at the post I linked, your fragile worldview can't handle that)
I watched the video (partially because I can't stand it, such annoying video).
So what's your point?? Go use it if that's your turf, don't come around insulting me for no reason.
Do you have a skin in that fame? Why are you so uptight about a vibecoded project? And you are all on the defensive while telling me I have a fragile worldview he he... Projection? Maybe?
There are ton of missing features, buggy ones, crashes.. What's the point of your dummy doing some tests on the slop?
My point was/is: it seems easy to claims victory these days with half a winning battle.
My point still hold, while yours seem moot.
Good day my little world shattering wannabe ;)
Tbf they're replacing other vibecoded slopware... Can't be much worse than what it's going after - and at least it's free.
Great, more slop
Well, if thanks to this we finally get open office to figure whatever tricks MS used to get documents to render fully correctly ONLY in office, consider me in.
Yeah, why would you waste time with these instead of Gimp, OpenOffice, etc? Except for the clicks.
i assume this person is making a statement more than anything. but gimp is not an adobe alternative. affinity is but not gimp. but since this is an open source commjnity i should point out affinity is not open source
Is OpenOffice still maintained?
Yeah, there are already good alternatives for the office package. I don't see why anyone would use a slop version instead of them.
I can't say anything about Photoshop and autodesk since I don't use them.
I agree, then I remember those infuriating pricks asking "Can I draw a circle in GIMP yet?" in every thread about updates. The slop is for those people.
You've obviously never used Photoshop or GIMP because if you have then you would immediately understand why. GIMP is a completely different experience, and its UX is far inferior to Photoshop. On top of that, anybody who is used to the workflow in Photoshop will have a very steep learning curve using GIMP.
Believe it or not, but most people just want a tool that works for what they're trying to do. These apps have some bugs and rough edges still, but they're very much usable and make it trivial to switch for anybody who's used to Photoshop.
The venn diagram of what GIMP does and what Photoshop does isn’t the singular circle people assume. I, too, loathed my time with GIMP wondering how it ever got so popular in the OSS community, but then you realize it’s kind of all they have so of course they’ll support it no matter what.
I haven’t used it in years and based on that experience, I’m not rushing to try it again anytime soon. The UI felt like a UX designer’s prank on the world.
Yeah, you should definitely try using it again - especially since the big 3.0 release.
Menus and tool names/functions still do not map perfectly onto Photoshop's (it is its own thing after all, so why should it?), but it is a serious and sophisticated piece of software. Easily adequate for my professional reproduction work.
I switched to it from Photoshop two or three years ago and had to spend a few hours watching tutorials and reading the manual to make the transition. But now there is hardly anything I can't do in GIMP at least as fast, easily and reliably as I could in Photoshop.
I've been using the recent versions of GIMP and it's surprisingly usable. Of course tools are a bit different and in different places compared to Photoshop, but that goes for any software.
Yeah, these are very different tools. And yeah UX in GIMP is something else.
It's very obviously better to have open tools than closed ones. This whole screeching about slop is both incredibly tiresome and irrational in the extreme. These are new tools that make software development easier, people are making useful things with them, and they're helping people move off proprietary software. That's obviously a net positive.
If you don't like the tools people are using go ahead and make something comparable by hand, except we both know that you can't. So, you're adding nothing constructive to the discussion here.
LibreOffice?
For an office suite LibreOffice is fine, although compatibility with MS Office is still spotty. But for graphics there really aren't drop in replacements for Adobe apps right now.
At the end of the day, I don't really care what tools software is made with. Either it works well or it doesn't. You can make quality projects using LLMs and you can make really shitty software without them. The deciding factor in both cases is skill ans knowledge of the developer building the app.
Excuse me, do you call this open source?
For real. I can open source my valueable projects to you. But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?
Hell, every piece of JavaScript code on Earth is technically open source. If you can read assembly, everything is open source.
Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit. The intention of opening the source code is welcoming auditing, learning, contributing, to name a few.
"Opening" the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.
I’m guessing they believe it meets the OSI definition of open source. Essentially that the code is licensed for redistribution.
Does this have tons of meaningless boilerplate and hard to follow call chains? I have read part of the source, and what I’ve seen looks pretty well organized, but if that is how you think the current models write code, you’ve missed many months.
Edit: Just clarified a single sentence.
But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?
That you would not distribute the original source code, right? That is A source code, not THE. The generated source code by Claude Ai is THE new source code, there is no higher code generated from it. It is the implementation, the original source. It has an Open Source license. They do not mangle it and distribute a manipulated mangled version and hide the original source code.
What you criticize is the quality of code. But that is not a definition if something is Open Source. By all definitions, the distribution of original source code and a license compatible with Open Source is basically what Open Source means.
Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit.
Correct. It requires a license compatible with Open Source, which it is in this case.
“Opening” the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.
This is irrelevant for a definition to be Open Source or not.
Then the mangled version you released is open sourced. The phrase “open source” isn’t really that complicated. The word that’s complicated is “free.” You didn’t release your software freely. Your software is still caged behind a transpilation, unfree.
