~~Creator~~ instructor

None of them work as intended and we already have free options why is this a headline

I don't think this is going to amount to anything; the rate he's popping these out suggest he's more motivated by making a point and/or prestige than getting something useful at the end, and turning these enormous codebases nobody has any intuition for into something maintainable is going to be grueling work that will make them wish they started from scratch. But if we imagine that this will go somewhere:

Wouldn't that be bad for open source in the long run?

Businesses, certainly not the larger ones, are not going to touch this for various reasons. So while Adobe and Microsoft may take a hit, it's not going to fundamentally harm their business models. Students, on the other hand, can't afford the real thing. If that leads to them to alternatives like LibreOffice, GIMP, or Krita, then when they end up in the workforce, there's going to be at least some pressure to let them use the tools they're used to. In fact, I use LibreOffice at work. But if they can have something that looks and feels exactly like Adobe's and Microsoft's products, they'll feel right at home with the real thing at work.

Great, more slop

As many free alternatives as there were before the rampant vibecoding, it seems that this growing collection of tools is not only functional, but a message to the large companies as well. Most of these apps are still far from what they intend to replace, however, so we'll have to see how deep this message cuts.

Blood in the water for Adobe. Acrobat is a steaming pile of garbage. My org worked with their engineering team to track down a bug that we reported. They affirmed the bug (app hangs on launch) and then took four to five months fixing it.

I've worked in software engineering. I know that debugging, patching, testing, verifying is difficult. But the enterprise license costs a lot and that was a very long time with a crippling bug. The only satisfactory answer (to me) is that they don't feel urgency because they are entrenched without real competition. They need to wake up.

(No, I don't think vibe-coded Acrobat replacements will unseat them. I think LLM-powered real devs will come for them because the moat is smaller.)

I'm pretty happy with libre office. Not keen on AI code

Open source tools for all of these use cases have existed for over a decade and people still buy both adobe and Microsoft office. I don't think some slop apps are going to change that.

I'm a Microsoft hater but I don't think this will changes the wider publics opinion on them?

Open office and libreoffice have been around a good while now.

not interested in openslop

Massive nothing burger, those sloppy clones are fucking terrible in production, and dont believe me, look it up yourself.

Id love for it to be really of substantial value as it is now though.

"creator" my ass

Why doesn’t the dev rather work on specific features sets on one existing project instead of building half baked fleet of slop.

It's funny, but we've had LibreOffice for years. I'll take the human made one, thanks.

But continue making the unaccountable Epstein class uncomfortable. Autodesk next, yes please. I'll still use FreeCAD but boy is it quirky lol.

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?

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?

Even if these are slop it forces the large ai pushers to make some decisions regarding copyright. I hope.

I think (from a layman's perspective) that these would have far more potential if they didn't fully commit to the "100% from scratch reimplementation in Rust, btw" bit. Especially for this Office suite, where a wealth of options already exist that they could build upon (LibreOffice, OnlyOffice/EuroOffice, Collabora Desktop) for more proven support of these formats.

That said, I hope they decide to vibe clone Clip Studio Paint someday, then there'd finally be an open-source tool that can open .clip files. And maybe that could even allow someone else to implement the format in Krita, GIMP and the like

This is quite literally one of the best things of this fucking century. Imagine what is going to happen to these mother fuckers and their bottom line. They have been a knife in Linux’ side for decades holding so many people from switching and now look at this. Your love or hate towards AI right now actually doesn’t matter, because the end result is way greater than it. I’m rejoicing hard over this

Where's the legal limit?

If I use AI to make and sell a Ford truck, will Ford sue and we can get precedent that AI use is still a copyright violation?

Man, imagine the financial crisis vibe-coded Excel usage will cause.

FOSS clones for software just to work on closed overengineered standards is stupid. We have had markdown for decades but still prefer oblong zip-xml files for writing rich text and slides!? Absurd.

Excel is the only MS Office product that makes sense to exist, and thus carries the brand to dominance largely by itself. Docs and slides have already been solved; I wish devs just focused on making the perfect Excel clone and abandon looking at all other MSOffice programs.

I love it! Big tech wants control of everything. They put out AI, that they can't control, and we have open source models breathing down their necks. (Imo the worst case scenario isn't AI wiping us out but being entirely subservient and in control of the psycho pdf billionaires)

And now AI is breaking down closed software moats. I really hope this becomes a trend. And it's not like they can get frontier the AI labs to stop this, cos that wouldn't stop everyone else.

Also imagine all the crap analytics and spyware all these closed source software products have in them. Let's decompile every single one and hang the companies with it. Let's reverse engineer every "smart car" software and disable all connectivity. Let's make any IoT device work with Home Assistant. Let's drive John Deer into bankruptcy.

I'd take open source AI code any day over adobe or amazon or meta's shit.

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.

I want to coin a new term: Slop’n’source

Comedy gold.