“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones

A developer identified as Thomas has announced an effort to build open-source alternatives to Adobes Creative Cloud apps, saying the projects will be released under permissive MIT and Apache licenses. Thomas, who said he has roughly ten years of experience on large-scale Rust projects, told Hacker News that repeated friction with commercial software cancellation fees motivated him to pursue freely licensed replacements.

The planned applications will integrate the existing ArtCraft visual AI model and IDE as an optional feature; access to that model will be sold on a token basis to generate revenue that Thomas says will sustain the projects. He framed the funding approach as a way to avoid the common fate of small open-source efforts becoming unsupported: "We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded," he wrote.

Screenshots and descriptions show at least one app, Filmcraft, closely replicating the appearance and workflow of Adobe Premiere. Thomas also posted a broader claim that AI tools enabled him to rapidly produce functionally equivalent versions of complex proprietary software, asserting he had effectively "one-shotted Photoshop." He described a future in which developers use similar methods to build open replacements for major tech products such as search engines and smartphones.

Legal and practical challenges remain. While reverse engineering for functionality has frequently been held lawful, the ArtCraft apps could face trade-dress or other intellectual-property disputes if their interfaces are judged too similar to Adobes. Thomass project is also unfinished and positioned as ambitious and early-stage rather than a drop-in substitute for mature commercial suites.