AI developer builds open source alternatives to Adobe software

A developer known as Thomas has released open source software intended as an alternative to Adobe products. He explained the idea on Hacker News, saying he was prompted to act after being caught out by Adobe's cancellation fees once too often.

Thomas says he has around ten years of experience working on large-scale Rust projects. His apps are completely free and distributed under MIT and Apache licenses. One of them, Filmcraft, closely imitates the look and feel of Adobe Premiere.

Funding

Development is to be paid for by selling token-based access to the existing Artcraft visual AI model and development environment. It is offered inside the apps as an image-generation option alongside third-party models. According to Thomas, this should keep the apps from becoming an abandoned small-team project, since his team already builds popular software for filmmakers.

Legal risks

Thomas is one of many programmers using AI to speed up reverse engineering, meaning the replication of a program's functionality without directly copying its code. The practice is generally considered legally acceptable, but the ArtCraft apps could still run into trouble if their appearance and interface resemble Adobe's familiar design too closely.

Bold predictions

Thomas says he has coded exclusively with AI tools since February. He expects that everyday developers will soon be able to recreate open source versions of popular paid software. He writes that it is now possible to build functionally equivalent, high-performance, cross-platform copies. He also mentions ambitions to replace Google Search and build his own smartphones. In an earlier comment, he claimed to have built the whole of Photoshop in a single attempt.