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Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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Brandon 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.

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[–] 21 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    and proof that frontier LLMs can reverse engineer / clone well (...duh), this is a big pile of nothing.

    I don't think this is proof.

    It's proof that they can make something that appears to reverse engineer / clone well.

    To really know, we'd need to use it as daily drivers long enough to give it a good test. And it hasn't been out long enough for that.

    From previous experience we know that LLMs are great at confidently producing plausible output with problems that are hard to detect and fix without expert level knowledge and experience.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    From previous experience we know that LLMs are great at confidently producing plausible output with problems that are hard to detect and fix without expert level knowledge and experience.

    What experiences exactly? Whether the output is correct or just plausible and how many and how severe the problems are depends on the actual problem, and this statement is way too broad. There are also enough experiences where it works. It depends on how you use it.

    I don't see too much of a difference between a LLM producing plausible output as the result of reverse engineering and a human engineer producing plausible output as the result of reverse engineering. Again, we're not talking about absolute experts doing this for the past 20+ years spending months to do this. For a "regular" engineer doing this, it's the same best guess.

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