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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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[–] 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

"cat looks inside" meme template: "[...]", "looks inside", "slop"

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?

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  • [–] 17 points 1 week ago*

    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.)

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    I’ve used the photoshop clone, I’m not a digital artist so I don’t really know much, but it worked ok. I’m sure with time it’ll get better. I’m also using the word craft one and this one works no issues at all. Also on this one I don’t really do a lot of docs but I did some stuff on it and it worked fine

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