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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 2 weeks 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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[–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I don't think how they went about it is really worth arguing about since we're both just speculating here. Ultimately, it's the end result that's relevant not how the sausage was made.

And we'll see if Adobe goes after them on the basis that it's warez or not. I think it's entirely likely that they might even if there's no legitimate ground to do that. Companies are well known for bullying open source projects that are viewed as a threat to their profits.

OK, I’m taking that to mean that you haven’t actually identified any specific features (or PSD compatibilities) that PhotoCraft has over GIMP besides the UX?

Just to reiterate this point. I do not care what level of feature parity it has with Photoshop or GIMP. My only interest is that it works for my use case, and that's what I tested. It solves a problem for me as an individual by providing me with a tool that has the UX I like and the functionality that I need.

Meanwhile right now we’re drowning in new 1M LOC slop projects overpromising and underdelivering.

But what is the actual problem here. It's not like I'm forced to look at any of these projects, or use them. I keep seeing people talk about this like it's some software apocalypse, but I personally have yet to be affected by any of this in a negative way. My experience so far is that I got a few useful open source apps now that let me replace proprietary ones.

And I also maintain open source projects and libraries. I haven't seen any flood of LLM generated pull requests on them either. Maybe it's a bigger issue for large and popular projects, but it seems that even there people are split on whether they like getting more contributions or not.

So, I see more upsides than downsides here on the whole.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (1 child)

    And we’ll see if Adobe goes after them on the basis that it’s warez or not. I think it’s entirely likely that they might even if there’s no legitimate ground to do that. Companies are well known for bullying open source projects that are viewed as a threat to their profits.

    Yes, I agree it's possible that Adobe goes after them for something even if they didn't decompile photoshop - and also even if it isn't really a threat to their profits.

    I do not care what level of feature parity it has with Photoshop or GIMP. My only interest is that it works for my use case, and that’s what I tested. It solves a problem for me as an individual by providing me with a tool that has the UX I like and the functionality that I need.

    Cool, if it works for you then I wouldn't tell you not to use it! I'm just skeptical that it actually will; I assume you haven't used it enough to really find out how well it works in practice yet.

    It’s not like I’m forced to look at any of these projects, or use them.

    I guess we're not forced to look at them but to avoid looking at them we'd need to stop reading the internet. I only looked at this one because I was conflicted about if i should delete this post from /c/opensource here - the discussion has been informative so I certainly won't now, but i'm still conflicted about the fact that by leaving this post here we're potentially helping this genAI huckster get more paying customers for his token-reselling business which this project is obviously a loss-leader for.

    Btw I found the video I mentioned earlier, here is a link to the part comparing PhotoCraft's Levels adjustment to Photoshop's: https://youtu.be/Oc51Ty9h-68?t=216 (and later he compares other basic features).

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    Like I said, it's usable as is for random things I do day to day like making memes. Maybe I'll run into some show stoppers, but I'm fairly optimistic so far. I suspect most people who aren't graphics designers don't really have terribly sophisticated workflows. Both Photoshop and GIMP are huge, and everyone who's not a professional uses a small subset of the overall features.

    And I just don't see why we should care whether this post might help some company in some unspecified way over whether these apps might help people on this forum. Especially given how niche of a forum Lemmy is in the grand scheme of things. The reason this story made it here in the first place is because it already got mainstream coverage. As you point out, the business model these companies have is unsustainable, so I don't really spend time worrying about how many customers these companies get in the short run. We're very obviously in a bubble here, and there's no credible business model. These companies are basically subsidizing people having fun, and I don't really see much of an issue with that. The bubble will pop and most of the negative side effects will go with it. My expectation is that local models is where things are headed after the bubble.

    And yeah that video is precisely why I think Photocraft is fine. He's a professional designer, and he is used to using parts of the tool I just don't need. The basic levels adjustment is all I ever use for example. But take something like adding a stroke to text. This is a common thing I do if I make a meme. In Photocraft, I just add some text, go to blending options on the layer and add stroke. Done. In GIMP, this is a whole adventure last I tried.

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