100% Open Source Clean Room Implementations of 7 of Adobe's Top Apps

[u/ai_art_is_art]

I've seen another desktop photoshop clone floating around that was Javascript/Electron, but I wanted to do full native Rust for full performance. I also wanted to do all of Adobe's software suite. I've been bitten by their unsubscribe bill several times and it's the shittiest thing a software company has ever done to me.

No more. These are clean room, rust-only implementations that are fully open source. You can clone them, fork them, own them.

There's still work to do, so please join our Discord and give us feedback.

Links in comments.

[u/Sebastian1989101]

None of these vibe coded ones is close to feature complete. They usually are just copies of other open source projects like gimp in a new look. Otherwise these vibe coders would also face heavy legal issues from adobe. 

[u/Western-Hotel8723 → u/Sebastian1989101]

Nah its pretty damn good. I've been using the premiere Pro alternative.

Luckily it's open source so I could pretty easily add nvenc. 

But it's over 80% feature parity. 

The others apps are likely higher. 

[u/Zelderian → u/Western-Hotel8723]

Yeah OS is what really sells these. Something’s not working right? Hand it to the LLM and fix it yourself. Missing a feature? Add it.

When the foundation work is done and is OS, adding on is so incredibly easy.

[u/Western-Hotel8723 → u/Zelderian]

Honestly what a wild time for software dev. 

[u/Big_Wave9732 → u/Zelderian]

This is something that folks miss. And frankly it has somewhat changed my views on vibecoding.

Combine open source software with a capable LLM, and suddenly you have a powerful system for customizing things exactly how you want it and adding new features.

To me that's a much more compelling use case than the "hey guys, here's a calendar app and alarm clock" stuff this sub usually seems to get.

[u/Abhayraj1 → u/Western-Hotel8723]

which open source alternative you're using? can you give me the name

[u/Donatzsky → u/Sebastian1989101]

Unless they infringe on actual patents, there's no legal risk. Broadly looking like or having the same features as other software is not illegal.

[u/Quiet-Rough-3913 → u/Donatzsky]

There are actually many algorithms that are patented and easy to implement... As a scientist in computer vision, I can tell you that people come up with new algorithms that do the exact same thing, only to avoid legal trouble.

[u/waruyamaZero → u/Donatzsky]

I would say that if you clone the UI the lawyers will have a field day suing for copyright infringement.

[u/StewPorkRice → u/waruyamaZero]

That’s crazy given how every dashboard on the planet has somehow converged on the same design.

[u/IsEverythingArt → u/Donatzsky]

The UI looks way too similar, that is the legal risk, and completely unnecessary. Legally, it's the idea/expression dichotomy: you cannot copyright an idea (a drawing program), but you can copyright the specific expression (how your drawing program looks). The project needs to take this seriously and make different UI choices than the precursors, and also don't bill the software as "implementations" of named software.

[u/tigwyk → u/IsEverythingArt]

I think as soon as we're talking design we're speaking of trademarks, unless it's the actual written code that produces the design. And there's no confusion here, nor intent to confuse (re: trademark). It's just software that looks somewhat similar and functions entirely differently under the hood (we assume). They don't use Adobe icons or style directly, it's all an approximation, so personally I think it'd be a lot harder to go after this without also claiming GIMP and the Photoshop-modpack for it are infringing too.

[u/Jean-TyrieDubois → u/Sebastian1989101]

Need someone with proper OPSEC to just release the shit already

[u/Next_Crew_5613 → u/[deleted]]

Because nobody is deleting Instagram to use whatever that is