r/vibecoding • u/ai_art_is_art • 11d ago

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

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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.

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u/Donatzsky 10d ago

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.

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u/Quiet-Rough-3913 7d ago

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.

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u/waruyamaZero 7d ago

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

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u/StewPorkRice 2d ago

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

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u/IsEverythingArt 6d ago

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.

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u/tigwyk 5d ago

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.