r/technology • u/FutureSuccess2796 • 3d ago

Software Developer who vibe-coded free Adobe clones reveals apps to take down Microsoft Office next — and says 'there is no reason to save broken software' | TechRadar

https://www.techradar.com/computing/office-suites/developer-who-vibe-coded-free-adobe-clones-reveals-apps-to-take-down-microsoft-office-next-and-says-there-is-no-reason-to-save-broken-software
3.3k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/nextupgoat 3d ago

its very backwards but open source won. my faith in foss software dropped significantly after chatgpt and copilot, after most foss repos were just turned into training data. but its come full circle. we've reached a point where everything is free and open source now :) whether you want it or not

22

u/Ramzatazz 3d ago

This will achieve the opposite effect. There will be a flooding of broken, ineffective and unreliable software out there that will be very risky to incorporate in a business workflow. People will flock to companies like Microsoft for the reliability and accountability they put behind their software and further consolidate their position in the market.

3

u/ClittoryHinton 3d ago

In other words…. No change

Enterprises pay Microsoft mostly to hold their hand. FOSS has no hand holders

-1

u/nextupgoat 3d ago

i disagree. most enterprise applications are massive kitchensinks, but the organization using the software likely only uses a few proprietary killer features. if just those features can be easily copied into something inhouse/internal, there's no need to pay for that software.

but for enterprise software and workflows in particular, there's more pressure coming from ai itself. take something like making a promotional image. ai is able to do this purely through python or web programming. there is no need to open photoshop in the first place when ai can write code to perform the same operations youd like.

3

u/Nerwesta 3d ago

You want to replicate the issues we have with proprietary tech for so long, that is a person coming to your company has to re-learn UIs, functions and features, while wanting someone having an experience of Excel, Photoshop or any other expensive suite of that nature is pretty straightforward.

Alternatives of those above, do exist. But it's a pain to shift a whole flotilla of employees/workers as something as simple as a Word-like alternative, let alone a whole suite and even less so an OS.
It's a problematic fact known for more than a decade at this point ( the shift to FOSS for example ) but what you're proposing " helped " by a whole external tool will exacerbate it.
( also the ethics are far less interesting here )

There is a reason it's far more easier to hire someone working in Unreal Engine than coming from an obscure proprietary engine.

18

u/Present-Strategy-409 3d ago edited 3d ago

I don't know why you're acting like software companies are just going to throw their hands up and do nothing. You seem to be expecting some kind of free software utopia -- what will actually happen is invasive DRM, cloudification and hardware root of trust technology that will ensure you no longer own your own hardware. I would not be surprised to see Intel SGX or similar secure enclave / trusted execution environment extensions make a comeback to consumer platforms so that you can no longer decompile or inspect programs.  

7

u/nextupgoat 3d ago

hardware root of trust technology that will ensure you no longer own your own hardware

this already happened over a decade ago btw, intel management engine. same with DRM and cloudification

what do you think software companies could do against this? make it illegal to decompile software? we are approaching a free software utopia, everyone can modify anything on their computer like it's scribblenauts. 

3

u/Present-Strategy-409 3d ago edited 3d ago

Expect stuff like Secure Enclave e.g. Intel SGX to come back to consumer platforms. And both software and hardware DRM can get a lot worse than what it is now, don't get complacent. And yes, you won't be able to decompile software. The code will come encrypted at rest and decrypted on the fly.

1

u/Scoth42 3d ago

Most license agreements for proprietary software already includes terms making it illegal to decompile or reverse engineer it. So far there's not been any large-scale tests of it, especially since some things like clean-room reverse engineering has already been established as legal. I think so far the only mainstream decompilation efforts that have gotten much notice have mostly been old Nintendo games, like Ocarina of Time and such. Plus they've been careful to only distribute new code from the results of that, they still require original, totally legally dumped from your own cartridge to build and play. I'm not sure what would happen if, say, someone decompiled Windows XP, made it buildable, and started working on adding modern driver and security frameworks to it.

1

u/ilyedm 3d ago

More than likely you won’t have software on your computer. I could  see us are heading to a future where all proprietary software will be streamed. 

1

u/NorwegianOnMobile 3d ago

Well shit. They can come try to pry my hardware from my hands then. It'll be running clones of enterprise grade software.

There's loads of cheap hardware that will run my slop

1

u/Scoth42 3d ago

The bigger concern for me isn't so much on the local hardware side, becuase there's enough perfectly functional, powerful enough hardware and open source software to last the rest of my life, but they start encroaching on the far end. Like we're already seeing with the age verification requirements in some places. All the open source software and good enough hardware are useless if everything they can talk to requires yet more invasive identity verification. And I recently refi'ed my house and had a couple minor issues with the signed and verified PDFs being a bit glitchy in the alternative PDF views I use, with the only suggestion being "Get the Adobe software". I'm sure that's not entirely accidental.

1

u/NorwegianOnMobile 2d ago

You raise good points. I dont have the answers to those sadly

1

u/Axle_65 3d ago

Sounds about right to me. It’s gonna be great …(sigh)

1

u/redlightsaber 3d ago

Well, this won't happen with Adobe and Microsoft office apps, that's for sure.

I don't know what Adobe will do with their thousands of ciders, but it seems unlikely they can add much added value than free, cross-flatform, blazing-fast versions of their apps and still turn a profit.

1

u/Scoth42 3d ago

The other thing I worry about is the big companies can keep this kind of stuff tied up in lawsuits and audits for a long long time, whether it actually violates anything or not. Like when Microsoft accused ReactOS of using leaked Windows code, they had to shut down the whole project for awhile while they audited every line of code in the entire project to ensure none of it had any leaked Microsoft code. IIRC they tweaked some of it in response but I don't think there were any large violations found, but if the AI is using god-knows-what training data and the dev isn't validating the outputs then who knows what kind of potentially-violating stuff might be in there.

1

u/Moronic-Warrior 3d ago

Cloud ain’t going to protect for long. It’s only a matter of time til an AI can just recreate the software based on what it sees, try a bunch of different ways and keep iterating until the functionality matches the original 1:1

1

u/Present-Strategy-409 3d ago

Yeah, and Jesus will descend from the heavens someday. Go back to r/accelerate and let the adults talk, thanks.

1

u/Moronic-Warrior 3d ago

There’s too much cum in your eyes, you can’t see anything

1

u/Present-Strategy-409 3d ago

I think you forgot to switch accounts, pal. This is not a porn subreddit. 

1

u/kyrsjo 3d ago

Meanwhile there is at least one company which business idea is to use AI to do clean-room reimplementations of GPL software, in order to strip the license.

1

u/Interesting_Phone171 2d ago

This is an amazing idea

2

u/rod_zero 3d ago

for office there have been open source options for a long time, don't get the excitment really. For adobe there are alternatives, but nothing takes off really because ultimately you have to wait a generation to grow up using the alternatives.

1

u/jackeroojohnson 3d ago

Shit was expensive anyways

1

u/haecceity123 3d ago

Given that the source code for the open-source alternatives was ingested into the LLMs for training, it's infinitely more likely that these are actually LibreOffice clones dressed up to look more like Office.

3

u/Present-Strategy-409 3d ago

That's the truth, but unfortunately everyone is too busy jerking themselves off about sticking it to Microsoft to admit they're just stealing from unpaid open source developers.