ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust

echelon

Haha, I wasn't ready to post this to HN. It's not anywhere close to ready. But thank you aghuang. (I want to post this again when we clear Beta phase.) These are still super early alpha. All MIT/Apache licensed. No telemetry. I'm going to try to drive these to 100% parity but it's going to take a minute. And I'll need lots of help. (Anyone want to join me? I'll pay stipends and bug bounties.) I'm going to do Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too. Probably a lot of stuff to collapse. It's not just SaaSocalypse. Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now. Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again. We can literally deenshittify the world without breaking a sweat.

girouetten21

OMG, the page design is incredible

nickc888

i don't want to have to sign up / log in just to test drive the desktop app?

CreepGin

Just curious, what is the subscription for? Purely for image generations? Are these built into the apps, or just a web feature?

_stillmind

I'll just keep using Affinity.

slopinthebag

i like this project, the scope is enough to test most of the claims being made about vibe coding

colesantiago

As soon as I saw this software suite about 2 days ago, I shorted Adobe Inc immediately. Adobe to $120 price target at least, could be even lower.

praet

Adobe's moat is so small, so it's a matter of time until someone frustrated with their pricing would rather just rebuild the entire Creative Suite. I have also rebuilt the features from Photoshop I want using Rust recently (primarily because the company I work for started blocking Photopea, but I digress...) and it's been a great to work with. I can imagine the same would hold true for Lightroom, Illustrator, and Indesign. Overall, looks like a cool project. Looking forward to the *Craft repos on github gaining traction

nonethewiser

Pretty crazy. I think we’re already very numb to AI. Can you imagine seeing something like this pop up 3 years ago? Youd have been dumbfounded and it would have been major news.

brazukadev

Honestly the scrollbar is infuriating. Can't expect any better attention to UX from the apps.

adzm

I'm curious if there are design parents or anything that could put these kinds of projects in legal peril

kmeisthax

> ArtCraft is a form of "fair source" software. It's like free beer in that we give you the code, but there are a few small limitations on what you can do with it. As seen on the main Artcraft repo. There's other tools that are MIT-licensed, although given that people are noting that this is AI-created the notion of copyright on this is suspect to begin with. Remember kids: all AI slop is born public domain because machines don't have a soul for the purpose of copyright law. And probably also the 13th amendment. Don't upload your brain, kids. Anyway, let me get up on my soapbox and talk about these "have your cake and eat it too" licenses, that try to be source-available while privileging one particular vendor as the Blessed Owner with special monetization powers. To put it shortly, this doesn't work, because it mixes all the bad parts of FOSS with all the bad parts of proprietary software. The business model of proprietary software does not work with even source-available terms. Proprietary software is a game of becoming essential to your customers and then taking them for everything they've got. All the successful proprietary companies are, effectively, selling legacy software that was useful to a group of companies a long time ago, but is now so deeply integrated into their IT systems they don't even know they have it until the licensing police show up. "You can use it for free but can't sell it" is anathema to this: it is specifically the "use" part that you're worried about. Likewise, being able to modify the software - even only for internal uses - means that the proprietary owner has to compete against their own customers for ongoing payments and revenue. Again, if you've dug your talons into a big org to the point where you're indispensable, you don't want your customers making their own forks of your code. You want them paying $$$$/mo for enterprise support. What FOSS is doing is basically promising to never do these things. If your goal is to make money, then adopting FOSS is like a cat going vegan. And the half-measure source-available licenses don't help, because you wind up conceding all the things that make you money just so you can claim ownership over things most people weren't interested in. also, from their CLAUDE.md: > Clean-room. Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Illustrator bundle (names/listings only). Never copy Adobe icons, artwork, presets or wording beyond feature names. Behaviour comes from public docs and black-box observation of the running app with synthetic documents only (screenshots by window id, stored under plan/illustrator/screenshots/, never committed). Never copy GPL/AGPL code (Inkscape, lib2geom…). There is no such thing as clean-room vibe coding. Every line of FOSS code has been trained on. If you use any AI coding model, you are generating code that is going to be similar to copylefted code. There is no "MIT/Apache only" model out there you can use. Also, no, switching to GPL doesn't help. Actually, it is my opinion that you cannot meaningfully comply with GPL while vibe-coding, because you have changed the definition of "corresponding source code" from a bunch of .rs files to a number of prompts being handed off to a cloud model. Remember: according to GPL, the source code is not "the thing you put into the compiler", it's "the thing the developers prefer to edit to alter the program". Otherwise, you could say "the source code is this uncommented ASM listing" and sidestep the GPL entirely. What we're doing with AI is the same idea, except instead of going down one level of abstraction, we're going up one.

ToyKeeper

It's wild that anyone still uses Adobe software these days. Adobe is one of the most famous companies for enshittification, and the open-source alternatives are generally very good. Personally, I switched to open-source alternatives way back in the late 1900s, and they've only continued to improve ever since. Adobe has been lagging behind for over a quarter of a century, in the ways which matter to me, and they keep getting farther behind as they turn to worse and worse methods of extorting money from people. YMMV, of course. I can get behind almost anything which reduces lock-in for Adobe's remaining customers, but from what I see in other comments, this probably ain't it. It seems very vibey and buggy. But maybe after more work is put in, it could be good. It looks like it wasn't supposed to go public yet, and they're aware that it's not ready yet.