Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project

hex4def6

I mean, it seems a pretty open-and-shut case. The author literally admits he copied the code. From one of the comments he makes: > @kuckir, to be clear about the lineage: PhotoSuite started from the Photopea build mirrored at https://github.com/ruanjiyang/Photopea-Offline , and the README credits Photopea as the primary inspiration and prior art. Over the past year it's been rewritten and rearchitected module by module, retargeted for desktop, restructured into ~330 source files, with a lot of features Photopea doesn't have. It's a rewrite of that lineage. That Photopea-Offline is an unofficial rip of the actual app. Pretty sure using a pirated version doesn't suddenly grant you license rights to use & extend the code into another competing product...

cautiouscat

I wonder if the issue is being responded to by an agent. A lot of the responses sound like stuff Claude writes.

xpct

I find it hardest to sympathize with the guy who inserted himself with 'Adapt or Die'..

slopinthebag

seeing what has been happening in the game modding communitiy, with people reverse engineering full rust rewrites of games like modern warfare 2 [1][2], or reverse engineering mashups with cod, minecraft, and skate 3 [3][4][5], the only defence against reverse-engineering literally all software will be to serve it from the cloud, and even that will not be enough. these people aren't even programmers, claude code just downloads ghidra and builds this stuff. the future of software is oss. unless governments lock down access to these tools to prevent this kind of reverse engineering. which is a horrible future to envision. [1] https://github.com/vladtrc/iw4L [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbADrcEW5w [3] https://github.com/chasmlol/2010-rust-rewrite-mashup [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuu7bx/are_you_seein... [5] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuag9d/skate_3_was_r...

lenny3

I just find it surprising that the author is complaining about "stolen code" while having been piggybacking (and earning money) from unattributed OSS code for years... https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/9042

agar

If your answer to "here is an example of 1:1 copying of my code and I can do the same for every line in your app" (Github comment 7, from the Photopea author) is to copy/paste a justification from an LLM (comment 8, from the Photosuite author), you've lost the argument. The hard reality though is any site written in JavaScript is now part of an LLM's training set and can (and will be) be trivially rewritten into something new. Interesting times. >“He who hath grown wise concerning old origins, lo, he will at last seek after the fountains of the future and new origins. […] For the earthquake—it choketh up many wells, it causeth much languishing: but it bringeth also to light inner powers and secrets. The earthquake discloseth new fountains.” — Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

spl757

All I know for sure is that the author of Photopea is not AI and I remember when he first released it. No one was calling it a photoshop ripoff. People were calling it an actual open source alternative that functioned and didn't cost the heap of cash Adobe wanted. I recall the response to the announcement being quite positive.

Fe2O3

The GitHub issue is now a 404. Archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20261006025310/https://github.co...

golfer

The OP link returns 404 now. https://github.com/eolix/photosuite/issues/77

geor9e

How bizarre. The thief has already deleted the thread. So obviously guilty just by the fact that it's clearly a browser app inside a desktop wrapper. That makes absolutely no sense as an architecture decision. And it uses all of Photopea's libraries. Before the thread was deleted, they had spawned a few sub‑agents to come in and bully the Photopea creator. But none of it was believable; it was clearly an angry thief lashing out.

iamnotevenhere

Isn't this a pretty obvious case I mean the author is not even hiding it just check the readme. They found illegally extracted photopea code then used AI to copy it. How are there any doubts on this?

matt3210

photosuite maintainers could just have ai adjust the code "In the style of X" and get around any argument if copy/piracy. The laws haven't caught up here. I can't imagine how anything could be enforced. Also there's cleanroom as a service :shrug: open source software effectively has no license for someone with tokens to spare. I don't like it but thats the situation on the ground IMO

etchalon

Mediocre people using tools that let them feel not so mediocre.

suplexer

We need much more of these type of direct call outs! Shed light on the AI grifters so the community knows what projects to avoid like the plague. It's embarrassing to be honest. The eolix guy couldn't even respond to the very first piece of evidence by the Photopea creator, before spewing some clearly and poorly generated, LLM response. So of course he'd resort to issue-closing, title-changing, banning, bullying and then Whatabout-ism. Beautiful rainbow of moral failures... Goodluck with that "internal audit" buddy. The internet never forgets. A side note: I wonder what pre-Microsoft Github would do in such cases. I don't think I've ever seen modern Github take action against any clone repo with legitimate copyright issues.