Comment by spl757
14 days ago
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.
Can confirm he is not AI and he also used to hang around here. Also before photopea, he tried to make a living once with a open source project, a flash replacement graphic libary for the web, called IvanK.
So that did not work out, but I used it a bit and interacted with him couple of times there, before moving on to easel and later pixi, after it became clear it would not take off and the other ones had more support.
Glad for him to found success with Photopea later, and he definitely has my sympathy here.
But I doubt this will work out much longer in the long run. It is just too easy cloning and improving projects with AI.
> improving
That's a dangerous word. Did you mean adding more features?
More useful features is usually what people call improving.
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> People were calling it an actual open source alternative
Photopea is not, and has never been open source, AFAIK.
Thanks for the correction. I thought it was just minified javascript.
Just to clarify, Photopea is not open-source software.
Yeah, I was mistaken. Thanks for pointing that out.
Was it ever open source? Thr github repo doesn't contain any sources...
Indeed. As others have pointed out as well, it's not open source. I thought it was just minified JS that can be downloaded and run offline. I've never used it because I prefer to self-flagellate by using GIMP.
I fully support him and Photopea, but come on. It is clearly in every single way a Photoshop rip-off. There is no denying it by reasonable people.
It's a clean room implementation of Photoshop features and UI. That's not a ripoff. Just like Wine or Mono aren't Windows ripoffs.
Does this mean that every mass-produced automobile is a ripoff of the Ford model T? Is Gimp also a ripoff? Paintshop Pro?
I’m with you in spirit, but please don't bring up gimp in this context.
It’s like mentioning your nephew is pretty good at the piano, when people are discussing if John Williams was copying Holst.
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what is the difference between "ripoff" and "fairly feature-comparable alternative"?
I find Photopea to be completely legitimate, and ripoff is too strong, but you can recognize that it's not just a "fairly feature-comparable alternative". It has most of the functionality at the exact same place, with the exact same shapes, because that will help user if they already know how to work with Photoshop. That makes Photopea a well-executed clone, one that has been reimplemented on another platform from scratch.
It's a reimplementation.
A rip off would be using the actual Photoshop source code.