Comment by anthk
3 days ago
It's happening. Check Artcraft. And Adobe could still profit from it. Custom plugins for companies, interop, optimization, rock-solid polished releases (and more optimized than ever) than vanilla MIT builds...
Also as a plus every user would be trained on Adobe's workflow. Companies would just pay Adobe for stable releases... and support. Ah, yes, the LLM's... sure. But when you have humans on your side, things get explained much better, even if Adobe points to an AI too to troubleshoot. They know how to explain problems to an AI and tell the best solutions to the user back and forth.
How that's all going to go down remains to be seen, because it's not clear how Adobe and Microsoft (who have very deep pockets) view the situation or what their response is going to be.
While it is true that money could possibly be made indirectly and around the product (e.g. training, support, ads), the questions surrounding doing the equivalent of turning their IP into open-source remains. Usually, dominant companies don't like change or having to figure out new ways to obtain revenue, other than what's direct and obvious to them.
As for customization and plugins, that looks to be an AI versus IP problem too: (1) that companies would turn to Adobe or Microsoft, versus using their own AI (2) 3rd parties reverse engineering their plugins with AI.
Most likely way that it appears possible, is some type of licensing deal between the AI company and the original IP owner. Would be surprised if they do that smoothly, prior to lots of court fights, because corporate types usually don't like to share.
They can't prevent people from making their own in-house clones. They can take down Artcraft/whatever OSS repo but it's meaningless. I have my own C++ Photoshop/Office clones that I've been using for a few months now. Full replacement for anything Microsoft/Adobe has put out. How are they going to prevent me from using my own code? Or how will they prevent anyone else from just vibing up another Artcraft replacement (in case it gets taken down)?
Wait, who owns GitHub again?
True, at the moment, they can't stop the AIs or who is already in possession of the code. But, they can go after anybody hosting that code (as they have done similarly before).
And the AI companies themselves are also a target, to disallow asking or performing the reverse engineering of designated IP.
The Empire (can) Strike(s) Back (unfortunately).
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