(By You Yunting) Adobe has long been known in the industry for its powerful video and image editing software. But recently, a developer used AI to build software that replicates most of the features of seven Adobe products, and released it as open source on GitHub. When the story hit the news, netizens both in China and abroad showed Adobe no sympathy at all. Instead, they cheered. There’s a reason the pitiable are also hateful. Today, let’s talk about why “everyone cheers when Adobe stumbles”.
First, some background. Developer Brandon Thomas announced on Reddit that he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 large language model to build a suite of seven open-source applications in the Rust programming language, functionally comparable to seven Adobe products: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
As a trailblazer in software rights enforcement, Adobe has given many companies using pirated copies a painful taste of its legal muscle. But this time, Adobe may not actually be able to do much about these open-source clones. From the perspective of software infringement, Adobe has met its match:
First, the user interfaces are not identical. I downloaded PdfCraft, the Adobe Acrobat clone, and found that its tools are arranged in a single column—clearly different from Acrobat’s layout.
Second, the code is different. The open-source software is written in a different programming language from Adobe’s. Adobe’s products are developed mainly in C++, whereas Stirling, the counterpart application, was written in Rust by AI.
Third, cloning features are not necessarily illegal. Adobe’s current software features are the product of years of refinement, and they are certainly convenient for professional users. But under the idea-expression dichotomy in copyright law, these features belong to the realm of ideas. No matter how well Adobe optimizes them, imitating or cloning them does not constitute infringement.
Fourth, even if there was “access”, it would be hard to prove. The principle in software protection is that infringement requires “access plus substantial similarity”. Brandon Thomas emphasizes that his software was developed in a “clean room”—meaning, as I understand it, that he never accessed Adobe’s source code and never decompiled Adobe’s software for the AI to rewrite. But as the aggrieved party, Adobe has no practical way to verify this.
Two points are at issue here. One is whether the large language model used by Brandon Thomas was trained on Adobe’s leaked source code (leaked in 2013, whose core functionality is largely consistent with the current version) or on Adobe source code decompiled by others. The other is whether the software development process involved decompiling Adobe’s software and feeding it to the model. Both points relate to the “access” element of the “access plus substantial similarity” test.
The problem is that the AI industry is still in its early days, and the training data of large language models are entirely opaque. As for whether decompiled Adobe code was used during development, that can only be inferred from subtle traces left in the running software. Adobe would need preliminary evidence before it could ask a court to order the developer or the model provider to produce the relevant training materials or materials used in development. So far, at least, Adobe has raised no such challenge.
Now, why is Adobe so widely resented? First, the software is subscription-only—Adobe no longer sells perpetual licenses. Even if you only use it once or twice a year, you must pay monthly or annually. Worse, the monthly billing plan conceals an annual-commitment rule: if users want to cancel mid-contract, they have to pay 50% of the remaining contract value as an early termination fee.
Second, Adobe offers no flexible, pay-as-you-go option for companies with seasonal staff. For contractors, interns, or part-time designers, companies must still pay full annual fees, and accounts cannot be shared flexibly. For occasional users, the high pricing smacks of price gouging.
Many Chinese companies harbor even deeper grievances. Unlike small overseas teams, Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises cannot buy lightweight packages for a few dozen dollars a month; they can only purchase the expensive full suite, making their costs far higher than those of their foreign peers. Moreover, Chinese users cannot buy directly from Adobe’s official website or manage subscriptions and renewals online as foreign users do—they can only purchase licenses through Adobe’s local agents. And due to network restrictions and data compliance requirements, Adobe’s cloud collaboration features are drastically limited in China: the same software, but with far fewer features.
Adobe’s sales model in China also lacks a business rationale centered on customer service and product value. Many domestic companies use pirated Adobe software, and Adobe often uses demand letters and copyright compliance checks in China to pave the way for sales. Its resellers routinely make outrageous demands, requiring companies to buy more licenses than they actually need—or face a lawsuit. They also like to send threatening text messages directly to companies’ registered legal representatives or senior executives. The sales culture is truly hard to swallow.
That said, this enforcement model has its own frustrations and weaknesses. The frustrating part is that a company like Adobe runs a global pricing strategy, which means it cannot charge high prices abroad and low prices in China; it cannot adopt a model like WPS, where the software is free and revenue comes from value-added services. The weakness is that enforcement fundamentally relies on government agencies and the courts. To report a company for using pirated software, one must go to the copyright authorities and cultural law enforcement authorities; to sue, one must apply to the court for preservation of evidence just to obtain proof of the pirated use. In today’s economic downturn, there is far less room to mobilize these resources than before.
Finally, the AI-cloning of software features discussed here represents a low-end use of AI. The developer’s cloning of Adobe’s features is imitation, not creation. This kind of imitation is now spreading across the entire industry, and it will damage the software ecosystem: as large numbers of users flock to free feature clones, software companies’ revenue will shrink, forcing them to lay off staff or restructure just to survive—and some will go under.
But feature clones are, after all, low in quality. Companies with real technical strength—like Adobe—will keep their core base of heavy users who pay. Once they adapt, these companies will use AI to create even more powerful software. Still, given that the existing ecosystem took software companies decades to build, the adjustment will not happen quickly.
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