This Time, Software Really Might Be Over

If an open-source suite reaches 70% to 80% parity with Adobe’s creative tools, smaller and midmarket enterprises may decide 'good enough' is good enough.

The SaaSpocalypse might be back on. A developer has used AI to create an alternative to the Adobe Suite and in doing so has put the entire cloud model, with it's hard-to-exit ecosystems, back under scrutiny.

The SaaSpocalypse and death of enterprise software at the invisible hands of AI agents has been a distinctly stop-start affair this year. In February, after Anthropic’s release of 11 industry specific plug-ins for Claude Cowork, investors panicked as the belief that had sustained the best part of two decades of growth – that every business function needs a dedicated SaaS application (and its recurring licencing model) – was called into question. The value of SaaS stocks plummeted by around $2 trillion and death rites were administered.

By the summer everyone had calmed down a bit and the SaaSpocalypse bottomed out, as investors slowly cottoned on to the fact that some SaaS companies like Salesforce were likely to benefit from agentic AI rather than be consumed by it. Creative software giant Adobe seemed to fall into this category, making up value it lost in February and investing in AI to bring its own agent-driven offerings to market.

But the SaaSpocalypse might be coming for Adobe after all. A software developer has used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust to essentially reverse engineer the full Adobe Suite and publish the lot as open-source software called Artcraft.

Announcing the project on Reddit, developer Brandon Thomas said:

“No more subscriptions with cancellation fees. These are yours to own forever. You can fork them, build them. Whatever. They are yours to own. They're open source.

“If you're worried this is just some one-off flash in the pan that will die, it isn't:

“I'm not just some casual vibe coder. I'm a 15-year industry veteran who has written everything from six-nines payment rails that move billions of dollars of transaction volume a day to advanced robotics and optics automation. I've used Rust extensively for about a decade, and I know how to build and maintain large-scale Rust projects.”

The Race To Parity

Artcraft isn’t as useful as Adobe. Thomas himself acknowledges around 50% parity but has invited developers to get involved and is even paying bug bounties. If the open-source community does its thing effectively, the chances are high of finishing with a product 80% as good as Adobe – one that enterprises can own in perpetuity.

In common with many SaaS providers, Adobe's market dominance didn’t arise solely due to superior features and functionality. What Adobe has done is create an ecosystem and make it very hard to exit. The CMA opened an investigation into Adobe’s licencing terms earlier this year, and the company also settled a $150 million lawsuit against it in the US.

If an open-source suite reaches even 70-80% parity with Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and InDesign's capabilities, many smaller or midmarket enterprises, along with individual users like freelance creatives, might well decide it’s good enough.

Artcraft also dangles the tantalising possibility of consolidation in the open-source creative software ecosystem. Current Adobe alternatives like GIMP and Inkscape are fragmented and don’t really work together. A unified suite could offer consistent interfaces, interoperability and shared workflows. Combine all that with potentially more stable software and Adobe is going to have to work very hard to keep filling the sales funnel with new prospects.

If an open-source alternative reduces the costs of switching, Adobe will also find it harder to renew customers when their terms come to an end.

Take Back Control

Adobe’s stock price has dropped this week, and the company has yet to make a statement on the subject. Whilst Thomas’s project is a “clean room” implementation (he didn’t copy Adobe’s code, he effectively copied what the code does) Adobe may be taking counsel on whether it can issue proceedings based on intellectual property theft, patent violation or “trade dress.”

But the implications for software and SaaS from the Artcraft project extend far beyond Adobe’s possible woes. If AI can now recreate the kinds of application ecosystems enterprises have been locked into (often not especially happily) for years, it means that organisations could gain greater leverage over costs as a consequence of barriers to exit being dismantled.

Thomas’s use of generative AI coding tools is also interesting. Software development has been hugely disrupted by AI. Many software engineers are self-proclaimed haters, especially those struggling to find entry level work or a few years into their careers. But Thomas wants developers to use AI “take back the internet and own tech forever.”

“Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you,” Thomas wrote. “We’ll replace Google Search, we’ll build our own smartphones, we’ll build better infra. We’ll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world.”

“Software is over,” he said. We’ll see.

Computing contacted Adobe for comment, but the company did not respond.

This article originally appeared on MES Computing's sister site Computing.