The world just changed. But only some are surprised.
Last week, a news story went mostly unnoticed. A company called ArtCraft released “clones” of all of Adobe’s most popular software products. These versions are not sold under Adobe brands and are not copies of the Adobe software (which is closed source and proprietary), but were reimplemented to match the feature set of the Adobe applications.
Some people in the tech industry will undoubtedly react to this development by bemoaning the death of copyright in software applications. They will dress in funerary garb and take the moral high ground, ostensibly defending the artistry of developers and their ability to enforce the copyright in their work. But software is not art.
Others of us found this development entirely unsurprising.
It’s fitting that the disruption happened to Adobe first. Adobe is one of the last bastions of proprietary mass-market software. For years now, it has been alienating its customer base by forcing them to move from local desktop software to SaaS (with the insult-to-injury of a complicated and clunky desktop app to police its license keys), raising prices to the point that they are truly painful for individuals, applying draconian cancellation fees for subscriptions, and using the Microsoft/Apple trick of grabbing data for cloud storage to lock users in to their platform. (Reddit commenters in the above link use phrases like “It’s infuriating to see how much contempt they show for the customers who rely on them” and “It’s incredible to see how much they hate the people who use their products.”)
One of the most popular ways of thinking up commercial open source business plans is to ask the question: “What proprietary software does everyone use, and does everyone hate? Now replace it with a more modern product that is easier to use, doesn’t lock in price increases, and has less bloated feature sets.” If you posed that initial question to consumers over the last 5 to 10 years, their first answer would probably have been the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Adobe First, Now…Everything
But the ArtCraft release was only a small pre-shock before today’s announcement. Today, the commercial open source company Puter released 50 applications–including replacements for the Microsoft Office suite. In other words, you can get access to every application you are likely to need for your daily work from one source, but instead of having to overpay for a bloated legacy product that struggles in a cloud environment, you get the transparency of open source software, attractive pricing, and modern, cloud-native implementation. You don’t need a slew of enterprise software app accounts, and you don’t need any local software – but if you happen to want the code, you can get it, and customize it to your needs, because it’s all open source under the MIT license.
Moreover, there is an AI app builder that allows you to build pretty much any other application you want.
Post-Copyright for Applications
Don’t mourn the death of software applications; in fact, this is the beginning of a new life for them. We are all going back to the basics to learn why software is valuable. For years, software programming has been cumbersome, slow, and labor-intensive. Have you ever wanted an app that didn’t exist? Or a feature you needed? Well, you were out of luck, because it was too much work to create it and debug and deploy it, even on “open” platforms like iOS, and even in open source projects. Then along came AI coding models. And now, basic coding is relatively quick and easy. That doesn’t mean there is no effort in writing good applications, but it does mean that a lot of the slogging is gone.
If you can step out of the copyright mindset, you might realize that software is a functional tool that is weird subject matter for copyright in the first place. In fact, at the beginning of the software era, people did not assume software was subject to copyright at all. Those were the days before closed source (and then, open source, which was a reaction to it), when software was a freebie that hardware companies provided in order to get you to buy their equipment. History is repeating itself.
Software is not an “IP” Business
The notion that software development is about protecting intellectual property like copyrights and patents is a thinking mistake that can be laid partly at the feet of intellectual property lawyers (of which I am one). Take a look at the agenda of any technology-related legal conference, and you see a sea of descriptions about “protection” of intellectual property. But the lawyers who represent the software business often have precious little to say about balancing IP protection against the goals of product quality or providing what users want or need.
Protecting intellectual property is the business of an intellectual property enforcer. That is done via litigation. IP protection is the basis of an entire industry for “patent assertion entities,” i.e., patent trolls. Copyright lawsuits over software are not as common, but when they happen, they are usually about trying to protect legacy products that are dying because the marketplace has left them behind. Businesspeople who are focused on “IP protection” have bought into a concept sold to them by IP lawyers or MBA classes, and sometimes don’t care about their products as much as monetizing their intellectual property assets. That mindset is a short-term business philosophy that almost ensures good products will not result. The main tool of an IP business is litigation. The main goal of a software business is customer satisfaction.
Can Application Developers Survive?
Yes. It is absolutely possibly to build software businesses in the post-copyright world. If you’re wondering how, all you need to do is look at what commercial open source strategists – like me – have been saying for the past decade. Commercial open source businesses are hugely popular and successful. Proprietary software is dying, because software never should have been about protecting intellectual property. It should be about creating products that make people’s lives easier.
Those who bemoan the death of copyright in software applications usually ask: if I put my effort into creating these applications, but I can’t sue people for copying it, how will I get compensated for it? The answer to that question has also been clear for a long time, and is well-understood by commercial open source software businesses. You need to build great products. You to sell them to people who like your products. They are not buying IP. They are buying solutions to their problems.
The intellectual property you do have is a brand, and that represents reputation and goodwill. In legal terms, it is a trademark.
From today forward, software IP will be about branding. Those who create the best products will win the market. Maybe there will be 1,000 clones of Microsoft Office, but then the market will ask: which one is the best? Only a few winners will emerge. A market cannot absorb 1,000 brands, only a few. This shift of emphasis to branding will re-align software developers and software users. For users, quality and ease of use was always the question. But proprietary software companies too often forgot that this was so, and built businesses around “monetizing” users. If you are sitting in a board room or a sales meeting, and someone starts talking about extracting more money from existing customers without giving them more value, you should sell your stock and quit, because your company is doomed. It has forgotten what its business is about.
Why You Can’t Really Vibe Code…Yet
All this is happening because of the availability of vibe coding (AI “clean room” reimplementation). But if you look beneath the hood, there is a lot of hand waving and FOMO about the ease of vibe coding. Yes, it is easy to get an AI to write and application. But when people tell me about their vibe coding projects, I always ask them: once you wrote your application, how did you serve and store it? The answer is usually “I got my IT department to do it.” And…that’s the problem. Actual deployment is still too difficult for most users.
While ArtCraft and Puter may be some of the first movers in this new software world, they will not be the last. The coming year or two will likely see a slew of new apps. The differentiating factor – along with app quality – will be how easy the apps are to deploy. Platform matters. (That is where Puter particularly shines; it’s a native cloud platform that is plug-and-play for the user.)
Go Have Fun!
You owe it to yourself to check out Puter and its ready-made apps for “Everything.” The current app versions are excellent starts and they will keep improving. My favorites are spreadsheet, word processing, invoicing, and video conferencing. (I wrote one to help me learn Hindi!) The platform also has some fun games and lots of other choices, and if you don’t like those, you can build your own.
Enjoy the new world!
I want to be clear: My comments about changes in the software business are, in my view, objective. I’ve been saying most of them for years. But when it comes to Puter, I am an investor and I am not objective. I think their business model is the future of software.
