If your answer to "here is an example of 1:1 copying of my code and I can do the same for every line in your app" (Github comment 7, from the Photopea author) is to copy/paste a justification from an LLM (comment 8, from the Photosuite author), you've lost the argument.
The hard reality though is any site written in JavaScript is now part of an LLM's training set and can (and will be) be trivially rewritten into something new. Interesting times.
>“He who hath grown wise concerning old origins, lo, he will at last seek after the fountains of the future and new origins. […] For the earthquake—it choketh up many wells, it causeth much languishing: but it bringeth also to light inner powers and secrets. The earthquake discloseth new fountains.”
I just find it surprising that the author is complaining about "stolen code" while having been piggybacking (and earning money) from unattributed OSS code for years... https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/9042
I mean, it seems a pretty open-and-shut case. The author literally admits he copied the code. From one of the comments he makes:
> @kuckir, to be clear about the lineage: PhotoSuite started from the Photopea build mirrored at https://github.com/ruanjiyang/Photopea-Offline, and the README credits Photopea as the primary inspiration and prior art. Over the past year it's been rewritten and rearchitected module by module, retargeted for desktop, restructured into ~330 source files, with a lot of features Photopea doesn't have. It's a rewrite of that lineage.
That Photopea-Offline is an unofficial rip of the actual app. Pretty sure using a pirated version doesn't suddenly grant you license rights to use & extend the code into another competing product...
to banning photopea, to when photopea responds with a 2nd account re: some duplicate code which is very hard to explain w/o being, well, duplicated to what you pasted above.
seeing what has been happening in the game modding communitiy, with people reverse engineering full rust rewrites of games like modern warfare 2 [1][2], or reverse engineering mashups with cod, minecraft, and skate 3 [3][4][5], the only defence against reverse-engineering literally all software will be to serve it from the cloud, and even that will not be enough. these people aren't even programmers, claude code just downloads ghidra and builds this stuff.
the future of software is oss. unless governments lock down access to these tools to prevent this kind of reverse engineering. which is a horrible future to envision.
I saw someone say that we're going to go back to a situation like the 70s where software is technically copyrightable but there's no reason to bother. Maybe Stallman's dream will finally come true.
I think GTA6 will be the real test for how capable these agents are. Some of these mods use well-known emulation methods, and some of these binaries have probably been ingested by the LLM numerous times.
I don't mean to discredit LLM capabilities, it's just that these examples are heavily favored by what's already documented online.
yeah for sure, and more modern games will probably be more difficult as well. but even so, games feel like one of the harder things to reverse engineer compared to most business software. yes there is the backend component, but that's mostly just crud.
If your answer to "here is an example of 1:1 copying of my code and I can do the same for every line in your app" (Github comment 7, from the Photopea author) is to copy/paste a justification from an LLM (comment 8, from the Photosuite author), you've lost the argument.
The hard reality though is any site written in JavaScript is now part of an LLM's training set and can (and will be) be trivially rewritten into something new. Interesting times.
>“He who hath grown wise concerning old origins, lo, he will at last seek after the fountains of the future and new origins. […] For the earthquake—it choketh up many wells, it causeth much languishing: but it bringeth also to light inner powers and secrets. The earthquake discloseth new fountains.”
— Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
I just find it surprising that the author is complaining about "stolen code" while having been piggybacking (and earning money) from unattributed OSS code for years... https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/9042
I wonder if the issue is being responded to by an agent. A lot of the responses sound like stuff Claude writes.
I find it hardest to sympathize with the guy who inserted himself with 'Adapt or Die'..
I mean, it seems a pretty open-and-shut case. The author literally admits he copied the code. From one of the comments he makes:
> @kuckir, to be clear about the lineage: PhotoSuite started from the Photopea build mirrored at https://github.com/ruanjiyang/Photopea-Offline, and the README credits Photopea as the primary inspiration and prior art. Over the past year it's been rewritten and rearchitected module by module, retargeted for desktop, restructured into ~330 source files, with a lot of features Photopea doesn't have. It's a rewrite of that lineage.
That Photopea-Offline is an unofficial rip of the actual app. Pretty sure using a pirated version doesn't suddenly grant you license rights to use & extend the code into another competing product...
And the comment where he's "explaining" the code is clearly LLM written. Very nice.
Also, he started by lying. He/she went from
> That's a bold accusation. Would you care proving which bits of the code are "stolen"?
https://github.com/eolix/photosuite/issues/77#issuecomment-5...
to banning photopea, to when photopea responds with a 2nd account re: some duplicate code which is very hard to explain w/o being, well, duplicated to what you pasted above.
seeing what has been happening in the game modding communitiy, with people reverse engineering full rust rewrites of games like modern warfare 2 [1][2], or reverse engineering mashups with cod, minecraft, and skate 3 [3][4][5], the only defence against reverse-engineering literally all software will be to serve it from the cloud, and even that will not be enough. these people aren't even programmers, claude code just downloads ghidra and builds this stuff.
the future of software is oss. unless governments lock down access to these tools to prevent this kind of reverse engineering. which is a horrible future to envision.
[1] https://github.com/vladtrc/iw4L
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbADrcEW5w
[3] https://github.com/chasmlol/2010-rust-rewrite-mashup
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuu7bx/are_you_seein...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/bevy/comments/1wuag9d/skate_3_was_r...
I saw someone say that we're going to go back to a situation like the 70s where software is technically copyrightable but there's no reason to bother. Maybe Stallman's dream will finally come true.
that would be the absolute dream imo. true ownership of the code running on your system.
I think GTA6 will be the real test for how capable these agents are. Some of these mods use well-known emulation methods, and some of these binaries have probably been ingested by the LLM numerous times.
I don't mean to discredit LLM capabilities, it's just that these examples are heavily favored by what's already documented online.
yeah for sure, and more modern games will probably be more difficult as well. but even so, games feel like one of the harder things to reverse engineer compared to most business software. yes there is the backend component, but that's mostly just crud.