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.”
How bizarre. The thief has already deleted the thread. So obviously guilty just by the fact that it's clearly a browser app inside a desktop wrapper. That makes absolutely no sense as an architecture decision. And it uses all of Photopea's libraries. Before the thread was deleted, they had spawned a few sub‑agents to come in and bully the Photopea creator. But none of it was believable; it was clearly an angry thief lashing out.
From another OSS author: Just let it blow over. Don‘t engage. Ignore it. You‘re already making a mistake justifying yourself to people you‘ll never convince. Leave, for a time.
That makes absolutely no sense as an architecture decision.
It makes a lot of sense architecturally. It's much simpler to update a webpage than force every user to update their app when something needs to change. Consequently a lot of apps, especially on mobile, use a system webview with a page loaded from a server and rendered to look like the app for anything that gets regular updates. The alternative is having lots of versions of the page and needing to manage all the different variations of payloads from them.
Backwards compatibility in an API isn't that hard, but when there's a simpler option (a webview) people will take it.
That said, if there's no native stuff in the app, it is a bit harder to justify.
That's all wonderful until some dipshit decides to cut features because they were too much of a maintenance burden. At least with the desktop app you can push back and not update.
All I know for sure is that the author of Photopea is not AI and I remember when he first released it. No one was calling it a photoshop ripoff. People were calling it an actual open source alternative that functioned and didn't cost the heap of cash Adobe wanted. I recall the response to the announcement being quite positive.
Can confirm he is not AI and he also used to hang around here. Also before photopea, he tried to make a living once with a open source project, a flash replacement graphic libary for the web, called IvanK.
So that did not work out, but I used it a bit and interacted with him couple of times there, before moving on to easel and later pixi, after it became clear it would not take off and the other ones had more support.
Glad for him to found success with Photopea later, and he definitely has my sympathy here.
But I doubt this will work out much longer in the long run. It is just too easy cloning and improving projects with AI.
Why not just apologize and have Claude rewrite any code that's similar? Whether you did it intentionally or not, you probably agree that you can't keep using his code and that it would pretty bad if someone did something similar to you.
photosuite maintainers could just have ai adjust the code "In the style of X" and get around any argument if copy/piracy. The laws haven't caught up here. I can't imagine how anything could be enforced. Also there's cleanroom as a service :shrug: open source software effectively has no license for someone with tokens to spare.
I don't like it but thats the situation on the ground IMO
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.
Absolutely. There’s a lot of this going around on twitter too with all the game reverse engineering with all the AI grifters claiming games are all open source now etc. Yeah right, I don’t think they understand the concept of open source or copyright!
Isn't this a pretty obvious case I mean the author is not even hiding it just check the readme. They found illegally extracted photopea code then used AI to copy it. How are there any doubts on this?
We need much more of these type of direct call outs! Shed light on the AI grifters so the community knows what projects to avoid like the plague.
It's embarrassing to be honest. The eolix guy couldn't even respond to the very first piece of evidence by the Photopea creator, before spewing some clearly and poorly generated, LLM response. So of course he'd resort to issue-closing, title-changing, banning, bullying and then Whatabout-ism.
Beautiful rainbow of moral failures...
Goodluck with that "internal audit" buddy. The internet never forgets.
A side note: I wonder what pre-Microsoft Github would do in such cases. I don't think I've ever seen modern Github take action against any clone repo with legitimate copyright issues.
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.
I'm currently working on OpenBFME[0] and I can assure you, enough LLM power guessing at the code in the binaries is enough to get the code for anything
Wine-style PS5 emulation has advanced far enough that I would bet money on there being a pirated GTA6 PC release based on the PS5 version available within six months.
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
Half of these are extremely permissive license attribution issues. Seems rather tame, no?
> 4.4. Paper.js (ext1790438722.js)
> Upstream Project: Paper.js (by Jürg Lehni & Jonathan Puckey)
> License: MIT License
> Specific Violations:
MIT Condition: The MIT License mandates: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."
The entire ~200 KB Paper.js library is embedded in minified form with all author names, copyright notices, and license text stripped.
I question the seriousness of the author of "Photosuite". Who goes through the trouble of creating accounts to prove poorly, that they "didn't steal code".
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
> those defaults have earned their place here even though the format doesn't require them
> the reader emits the model's shape rather than the file's
Oh hello Claude
I had the same exact thought from the paragraph above that when reading:
> the writer derives its field count from Object.keys().length while skipping the sentinel
How bizarre. The thief has already deleted the thread. So obviously guilty just by the fact that it's clearly a browser app inside a desktop wrapper. That makes absolutely no sense as an architecture decision. And it uses all of Photopea's libraries. Before the thread was deleted, they had spawned a few sub‑agents to come in and bully the Photopea creator. But none of it was believable; it was clearly an angry thief lashing out.
No, I have a family and this is a hobby. I don't need threats or online bullying.
I'll do a code audit (and you should too, before casting stones). The code is there.
Then why are you bullying photopea by posting slop from alt accounts?
https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/9042
This is childish behavior.
How is that me? This shit blew up overnight. There are people on both sides of the fence, and I want out.
From another OSS author: Just let it blow over. Don‘t engage. Ignore it. You‘re already making a mistake justifying yourself to people you‘ll never convince. Leave, for a time.
Just for recap: this guy copied another project, had a LLM modify it a bit and presented it as his work.
The only credit he gave was saying the original project was inspiration.
Then he deleted and banned the original author posting proof that it was a rip of and not just inspiration.
So I welcome him leaving and reconsidering.
Maybe next time consult Claude first for potential fallout before embarking on a project.
> I don't need threats or online bullying.
> There are people on both sides of the fence, and I want out.
Victim card. How classy. You are using every trick in the book, one by one
That makes absolutely no sense as an architecture decision.
It makes a lot of sense architecturally. It's much simpler to update a webpage than force every user to update their app when something needs to change. Consequently a lot of apps, especially on mobile, use a system webview with a page loaded from a server and rendered to look like the app for anything that gets regular updates. The alternative is having lots of versions of the page and needing to manage all the different variations of payloads from them.
Backwards compatibility in an API isn't that hard, but when there's a simpler option (a webview) people will take it.
That said, if there's no native stuff in the app, it is a bit harder to justify.
That's all wonderful until some dipshit decides to cut features because they were too much of a maintenance burden. At least with the desktop app you can push back and not update.
All I know for sure is that the author of Photopea is not AI and I remember when he first released it. No one was calling it a photoshop ripoff. People were calling it an actual open source alternative that functioned and didn't cost the heap of cash Adobe wanted. I recall the response to the announcement being quite positive.
Can confirm he is not AI and he also used to hang around here. Also before photopea, he tried to make a living once with a open source project, a flash replacement graphic libary for the web, called IvanK.
So that did not work out, but I used it a bit and interacted with him couple of times there, before moving on to easel and later pixi, after it became clear it would not take off and the other ones had more support.
Glad for him to found success with Photopea later, and he definitely has my sympathy here.
But I doubt this will work out much longer in the long run. It is just too easy cloning and improving projects with AI.
> improving
That's a dangerous word. Did you mean adding more features?
More useful features is usually what people call improving.
I fully support him and Photopea, but come on. It is clearly in every single way a Photoshop rip-off. There is no denying it by reasonable people.
what is the difference between "ripoff" and "fairly feature-comparable alternative"?
It's a clean room implementation of Photoshop features and UI. That's not a ripoff. Just like Wine or Mono aren't Windows ripoffs.
Does this mean that every mass-produced automobile is a ripoff of the Ford model T? Is Gimp also a ripoff? Paintshop Pro?
The GitHub issue is now a 404.
Archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20261006025310/https://github.co...
Issues removed, and a notice: Currently running an internal code audit.
"Gosh, did my LLM just copy Photopea? Lemme see"
I wonder if the issue is being responded to by an agent. A lot of the responses sound like stuff Claude writes.
Nah, I'm real
That doesn't preclude their point from being true.
Why not just apologize and have Claude rewrite any code that's similar? Whether you did it intentionally or not, you probably agree that you can't keep using his code and that it would pretty bad if someone did something similar to you.
"Nah"?
I suspect we're dealing with a child here with a cloud code subscription who isn't quite familiar with US copyright law or software licenses yet.
You‘ll suspect that from a single word? The people on this site man.
It definitely sounds like Claude.
I find it hardest to sympathize with the guy who inserted himself with 'Adapt or Die'..
> Eolix has OPENLY cited he used Photopea for inspiration and what parts he used, he's acted with honesty.
He's the definition of the word "bootlicker".
"But he admitted to killing him, he's innocent!"
photosuite maintainers could just have ai adjust the code "In the style of X" and get around any argument if copy/piracy. The laws haven't caught up here. I can't imagine how anything could be enforced. Also there's cleanroom as a service :shrug: open source software effectively has no license for someone with tokens to spare.
I don't like it but thats the situation on the ground IMO
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.
I banned the user photopea because they started spamming issues instead of following the thread
They posted one new issue with proof that you copied their code, which you deleted and closed. I’d hardly call that spamming.
I find that very hard to believe.
Absolutely. There’s a lot of this going around on twitter too with all the game reverse engineering with all the AI grifters claiming games are all open source now etc. Yeah right, I don’t think they understand the concept of open source or copyright!
Such a basic mistake treating any repo as free use. That one’s clearly a rip of copyrighted code.
I was about to say this. Even if the offline version was an authorized thing, there was no license attached to the project, meaning full copyright.
Isn't this a pretty obvious case I mean the author is not even hiding it just check the readme. They found illegally extracted photopea code then used AI to copy it. How are there any doubts on this?
We need much more of these type of direct call outs! Shed light on the AI grifters so the community knows what projects to avoid like the plague.
It's embarrassing to be honest. The eolix guy couldn't even respond to the very first piece of evidence by the Photopea creator, before spewing some clearly and poorly generated, LLM response. So of course he'd resort to issue-closing, title-changing, banning, bullying and then Whatabout-ism.
Beautiful rainbow of moral failures...
Goodluck with that "internal audit" buddy. The internet never forgets.
A side note: I wonder what pre-Microsoft Github would do in such cases. I don't think I've ever seen modern Github take action against any clone repo with legitimate copyright issues.
The OP link returns 404 now.
https://github.com/eolix/photosuite/issues/77
Mediocre people using tools that let them feel not so mediocre.
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.
I'm currently working on OpenBFME[0] and I can assure you, enough LLM power guessing at the code in the binaries is enough to get the code for anything
[0] https://github.com/Open-BFME/
Wine-style PS5 emulation has advanced far enough that I would bet money on there being a pirated GTA6 PC release based on the PS5 version available within six months.
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
Since that audit is just some hours old and clearly completely AI written - may I ask if you have looked into it yourself to make such claims?
Or rather created it and eolix is your other alias?
From 5h ago, and suddenly you found that immediately, this is very juvenile.
Their HN account is even newer
Half of these are extremely permissive license attribution issues. Seems rather tame, no?
> 4.4. Paper.js (ext1790438722.js)
> Upstream Project: Paper.js (by Jürg Lehni & Jonathan Puckey)
> License: MIT License
> Specific Violations: MIT Condition: The MIT License mandates: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." The entire ~200 KB Paper.js library is embedded in minified form with all author names, copyright notices, and license text stripped.
I question the seriousness of the author of "Photosuite". Who goes through the trouble of creating accounts to prove poorly, that they "didn't steal code".