Rust upstart reveals 'reimplementation' of Microsoft Office – with Claude on coding duty

Rust development firm ArtCraft has introduced free alternatives to Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in its expanding lineup of clean-room reimplementations of proprietary software. These projects, which are still in development, heavily utilize Claude for coding and include additional applications modeled after Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro.

WordCraft, the company's Word alternative, functions well on Arm-based devices and closely resembles Microsoft's software, with altered buttons, icons, and imagery. The spelling dictionary and hyphenation feature are sourced from an open Moby Hyphenator II word list, while WordCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0. ArtCraft stresses that WordCraft is at a pre-alpha stage and estimates it has reached 62% feature parity, though it expects an alpha suitable for everyday writing soon.

However, the company cautions against using it for production workloads. The Document Foundation, which develops LibreOffice, declined to comment on the projects' compatibility with DOCX files, while Microsoft and Adobe also declined to comment on the creative applications' imitators. Legal expert Neil Brown suggests that the reimplementers might argue their work is non-infringing if they've implemented the functionality independently, but emphasizes that the legal situation remains complex and potentially litigious if the target company has significant resources.

ArtCraft developed WordCraft using public specifications and openly licensed assets, with ambitions to expand into creative software and office applications, but the success of these projects remains uncertain.