Rust upstart reveals 'reimplementation' of Microsoft Office – with Claude on coding duty
ArtCraft adds Word, Excel, and PowerPoint lookalikes to its open source lineup, but they're not ready for production
Rust-based startup ArtCraft has introduced a series of alternatives to Microsoft Office applications - Word, Excel, and PowerPoint - as part of its expanding line of clean-room reimplementations of proprietary software. These projects, exemplified by WordCraft, draw heavily on Claude for development and are yet to be fully realized. The company's GitHub repositories also feature projects inspired by Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro.
WordCraft, the Word alternative, functions well on an Arm-based Surface, bearing a resemblance to its Microsoft counterpart. However, it showcases different buttons, icons, and imagery. The spelling dictionary and hyphenation are sourced from Grady Ward's Moby Hyphenator II public domain word list, while the application is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0.
ArtCraft emphasizes that WordCraft is currently in the pre-alpha stage, having attained approximately 62 percent feature parity. Nonetheless, an alpha version suitable for everyday writing is anticipated soon. The software developers caution against using it for production workloads at present. They have not yet initiated testing for DOCX compatibility against real-world files, nor have they incorporated features such as charts, SmartArt, and embedded OLE objects.
The Document Foundation, which develops LibreOffice, refrained from commenting on the matter. Microsoft did not offer further response to inquiries. Adobe also declined to comment on the projects targeting its creative applications. Neil Brown, from decoded.legal, suggested that the legal standing of these projects would depend on the jurisdiction, but indicated that the developers might argue their reimplementations are non-infringing, as they have independently implemented the underlying functionality without accessing the source code.
ArtCraft's WordCraft was constructed using public specifications and original or openly licensed assets. The company's future projects are set to extend beyond creative software into office applications. However, the success of these implementations in delivering reliable replacements remains to be determined. In the coming years, it could prove ironic if AI programming tools undermine the revenues of the company that brought us Copilot in GitHub.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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