The Software Revolution: Open-Source Clones and Democratised Warfare with Jag Sharma and Jason Kapadia #123

And you know what? Let's kick off with your topic.

Is software IP losing its moat? Jason, take us through

it.

Yeah, so I want to talk about a crazy thing that's happening on GitHub, and it's genuinely making everyone in the software industry, including myself, break out in a cold sweat.

The project is called REA.

It's in the game.

No, it's R-E-A, short for reverse engineer everything.

And basically, it's an MCP server which hooks up to your AI coding agent like Cloud Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever you're using.

And it hooks up directly into these heavy-duty disassemblers.

And you just basically point your agent a compiled bit of closed-source software Ask how a specific feature works.

An agent pokes around at the binary and it traces the assembly.

It does all of this fancy stuff to try to figure out the logic and builds you a brand new clean room implementation from scratch.

For anyone who's listening, thinking that ARIA is some kind of magic tool, it's not going to create the full source code from scratch with all the comments and everything.

That's not possible because when they compile a piece of software, all of that stuff gets stripped out.

But what it does is it strips away, like Jag was saying, the friction of using complex tools.

And, you know, normally it takes years and years to master this type of stuff and to create software like adobe creative cloud in a couple of weeks would have seemed unimaginable actually not really unimaginable because just a couple of months ago we were talking about maybe this could be the the future with ai but actually that future is now coming true which is just crazy and What it is that people are so passionately riled up around, this isn't happening in a vacuum, right? So the Creative Cloud clone that was created is called Artcraft, right? And It has an open source clone of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Acrobat.

And he was fed up of Adobe's dark pattern cancellation fees, subscription price hikes, and forced terms of service updates that let them scan users' files for AI training.

And to be fair, Adobe made it.

So to be able to use their software, you had to allow Adobe... to actually scan all your files and use them to train their own models.

But the thing is that the reverse is not possible because Adobe have a lot of legal protection.

And there's a YouTuber called Lewis Rossman, who I was watching his videos.

They're actually fascinating about.

He was saying that under US law, there's a section one to one of the DCMA and let, there's basically all landmark cases like sega versus accolade google versus oracle reverse engineering for interoperability and clean room implementation has been legally protected for fair use so what that basically means is that right now you're able to do that for fair use but because it was so hard to actually decompile at these closed source programs It was very improbable that people would actually spend the time and money to decompile these pieces of software because of all the legal risks as well involved.

It wouldn't happen.

But now it's literally a couple of commands to your AI agent, right? So Lewis predicts that having AI...