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

ArtCraft has added alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to its growing collection of Rust applications, which it describes as "clean-room reimplementations" of proprietary software.

The projects lean heavily on Claude for development and remain unfinished, but our first look at its Word alternative, WordCraft, suggests they are worth watching.

The company's GitHub repositories also include projects modeled on Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. We fired up WordCraft on an Arm-based Surface and it worked pretty well.

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WordCraft resembles Microsoft's application, although its buttons, icons, and other imagery differ. "The spelling dictionary and hyphenation come from Grady Ward's public-domain Moby Hyphenator II word list," ArtCraft says, and the application is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0.

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The company is at pains to point out that WordCraft is at the pre-alpha stage and estimates that it is at 62 percent of real feature parity, although "an alpha for everyday writing is close." We would keep it away from production workloads for now. Its roadmap says testing DOCX compatibility against a collection of real-world files has not begun, and charts, SmartArt, and embedded OLE objects are dropped.

The Document Foundation, which develops LibreOffice, declined to comment. Microsoft acknowledged our inquiry but offered no further response. Adobe also declined to comment on the projects targeting its creative applications.

Neil Brown of decoded.legal told The Register that the legal position would depend on the jurisdiction, but suggested that "those doing the 'reimplementations' may well argue that, since they have implemented the underlying functionality independently (i.e. without access to the source code of the software that they are reimplementing), their overall reimplementation is non-infringing."

That said, "the legal situation is always going to be interesting, and quite possibly litigated, when the party most likely to feel aggrieved has deep pockets and lots of lawyers, and probably quite a lot to lose."

ArtCraft says WordCraft was built from public specifications and observation, using original or openly licensed assets. Its ambitions now extend from creative software to office applications, but whether the projects can deliver reliable replacements remains to be seen.

In the years to come, it would be richly ironic if AI programming tools took a bite out of the revenues of the company that gave us Copilot in GitHub. ®