A fledgling GitHub project wants to rebuild Adobe's entire Creative Suite in Rust, without touching a line of Adobe's actual code.
The repository, called Photocraft, surfaced on October 6, 2026, under the title "Adobe Creative Suite Cleanroom Port to Rust." A cleanroom port means the authors say they built it from observed behavior and public documentation, not from Adobe's source. The post picked up 68 points and 25 comments, a respectable but not viral showing. Beyond the repository itself, at github.com/storytold/photocraft, there's no other public detail on how far along the project actually is.
Cleanroom development is as much a legal move as an engineering one. It's the same strategy companies have used for decades to clone BIOS chips and file formats without inheriting someone else's copyright problems. Adobe's apps also run on a famously sprawling, decades-old C++ codebase, so a real Rust rewrite would be a bet on memory safety and maintainability, not just a way around licensing.
Cloning Photoshop is a lot easier to announce than to finish. Plenty of projects have tried to out-Photoshop Photoshop; what's missing here is any sign of which parts, if any, actually run.