DHH and Naval split on what free Adobe clones prove
One side sees the end of paid desktop software, the other sees a reason to move everything onto your own servers.
Miguel Ángel Durán, who posts as @midudev, shared a set of Adobe products reimplemented from scratch, free and open source. That was enough to start a fight about whether cloning a suite of paid tools counts as disruption or just copying.
DHH's contribution was a question rather than a verdict. How many pencils, how many humans, how many hours would it have taken to recreate the Adobe suite by hand, he asked. @ekremcetinkaya_ replied that he got the hype but this was just a discounted knock off, not something novel. DHH did not argue the knock off part. He argued the discount part.
The discount is the product
"Yeah, the discount is 100%," DHH wrote, adding that this unsurprisingly appeals to a lot of people who are tired of Adobe's subscription dark patterns. That is the whole case in two sentences. Novelty was never what the buyer was shopping for. If the thing on the screen does the job and the bill is zero, originality is a critic's concern, not a customer's.
Naval, posting separately on the same theme, took the argument somewhere less comfortable for anyone shipping software. Models are the last moat in software, he wrote. AI can train on essays and rewrite them, decompile software and recode it, ingest art and recreate it. But AI itself does not want to be distilled, and so he expects more software to retreat to the server and resist distillation.
Models are the last moat in software.
The business read
These two are not actually disagreeing about the facts, they are disagreeing about what follows. DHH is describing demand, which is that a free equivalent beats a subscription most people resent. Naval is describing supply, which is that anything you hand a customer as a working artifact is now a training target for the next clone.
For a solo founder the practical version is narrow. Nobody in these posts has produced numbers on how good the Adobe clones are, how many people use them, or whether any of them hold up under real work, so treat the quality question as open. What is not open is the pricing pressure. If your product is a binary somebody can download, inspect and reproduce, the price floor is whatever a motivated weekend plus a model costs. The parts that stay yours are the ones that only run where you control them, your data, your service, your account.
Yeah, the discount is 100%. Unsurprisingly that appeals to a lot of people who are tired of Adobe's subscription dark patterns.