lewelove

You're doing God's work. Keep it up! PhotoCraft is really cool, and the pace of stabilizing progress is incredible! Don't listen to people who dismiss your work without getting their hands on it.

> So is there a path to an ethical, viable business model for the author?

Yes and no. An ethical business model for software in this world must be built on a long process of collecting good faith from customers, it just doesn't pay well enough compared to the ones that shatter said faith (adware, exploitation, dark patterns). I think the software moat will be more and more based on social capital. People are happy to pay for the software if they know for a fact that company/person behind it isn't being hostile to them. Look at Steam as an example of this. And you can always open source your code, and still make money through the means of good faith. Is it actually viable? I don't know. It depends on how much money you want to make.

With all due respect: people should be able to do this. Copyright as a concept applied to code was always a god-awful idea, DMCA especially. And for JS served on the open web it's plainly comedic.

Someone can always make a new repo without redistributing your code, sourcing and hot-patching it directly from your domain. GitHub deleting this repo won't ever fix it, you're playing whack-a-mole and doing free PR for these repos here on HN.

We seem to forget that this website is called Hacker News.

Perhaps, but I doubt it. The immersiveness and suspension of disbelief come partially from the richness and massive bandwidth of the data stream players receive. Streaming degrades it massively. Even with media streaming, e.g. Netflix, there are many folks (including myself) who can't stand the low-ish bitrate they _have_ to supply to customers because of the infrastructure strain / $REASONS. With games it will be even worse. And there's also the latency problem, which is kinda massive for this. Unless of course they invent some kind of protocol where assets are stored and loaded on the console, but the logic of the game is received via a low-bandwidth stream.

Regarding your post: I think the future of RE of server-side bound software will be something like 1. Point your AI robot with eyes and ears to an interface designed for you (the human customer). 2. Make it explore software at massive speeds, map and record every possible behavior, closely construct/approximate the human-computer interaction model. 3. Rewrite it completely in Rust. 4. Profit.

There will be no moat. Popular non-FOSS will be laughed at and rewritten by its users in hours/days. Proletariat will finally own the means of production, and the Stallman dream will finally become real.

You will own everything and be happy.

Never got to try out PhotoSuite, looks like it really was just ripping-off your code, the repo owner already deleted it, and now it forks PhotoCraft.

I have a huge respect for your work on Photopea, been using it constantly since the time I completely moved to Linux a year ago. It has the best Photoshop parity yet to find! Would you ever consider to: 1. Open sourcing your work (partially or completely) under some kind of a permissive/copyleft license. 2. Rewriting some parts of the website that require performance as WASM targets. 3. Using any modern JS frameworks, e.g. Svelte.

Obligatory 927.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Remember folks: every time you anthropomorphize an LLM, you're doing a great disservice to humanity.