The developer who replicated Photoshop is taking action again, releasing an open-source clone of the Microsoft Office suite

Brandon Thomas, the developer who previously used AI to reconstruct Adobe Creative Cloud for free, has now turned his attention to Microsoft Office. He has released open-source clone applications WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft on GitHub, corresponding to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively. The three applications are written in Rust, with a single codebase that can run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD, and can also run in a browser. Thomas refers to this as a clean room reconstruction, meaning it is based on publicly available file format specifications and observations of the original software's behavior, without ever copying Microsoft's code, similar to the legal path taken by Compaq in the 1980s to clone the IBM PC BIOS.

WordCraft can read and write .docx format, covering 88% of the features in the Word ribbon. It currently supports revision tracking, footnotes, citations, and mail merge; however, taking into account document fidelity and stability, the team estimates its completeness as a Word alternative for actual work is only about 60%, and it is still labeled as an alpha early testing version. GridCraft has supported 513 out of 523 Excel worksheet functions and 89% of ribbon commands, with the developer self-assessing about 50% as usable for actual work. The next step is to improve compatibility with real .xlsx files.