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if it's a clean room implementation they can sue, but they won't necessarily win. anthropic gave up when claude was translated to rust because none of their code or assets were used, so they had no standing to object to the software itself existing.

this is the same sort of issue john deere has with open source diagnostic software, and nintendo has with some emulators. it's not illegal to copy features so long as you don't reuse any assets. a complete rewrite of photoshop in rust might just get away with it. you can be sure adobe will be pouring over their source for the slimmest bit of their IP. and of course, even if they would lose, there's nothing stopping them from dragging the other party through the courts just to ruin them financially.