The Age of Software Gatekeeping Is Over

For decades, the most valuable thing a software company owned was the wall around its product. Proprietary file formats, locked hardware, closed code and a team of engineers nobody else could afford. If you wanted what they built, you paid what they charged, on the terms they set.

That wall just got a lot shorter.

In the last few weeks, two stories made the point better than any think piece could. One person used AI to rebuild working versions of Adobe’s creative suite. A group of hobbyists used AI to start turning PlayStation 5 games into native PC programs. Neither project is finished. Both are moving faster than anyone thought possible a year ago.

My take: the age of software gatekeeping is over. The companies that win from here will be the ones offering the best combination of customer service and price. Not the ones claiming to be the “only” option.

Adobe: rebuilt out of frustration

In early October, a small team behind a project called ArtCraft released free, open-source clones of Adobe’s core tools: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere) and LightCraft (Lightroom). Developer Brandon Thomas reportedly built them with Anthropic’s Claude and the Rust programming language (Vice).

The motivation is the interesting part. It wasn’t a technical challenge. Thomas says he started after repeated frustration with Adobe’s cancellation fees. His co-founder, Michael Caffrey, described the subscription model as forcing users to “rent software.”

A week later, the same developer announced free clones of Excel, PowerPoint and Word (Futurism).

Let’s be honest about where these stand. They are early alpha. One technical review counted more than 800 open issues, including crashes on large images, weak color management and errors opening PSD files. Adobe also has things that live nowhere on your hard drive: cloud-based generative features, twenty years of camera and lens profiles, and licensed color libraries. Nobody is canceling their Creative Cloud license for PhotoCraft tomorrow.

But that misses the point. Two years ago, a credible Photoshop competitor meant a funded company and a large engineering team. Now it means a small group of annoyed customers and an AI subscription.

AnyPS5: the console wall cracks

Console makers have the strongest gate in software. The hardware is locked, the libraries are secret, and the exclusives are the business model.

AnyPS5 is an open-source project that takes a different route than a traditional emulator. Instead of pretending to be a PS5 while the game runs, it rewrites the game’s executable once, before you play, and swaps Sony’s system libraries for replacements written for PC. The first commit landed around August 2026. By mid-October, contributors reported 100% of PS5 graphics shaders and 88% of system libraries ported (Decrypt).

Again, the honest version: most games don’t run well yet. Reported frame rates range from 4 FPS to 60 FPS, and only a handful of titles are verified as playable. The project bans piracy and says you need to buy the game on the PlayStation Store. (Nothing technically stops someone from using a pirated copy.)

The timing matters too. This year Sony announced the end of physical discs for new games starting in 2028, argued in court that buying a digital game doesn’t mean owning it, and reportedly shelved planned PC ports. Every one of those decisions was a gate. And every one gave people a reason to look for a way around it.

What AI actually changed

Reverse engineering isn’t new. Emulators and clones have existed for decades. What changed is the COST of doing it.

The work has always been mostly grunt work: reading disassembled code, mapping what each function does, documenting file formats, writing thousands of lines of compatibility code. That is exactly the kind of work current AI models are good at. Tools like REA now let an AI agent drive established reverse engineering programs (Ghidra, IDA) directly, step by step (Akita on Rails). As one game studio executive put it, AI can “dramatically accelerate” reverse engineering (Decrypt).

The economics are moving fast. Epoch AI estimates the cost of running a model at a fixed level of quality is falling roughly 5 to 10 times per year. Work that took a team of specialists a year can now be started by a few determined people in weeks.

It still takes skill. Someone has to know what “working” looks like, catch the AI when it’s wrong, and do the hard parts no model can guess. (I’ve written before about the danger of output that LOOKS right.) But the barrier dropped from “funded company” to “motivated expert,” and that changes everything downstream.

If anyone can make it, no one owns “only”

For years, a lot of software pricing has rested on one quiet assumption: the customer has nowhere else to go. Switching costs, proprietary formats and locked platforms did the selling. Service could be mediocre and prices could climb every year, because leaving was harder than staying.

That assumption is breaking. When a capable clone can be built by a small team in months, “we’re the only ones who can do this” stops being a moat. It becomes a countdown.

Notice who built these projects. Not rival corporations. Frustrated customers. The Adobe clones started with cancellation fees. AnyPS5 grew in a year when Sony announced the end of discs and told buyers they don’t own their games. The people most motivated to rebuild your product are the ones you annoyed.

This isn’t doom. It’s a new job description.

None of this means software companies are finished. Adobe still has things a clone can’t copy overnight: cloud services, licensed data, decades of edge cases, and support. What it means is that those things now have to EARN the price, instead of the lock-in doing it.

If I were running a software company today, I would focus on three things:

• Customer service as the product. When the features can be copied, the experience can’t. Fast answers, real people, and fixes that ship are hard to clone.
• Pricing that feels fair. Nobody rebuilds a product out of spite when the price is reasonable and canceling is easy. Punitive cancellation fees are an invitation.
• Value that lives outside the code. Maintained data, expertise, trust, accountability. The code is the part AI can rebuild. The rest is not.

This is why I partnered with Trial Pro (UpSite Clinical), and how I’m approaching my own platform, Elessar.

Trial Pro is an AI-powered budget and coverage analysis platform for clinical trials. The platform itself impresses, but what sold me on them was their relentless approach to customer service. They don’t view a new client as a subscription. They meet with every client, and even potential clients, to hear what is working well and what needs to be updated to meet their needs.

For Elessar, anyone can build a dashboard over public CMS data. Anyone can drag the data into ChatGPT or Claude. The value is a UI that feels easy and intuitive, data sets that are kept current and traceable, and a customer-first approach that values feedback over a subscription.

The gatekeepers had a good run. The next era belongs to whoever treats customers best at a price they don’t resent.