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.

If those apps have all the same tools fully functionally integrated, there’s absolutely zero chance it was vibe coded. It would take longer to vibe code than to remake it by hand, in order to get all of them working together properly. Vibe coding isn’t there yet.

the open source rebuilds that were made in days are buggy and a bit broken at present.

I think it could be both. They decompiled it, likely with the help of an llm, and then vibe coded a reimplementation in rust. They claim 'clean-room reimplementation' on github, but I'm not so sure this would be considered clean room. I don't know, tho, let's wait for the lawyers and judges to say.