I'm not sure whether decompiling existing software is really necessary.
If we look at AutoCAD, there are already alternatives, including some from Chinese developers, offering perpetual licenses for a fraction of the cost of a single year of AutoCAD subscription.
At this point, buying a standalone AutoCAD subscription seems increasingly difficult to justify, at least for ordinary 2D drafting. Of course, if you're already paying for an Autodesk AEC Collection with Revit and other tools included, that's a different story.
Something similar is happening with Adobe. Affinity is a really nice alternative to Photoshop, at least if you don't need every advanced feature Photoshop offers.
For smaller edits, adjustments and everyday graphic work, I find it more than sufficient. Personally, I also find it much more pleasant and accessible than GIMP. But that's obviously a matter of personal preference.
I'm also watching the development of Chinese software with growing interest. D5 Render, for example, is a very interesting product. Its vegetation and landscaping libraries are genuinely impressive, especially considering how much these tools have improved in recent years.
I'm not a software developer or an economist, so I may be completely wrong about this, but I have the impression that we're slowly starting to see in the software industry something similar to what happened in manufacturing over the past few decades.
For a long time, Asian manufacturers were mainly associated with cheaper alternatives. Today, in many industries, they produce genuinely excellent products, often at a fraction of the cost of established Western brands.
Perhaps software is beginning to follow a similar path.
Of course, developing a fully functional BIM application is much more complicated than creating another 2D CAD program or image editor. And I don't expect an inexpensive Archicad or Revit replacement to appear overnight.
But I wouldn't be surprised if, over the next five or ten years, we started seeing some serious competition from companies that many of us haven't even heard of today.
Personally, I haven't switched to a subscription model, and as I mentioned in another thread, I simply don't see a good reason to pay recurring fees when I see so few meaningful improvements from one version to the next.
Especially now, when I suspect that automation and integration with LLMs will become increasingly important over the next few years. In fact, I think these capabilities may soon become one of the key factors when choosing software.
For me, the question is becoming less about which software has the longest list of features today, and more about which one will allow me to work more efficiently tomorrow.
And I'm not convinced that established software companies will necessarily be the ones leading that change.
Perhaps that's something Graphisoft, Autodesk and other established software companies should think about.
Because increasing subscription prices is relatively easy when customers have few realistic alternatives.
Keeping those customers when good alternatives start appearing at a fraction of the price might be a very different story.
