// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Local AI Weekly #6: If You Can Reverse Engineer It, It's Open Source!
What I realized in the past week or so is that if you can reverse engineer it, any software is open source software.
Not in the license sense, of course. But AI agents are getting good at reading binaries, tracing what an app does and rebuilding it. Last issue, we had the Craft tools cloning Microsoft Office. This week, there are more office clones, a viral repo that reverse engineers "anything", and people taking back control of their smart TVs with the help of AI.
The source code is no longer the wall it used to be. Whether that's a good thing depends a lot on which side you are on.
I have enjoyed using Myna for voice based input on Ubuntu 26.04 (yes, it can be installed on 26.04). The performance is surprising good. Next, I will be trying a few more such voice input tools, starting with SpeakoFlow.
REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is the repo of the week. It's an MIT-licensed MCP server that lets AI agents inspect native binaries, Electron apps, Android APKs, firmware and more. Deep native analysis needs proper reverse engineering tools like Ghidra. Analysis runs locally, but your agent's model provider still sees what it finds. Also, fake REA repos are already serving malware, so install it only from the official repo or npm package.
Graphify is reverse engineering for your own code. It turns a codebase, docs and PDFs into a knowledge graph your coding agent can query. Code is parsed locally with tree-sitter, and GRAPHIFY_BACKEND=ollama keeps the rest local too.
It's a Plan is a self-hosted Linear/Jira alternative where AI agents get a role and pick up issues like any team member. External agents run on your machine and hand tasks to Claude Code, Codex or opencode. In early stages for now.
Mandrake Linux creator Gaël Duval is behind ElixirOffice, a Microsoft Office look-alike built on Euro-Office components. The code was written by LLM agents, with tests and reviews on every change. It's AGPL-3.0 and in beta.
Then there is Ely Office, six offline desktop apps for documents, sheets, slides, PDF, Git and Markdown.
And BetterOffice, which we covered last week, now has its Apache-2.0 source under the openooxml org on GitHub.