Specifically, they pay for the cronyism aspect of the service. They pay because they're friends with the founder (or at least, the decision-maker expects kickbacks now or in the future), not because they need the features of the software. The features are only there to provide narrative support (I.e. justification for the money being paid). You can see that this is the case when the software gets really bad and there exist free open source solutions, the company has self-hosting capacity, but the company keeps using the expensive, clunky SaaS solution founded by their buddies... Then sometimes they jump ships to their buddy's SaaS company and get a nice fat salary as a reward for having helped to create the parasitic dependency.
The OccupySaaS people are delusional thinking that the system works well enough and is honest enough that a solution exists within the confines of that system. Same delusion the Occupy Wall Street folks had. Didn't work out for David Graeber, did it?
There is 'how the situation looks' and then there is reality which is 100 times worse.
Hmmm, no. I mean, yes that happens, but I'm pretty sure you've also paid for software in which you don't have buddies at that company.
I pay for Fastmail and I don't know anybody there. Same with Microsoft 365. I wish I was friends with the Roshal brothers!
What you mention, is a case of private sector corruption and I've seen it first hand, but I wouldn't say it's normal or even discuss it as regular practice.
In my B2B days I definitely saw deals made among friends like that, but I mostly saw salespeople inviting potential customers to expensive dinners that did not end in a sale. Failed cronyism then?
Yeah well we're just the plebs and we use whatever big tech forces us to use and whatever they allow us to discover through their discovery platforms and recommendation engines. About your Fastmail example specifically; All non-approved email services are blocked; if you try to set up your own service, all your outbound emails on behalf of your customers are marked as spam by big tech. Seriously, try to setup your own SMTP email service.
Every service has a moat; sometimes a technical one (I.e. block competitors as spammers), sometimes the moat is regulations (Are you SOC2 compliant?); other times it's just a business contract between people who belong to the same club.
This seems like it’s trying to reinvent the idea of FOSS. There’s already tons of FOSS alternatives to big tech SaaS and there’s lots of tech coops and other venues for tech activism. Why not support one of those ventures or build a platform to help amplify them?
Also odd to advocate for control of tech only to cede the entire project to AI.
Perhaps let's brainstorm ways to solve this. How can we incentivize joiners to projects? How can we both appreciate the founders and starters, and the later joiners who are necessary for the project? Perhaps if we encourage our own community (tech) to give serious weight and appreciation to all contributors, that will move things in the right direction.
Also, the creators of projects can do their part by sharing the praise their projects receive with their contributors.
What other ideas do folks have to encourage joining rather than starting?
Maybe assigning specific "ownership" (responsibility for, overall credit for) of some portion of the project to long time contributors over time?
I'm not sure the issue is getting credit for contributions, or as you suggest: giving ownership of areas of a project. After all, that's a problem already solved: CLAs for open source. With CLAs in place, developers get credited for their efforts (git blames!), as well as part of the IP of their implemented solution if accepted.
My argument goes more about the lines of: Some people want to be the starter of a project, disregarding existing, often advanced efforts about the same problem.
Take for example, the bajillion expenses tracker apps. The most reinvented wheel. Do we need yet another one?
> Take for example, the bajillion expenses tracker apps. The most reinvented wheel. Do we need yet another one?
Well, small projects being repeated is one thing, but because they're small there's only so much waste there.
I'm thinking more about "cathedral-like" projects, some massive open source project that lasts for years, in which it may be important to emphasize the contributions of, and a particular way of understanding the contributions of the many stonemasons and lesser artisans, as opposed to the leadership of the project and the architects.
Our whole society would benefit I think by having more respect for the "average person that contributes to the common good, even if they're not the leader", and actually praising that as much or more in some cases than the leadership role.
> I'm thinking more about "cathedral-like" projects, some massive open source project that lasts for years
Yes, though it takes a special kind of person to devout themselves to what potentially is a thankless job.
At least Linux kernel developers are mostly employees of tech behemoths, so they can contribute while remaining well paid.
I wonder about FFMPEG developers, if that's the exception.
> Our whole society would benefit I think by having more respect for the "average person that contributes to the common good, even if they're not the leader", and actually praising that as much or more in some cases than the leadership role.
I fully agree in the assertion that our society would benefit, but I see that more platonically than the reality.
The reality is what happens today, and I don't see that happening (hopefully I'm proven wrong).
Exactly. Also it's incredible how many working professionals (as evidenced by this "movement") don't understand why companies pay for software to these SaaS companies.
Ironically attaching your company to a movement like this will deter people from using it.
In my opinion, most tech-like professionals miss the point of delegating liabilities.
The whole reason to pay for software is to offload the liability to a 3rd-party. In simpler words: "As a company, I have this need and I don't want to solve it myself. Also, if I pay someone, I can sue them on contract breach just in case."
The legal part of the liability offload is key in the decision, because it requires ownership.
FOSS doesn't fulfill that requirement, therefore, adopting FOSS means the user owns the liability of using the software. Companies don't need or want more liability than they currently have to, less is better.
> Why not support one of those ventures or build a platform to help amplify them?
Because then you can't collect donations. And you have first prove yourself to be able to contribute to those projects. Because you want to make a name for yourself. Because you want to cast a big umbrella over unrelated software, except for the fact that they got started by this "movement".
This put a cap on the upper price. Basically it forced the SAAS pricing to dive similar to what Deepseek is doing to OpenAI and Anthropic. Easily 30% of any SAAS are not companies. So over time that portion will not grow and chip away. And further more this encourage other smaller companies to vye for the same enteprise customers forcing the price to dive further. I dont expect the current SAAS to continue much. It willturn more of personalization service in coming decade.
I think we can make it sharper by not only 1:1 copying it, but focusing on a specific use case that bugs people. How about a backend-only replica that solves Terraform-specific bugs and makes a 1:1 compatible API that feels like a breeze? Then users can slap their own UI on top and basically own the product.
This is a really nice idea, but most of these types things die as a nice idea unless they reach critical mass. 99% of people (to use the 99% idea from the website) just want to pay a fee to get a product and know that there is good documentation/training material and customer support behind it. Sometimes that "support" comes in the form of consultants around industries that push you into products as a result of using their services.
This seems inevitable in one form or another. A lot of talented devs are struggling to find employment at the same moment that there is a tool that can guide you through the parts of launching a product that are outside of your expertise. That's just more time to tinker out of curiosity or necessity.
I believe the next few years are going to see a lot of new and innovative tech products. Maybe this is how we build the internet we actually want.
Openship is an order management system. I built that first when I used Shopify. Then it was easy to build my own which became Openfront. Think of Openship as a the glue between Openfronts so businesses can buy from other businesses.
Happy to answer more questions. We’re making open source alternatives to Shopify, Toast, GlossGenius, MindBody, Booksy, Cloudbeds, Dutchie, etc.
I wish them success but doubt it will work for the simple fact that you need some semblance of reliable support which generally requires ownership. That is at odds with the spirit of this, at least from first page.
Or to put it another way, if money isn’t an issue why would you use Salescompel over Salesforce?
The more that the 'reliable support' becomes AI agents that make it harder and harder to get to an actual person, the more projects like this that can make good documentation that acts as support (if you point your own AI at it) make perfect sense.
Lots of smaller/medium sized companies where money is definitely an issue are also tethered to way too many SaaS subscriptions.
I think what AI has surfaced is that how bad most people, even people from tech are in understand what makes SaaS work and what makes software good. It is rarely just churning code.
Given how many FOSS alternatives exist, I'd hope that such projects could turn their attention towards the AI models themselves, creating an open-weights model from an existing proprietary model, or somesuch.
Unfortunately, that won't be a low effort thing where you can burn $100 to create an imitation of something, so all we get is vibe-coded Photoshop clones...
I really don't understand how you protest SaaS layoffs by providing open source alternatives free of charge?
Let's say you successfully create a drop-in equivalent to Salesforce that anyone can use for free, and sales teams decide they like you enough to do so (good luck). It takes off, and Salesforce goes completely under.
They can no longer afford to pay salaries in this hypothetical and everyone is let go. You have done the equivalent of laying off Salesforce's entire workforce. You've replaced a system that pays 15,000 engineer salaries with a system that pays no one and benefits other SaaS companies, no?
Why start with Auth0 and Salesforce? That feels odd if the target is around mass layoffs. Similarly, I don't get why anyone would even use them today. Auth0 has had better alternatives in a long time, and Salesforce, well, Salesforce is just trash.
Also, isn't the sales pitch behind IDPs like Auth0 is that few organizations actually _want_ to self-host an IDP? How is providing yet another self-hostable IDP server going to change that?
> Similarly, I don't get why anyone would even use them today. Auth0 has had better alternatives in a long time, and Salesforce, well, Salesforce is just trash
Could it be that Marc Benioff knows a few things that you don't know? If so, any guesses what those could be?
It will be hard to keep everyone on the same page because if this gains any traction social media will ratchet up the propaganda and play the divide and conquer strategy. There'll be accusations of people joining movements like this of being communists and that will kick it off. Same strategy being used across the board.
Dear god, the commies are in our software!!! Imagine if those types had a clue just how much digital infrastructure ran on code written by "communists"
Ironically your comment demonstrates exactly what I just said. Political polarisation plays into the hands of the elite, you're just helping to fuel it with this kind of tone.
I think it's great new takes on software comes around, but I hope that anyone that engages in these movements understands two things:
- Not every SaaS have their moat at a 100% of the software, e.g.: You could vibecode a Twilio, but good luck establishing contracts with carriers on getting phone numbers in bulk, which is their actual moat.
- Having the movement's foundation on revenge is a fuel that lasts very little. Once the avengers run out of motivation or the source of rage gets resolved (i.e. these developers get hired for higher salaries at companies with better culture), the steam will just dissipate. I know this myself by having walked this walk.
As long as new implementations of the software solves actual friction points of their would-be users, the chances for adoption/switch are higher than just making drop-in replacements. The justification gap to switch needs to be wide enough. I know graphic designers are pretty mad generally at Adobe's predatory licensing model, but is that true of other SaaS vendors?
Identify these friction points, sometimes it's not just clunky UI/UX, sometimes it's complicated billing (much like AnyDesk guys left TeamViewer and adopted a licensing model that actually makes sense). Sometimes it's just really bad tech support; the pandemic days left some vendors exposed at this particular area.
More often than not it's just customers that feel trapped by vendor lock-in, and have no solid alternatives, but by switching they wonder if this alternate vendor will just get greedy and do the same, which feels treacherous to these (rightfully) hurt, paying individuals and companies (particularly SMBs).
Most of the organizations that are successful are so because they had a coherent vision for what the product would be and a passion for solving that particular niche's problem. I'm not sure how anger/vengeance rather than a passion for the problem space is going to positively change the customer's perception of the product's long term vision, support and guarantees. Imagine trying to poach a Salesforce client and they ask you why would they need to invest time and money into migrating to your solution and all you got is "haha, fuck salesforce, they fired me".
The idea seems noble, but a good market-fit product is more than just code sitting inside a github repository. That's why there have always been open source alternatives to commercial CRMs long before AI even came into the picture but they never took off.
Products get successful by being good, but after a certain threshold people buy a product because "nobody got fired for buying Salesforce". Which is not all that different from buying a product because "haha, fuck salesforce, they fired me".
You probably don't intend this, but the argument seems like "money talks, so why bother with ideals". How would you solve enshittification in the current market, if not introducing a bit of anarchy?
That's definitely not what I'm saying. I'm just saying build a better product and a better company that focuses on its employees. It's not that hard and there are plenty of examples all around. Also, revenge isn't exactly an ideal, it's actually quite the opposite.
Let me get this straight, you’re implying that Anthropic’s other marketing campaigns, like “AI will probably hack all our systems and then kill us all” is not harebrained?
No. Some people want it to be, but it doesn't take a lot of thinking to understand why "we got fired from big tech because of AI, so now we're fighting back by funding said AI out of our own pockets" makes absolutely no sense.
Performative "guardrails" consisting of a single vague and easily bypassed prompt. It hasn't stopped anyone, and likely only serves as future legal defense in case of a lawsuit.
no opinion of if this is a good idea or not or the overall statement of the thing... but isn't support a big part of what these saas companies are really providing... its not just salesforce, its salesforce and customer success teams and 24/7 support etc.
i suppose this could provide that also (dont see that they want to) but then its just back to vendor a vs vendor b and vendor a in this case has a lot of history and inertia with the companies these guys would need to switch.
maybe that wouldnt be a big deal longer term, but near term i think we are probably still in a "nobody gets fired for buying ibm" phase at the moment.
ya you could save a ton on that salesforce contract and sticking it to them might feel great, but the project to migrate and then self support this with your own employees is non-trivial and would be a pretty monumental risk to take. like you might as well just internally vibe code a new solution that is perfectly tailored to your biz vs getting a knock off vibe coded version of a saas thing that you only actually use 20% of.
You may begin with vengeance but I hope vengeance won't be your permanent fuel. It tends to lead with clouded and personal decisions, emotionally charged responses (like the very website copywriting itself) and... well, I have my fair share of grievances and a significant boost of confidence is to persevere in what is right against the wrong that I felt were done to me... but if I make my grievances my customers and supporters' problem, I am dragging them into my cesspool, spreading the negativity and it simply does not create an environment and spirit of productivity..
Turnabout is fair play. Setting aside the overall ethical shitshow that AI presents, I don't really have much objection to turning their own tech against them.
LLMs are an incredible technology, and I would have loved to see them developed organically over time with sensible regulation and strong ethics....it would have taken many more years, but it also wouldn't have stolen the sum of human creativity, generated a hype bubble that threatens the global economy, wrecked the consumer hardware market, or been deployed in the most shortsighted, environmentally destructive ways imagineable.
But that's not what we got, so evoking the same fear and uncertainty that we must face in those who lead global megacorps is not out of bounds, as far as I'm concerned.
I've been threading the needle between my AI loving techbro indiehacker friends and my AI hating artist and FOSS geek lefty friends for the last year now and the dogmatism has been interesting. The extreme of it for AI lovers I don't really get in my friend group since I think it manifests mostly in AI psychosis meltdowns by tech CEOs like with the Proton Mail guy, or religious worship by the anyone with one degree of separation or less from anyone on the the AI doom cult temple sex priestess gang bang Sankey diagram.
To them, even a small use of LLMs is a moral endorsement and material contribution to the pillaging of natural resources by data centers, the racial profiling and inherent biases baked into LLM output by their training corpus and prejudices of corporate leaders, the theft of artists, writers, and FOSS contributors for training data, and even could cause irreparable brain damage (they inevitably have studies to link to, on LLM usage reducing problem solving abilities or creativity). Also LLMs still can't write good code, to these people.
I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present, especially in their current token-subsidized form (Claude max still is a hilariously obviously unprofitable endeavor). IMO turning these tokens into liberationist software (OP project and similar) is basically a form of wealth redistribution. Moving beyond clean room software implementation, once you get to the possibly or frankly illegal things you can do with LLMs, their activist potentials seem pretty obvious to me. Cracking and reverse engineering proprietary software, developing hacks against The System (what if we leveraged LLMs to take out Russian datacenters that flood the internet with ultra right wing propaganda? Or... Industrial sabotage <.<), automating social media content in the same way the far right is doing (or the opposite - responding instantly to all far right fake news, solving the "it's easier to create it than debunk it" problem), creating agitprop, or hell creating floods of disinformation. I mean depending on someone's value system in terms of ideologically valid strategy, there's a lot of possibilities unlocked by LLMs!
Personally I'm interested in anything that simply takes the winds of profit out of the sails of as many things as possible, which is why I like projects like this one and why I spun up a similar one a few weeks back: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity Though I'm looking at smaller niche things like, milk collection software or whatever.
> I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present
The problem isn't that they don't have potential, but that the downside isn't worth it.
You're trying to convince people that asbestos has great potential as a building material. You're saying it does an amazing job of fireproofing, and don't worry your pretty little head about cancer.
Asbestos is everywhere in older buildings because it was excellent fireproofing. We're still dealing with the consequences.
This is also my argument against militarization and armed revolution as a strategy of establishing anarchist or communist society. The downsides are illustrated and argued against in "The Anarchist Cookbook," a rewrite of the original by Keith McHenry. So, I'm interested in what you think the downsides may be here, since I'm not immediately able to think of any - at least not any caused by me as an individual activist.
It does seem that AI was used effectively recently in the defeat of Bolsanaro's son in Brazil, which I use as evidence for. I'm at this moment looking more into that when I really should be working, heh. Thanks to user solyin, sibling to you.
This is a very interesting mix of tone-deaf, disconnected from reality, AI-hype, and naivety that is just hard to wrap ones head around. where do I start.
First, is tech workers the 99% now? Come on, look at the average salary vs national median anywhere in the world. This is just a stupid take.
Second, this sounds like the idea of "Twitter is just a couple of SQL tables and UI pages" level of "I don't understand the depth of software engineering".
At least in the West, where most global SaaS revenue comes from, Tech workers are not 99%. In fact, most of them are well int the top 5-3%. Just look at median salary in your country.
That is not how it works. 99% is the everyone but top 1%. Tech workers are generally in the top 5%. So they are not the 99% but rather the top 5% so more aligned and part of the 1% they allude to "rebel against".
Get used to seeing this kind of cheap shots and half-ass projects everywhere. With AI, going from idea to half-ass now cost only 150$ per month and near zero skills.
the sirlte copy says all pull request get human eyes, but the 100s of commits and .5M LoC in a few days say otherwise, or that pushing to main is a bypass mechanism
Hah, glad I wasn't the only one that had this idea. Been chewing on it ever since malus.sh or whatever that joke clean room reimplementation of FOSS software project was.
I noticed that others are taking a shot at the big boys like Photoshop, but I don't think that makes sense since 1. Jesus Christ imagine trying to rewrite Photoshop, with or without Astra and reverse engineering, let's be real! And 2. GIMP already exists and people don't use it for various reasons an ultra nerd that doesn't have osx or windows on any device in his house (me) could understand. Instead I'm looking for small niche markets that are locked in by the software equivalent of a petty village despot. Decent examples so far include quilting software and funeral home SASS. I'm also looking for anyone stuck on old dead software with no migration path because of no export functionality or nothing supporting whatever given file format anymore. Apparently QuickBooks desktop falls into this category, but the space feels full enough, with e.g. GnuCash, that I don't think I would be much help there.
Basically leveraging subsidized tokens to liberate proprietary software. A bit of a petulant table flip maybe, but it kinda feels like the only thing left to us. Either we can kill ourselves scrambling around doing 996 for startups to try to avoid being a permanent underclass... Or we can light it all on fire.
Also inspired by open weight models tanking possible profit margins on frontier LLMs. One form of anti capitalist activism could be to just make it impossible to monetize something. The Manfred Macx form of activism.
Many other people in this thread with similar projects seem to be following the same workflow:
1. LLM agents sent out to find locked in proprietary software without a FOSS alternative
2. Targets selected by a human for deeper research on feasibility and alternatives
3. Clean room plan established
4. Human uses the software and takes notes
5. Feed notes into a token subsidized frontier model for orchestration. Architecture and plan written, beginning normal agentic development flow.
I'm slowed down significantly by step 4. Perhaps I will look into contributing my efforts to a larger project such as the one linked instead.
PhotoCraft is already better than GIMP3 in every aspect.
Usability is much better, binaries are 4 times smaller, and it's way faster. GIMP takes 5+ seconds to start, vibe-coded Rust Photoshop starts instantly.
I think the "old" open source community has very low standards for user experience when it comes to GUI software. It's one of the main reasons I could never get myself to use desktop Linux.
With AI, there are no excuses for open source software to be worse in any aspect at all.
The mistake is thinking the first S is what people pay for when it is the second S.
can't agree more
spot on :)
Specifically, they pay for the cronyism aspect of the service. They pay because they're friends with the founder (or at least, the decision-maker expects kickbacks now or in the future), not because they need the features of the software. The features are only there to provide narrative support (I.e. justification for the money being paid). You can see that this is the case when the software gets really bad and there exist free open source solutions, the company has self-hosting capacity, but the company keeps using the expensive, clunky SaaS solution founded by their buddies... Then sometimes they jump ships to their buddy's SaaS company and get a nice fat salary as a reward for having helped to create the parasitic dependency.
The OccupySaaS people are delusional thinking that the system works well enough and is honest enough that a solution exists within the confines of that system. Same delusion the Occupy Wall Street folks had. Didn't work out for David Graeber, did it?
There is 'how the situation looks' and then there is reality which is 100 times worse.
Hmmm, no. I mean, yes that happens, but I'm pretty sure you've also paid for software in which you don't have buddies at that company.
I pay for Fastmail and I don't know anybody there. Same with Microsoft 365. I wish I was friends with the Roshal brothers!
What you mention, is a case of private sector corruption and I've seen it first hand, but I wouldn't say it's normal or even discuss it as regular practice.
In my B2B days I definitely saw deals made among friends like that, but I mostly saw salespeople inviting potential customers to expensive dinners that did not end in a sale. Failed cronyism then?
Yeah well we're just the plebs and we use whatever big tech forces us to use and whatever they allow us to discover through their discovery platforms and recommendation engines. About your Fastmail example specifically; All non-approved email services are blocked; if you try to set up your own service, all your outbound emails on behalf of your customers are marked as spam by big tech. Seriously, try to setup your own SMTP email service.
Every service has a moat; sometimes a technical one (I.e. block competitors as spammers), sometimes the moat is regulations (Are you SOC2 compliant?); other times it's just a business contract between people who belong to the same club.
This entire website screams “Authored by AI”. It is ironic and lazy that the manifesto of a movement nominally for humans would be written by AI.
Does anyone else feel that this discredits it?
> Apache-2.0
Seeing this just feels like this whole thing is just some sort of trick by Big SaaS™ Use a strong copyleft license or go away.
Yeah why is this Apache-2.0 ??
>Copyleft.
Why even bother with the extra "protection". It can be re-made by AI as easily.
Just go all the way, MIT or BSD. Maximize reusability and adoption.
> It can be re-made by AI as easily.
Because that's not actually true yet, and may not be for a while
If you’re going to go all the way, make it public domain.
This seems like it’s trying to reinvent the idea of FOSS. There’s already tons of FOSS alternatives to big tech SaaS and there’s lots of tech coops and other venues for tech activism. Why not support one of those ventures or build a platform to help amplify them?
Also odd to advocate for control of tech only to cede the entire project to AI.
In case anyone is interested in existing FOSS alternatives:
Auth0: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/auth0
Salesforce: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/salesforce
Because it feels good to start something rather than joining an existing someone at the exact same mission.
It's all just performative.
Perhaps let's brainstorm ways to solve this. How can we incentivize joiners to projects? How can we both appreciate the founders and starters, and the later joiners who are necessary for the project? Perhaps if we encourage our own community (tech) to give serious weight and appreciation to all contributors, that will move things in the right direction.
Also, the creators of projects can do their part by sharing the praise their projects receive with their contributors.
What other ideas do folks have to encourage joining rather than starting?
Maybe assigning specific "ownership" (responsibility for, overall credit for) of some portion of the project to long time contributors over time?
I'm not sure the issue is getting credit for contributions, or as you suggest: giving ownership of areas of a project. After all, that's a problem already solved: CLAs for open source. With CLAs in place, developers get credited for their efforts (git blames!), as well as part of the IP of their implemented solution if accepted.
My argument goes more about the lines of: Some people want to be the starter of a project, disregarding existing, often advanced efforts about the same problem.
Take for example, the bajillion expenses tracker apps. The most reinvented wheel. Do we need yet another one?
To me, it's an ego-driven thing.
> Take for example, the bajillion expenses tracker apps. The most reinvented wheel. Do we need yet another one?
Well, small projects being repeated is one thing, but because they're small there's only so much waste there.
I'm thinking more about "cathedral-like" projects, some massive open source project that lasts for years, in which it may be important to emphasize the contributions of, and a particular way of understanding the contributions of the many stonemasons and lesser artisans, as opposed to the leadership of the project and the architects.
Our whole society would benefit I think by having more respect for the "average person that contributes to the common good, even if they're not the leader", and actually praising that as much or more in some cases than the leadership role.
> I'm thinking more about "cathedral-like" projects, some massive open source project that lasts for years
Yes, though it takes a special kind of person to devout themselves to what potentially is a thankless job.
At least Linux kernel developers are mostly employees of tech behemoths, so they can contribute while remaining well paid.
I wonder about FFMPEG developers, if that's the exception.
> Our whole society would benefit I think by having more respect for the "average person that contributes to the common good, even if they're not the leader", and actually praising that as much or more in some cases than the leadership role.
I fully agree in the assertion that our society would benefit, but I see that more platonically than the reality.
The reality is what happens today, and I don't see that happening (hopefully I'm proven wrong).
Exactly. Also it's incredible how many working professionals (as evidenced by this "movement") don't understand why companies pay for software to these SaaS companies.
Ironically attaching your company to a movement like this will deter people from using it.
In my opinion, most tech-like professionals miss the point of delegating liabilities.
The whole reason to pay for software is to offload the liability to a 3rd-party. In simpler words: "As a company, I have this need and I don't want to solve it myself. Also, if I pay someone, I can sue them on contract breach just in case."
The legal part of the liability offload is key in the decision, because it requires ownership.
FOSS doesn't fulfill that requirement, therefore, adopting FOSS means the user owns the liability of using the software. Companies don't need or want more liability than they currently have to, less is better.
They are aiming for 100% parity with existing SDKs and APIs. Most FOSS alternatives won't get anywhere near that.
> Why not support one of those ventures or build a platform to help amplify them?
Because then you can't collect donations. And you have first prove yourself to be able to contribute to those projects. Because you want to make a name for yourself. Because you want to cast a big umbrella over unrelated software, except for the fact that they got started by this "movement".
Don't fall for it.
this fine, but don't forget to hire the laid of sales and marketing folks. without them, this is going no where.
This put a cap on the upper price. Basically it forced the SAAS pricing to dive similar to what Deepseek is doing to OpenAI and Anthropic. Easily 30% of any SAAS are not companies. So over time that portion will not grow and chip away. And further more this encourage other smaller companies to vye for the same enteprise customers forcing the price to dive further. I dont expect the current SAAS to continue much. It willturn more of personalization service in coming decade.
I think we can make it sharper by not only 1:1 copying it, but focusing on a specific use case that bugs people. How about a backend-only replica that solves Terraform-specific bugs and makes a 1:1 compatible API that feels like a breeze? Then users can slap their own UI on top and basically own the product.
This is a really nice idea, but most of these types things die as a nice idea unless they reach critical mass. 99% of people (to use the 99% idea from the website) just want to pay a fee to get a product and know that there is good documentation/training material and customer support behind it. Sometimes that "support" comes in the form of consultants around industries that push you into products as a result of using their services.
I feel like this would be better as a federation. Each project on its own. Some shared resources and interconnection.
Even better if there was a tiny seed funding mechanism.And then some clever growth funding.
There's prior attempts in this general area, pre AI, like Zebras Unite that have some lessons.
https://zebrasunite.coop/
The difference here is its just one guy, a coding agent, and a fever dream.
This seems inevitable in one form or another. A lot of talented devs are struggling to find employment at the same moment that there is a tool that can guide you through the parts of launching a product that are outside of your expertise. That's just more time to tinker out of curiosity or necessity.
I believe the next few years are going to see a lot of new and innovative tech products. Maybe this is how we build the internet we actually want.
I’m already building this:
https://openship.org
I built the e-commerce[0] and restaurant[1] ones by guiding AI heavily but now have a software factory building the rest[2].
0. https://e-commerce.openship.org
1. https://restaurant.openship.org
2. https://{{gym, hotel, grocery, rental, pharmacy, coffee-shop, etc}}.openship.org
That’s just a commercial SaaS suite using open as a marketing hook, unless I’m missing something. Many companies start this way and become entrenched.
Your “factory” seems to have not gotten the memo that you are openship and not openfront?
Also I have zero clue what I’m looking at here? What is this?
Openship is an order management system. I built that first when I used Shopify. Then it was easy to build my own which became Openfront. Think of Openship as a the glue between Openfronts so businesses can buy from other businesses.
Happy to answer more questions. We’re making open source alternatives to Shopify, Toast, GlossGenius, MindBody, Booksy, Cloudbeds, Dutchie, etc.
Another AI fever dream.
Apache 2.0... so someone can take your code and turn it into saas again!
I wish them success but doubt it will work for the simple fact that you need some semblance of reliable support which generally requires ownership. That is at odds with the spirit of this, at least from first page.
Or to put it another way, if money isn’t an issue why would you use Salescompel over Salesforce?
Running a business isn’t just about software.
The more that the 'reliable support' becomes AI agents that make it harder and harder to get to an actual person, the more projects like this that can make good documentation that acts as support (if you point your own AI at it) make perfect sense.
Lots of smaller/medium sized companies where money is definitely an issue are also tethered to way too many SaaS subscriptions.
But AI!
I think what AI has surfaced is that how bad most people, even people from tech are in understand what makes SaaS work and what makes software good. It is rarely just churning code.
Given how many FOSS alternatives exist, I'd hope that such projects could turn their attention towards the AI models themselves, creating an open-weights model from an existing proprietary model, or somesuch.
Unfortunately, that won't be a low effort thing where you can burn $100 to create an imitation of something, so all we get is vibe-coded Photoshop clones...
I really don't understand how you protest SaaS layoffs by providing open source alternatives free of charge?
Let's say you successfully create a drop-in equivalent to Salesforce that anyone can use for free, and sales teams decide they like you enough to do so (good luck). It takes off, and Salesforce goes completely under.
They can no longer afford to pay salaries in this hypothetical and everyone is let go. You have done the equivalent of laying off Salesforce's entire workforce. You've replaced a system that pays 15,000 engineer salaries with a system that pays no one and benefits other SaaS companies, no?
I really don't get it.
Revenge. The answer is revenge. That's obviously driving motivation behind this.
Why start with Auth0 and Salesforce? That feels odd if the target is around mass layoffs. Similarly, I don't get why anyone would even use them today. Auth0 has had better alternatives in a long time, and Salesforce, well, Salesforce is just trash.
Also, isn't the sales pitch behind IDPs like Auth0 is that few organizations actually _want_ to self-host an IDP? How is providing yet another self-hostable IDP server going to change that?
And the hubris of attempting to fight well-known self-hostable IDPs like Active Directory.
And the network effects of taking frontally cloud IDPs like Google, or even OpenID…
> Similarly, I don't get why anyone would even use them today. Auth0 has had better alternatives in a long time, and Salesforce, well, Salesforce is just trash
Could it be that Marc Benioff knows a few things that you don't know? If so, any guesses what those could be?
An interesting idea, but if it's like Occupy Wall-street, the tricky part will be getting (and keeping) everyone on the same page.
It will be hard to keep everyone on the same page because if this gains any traction social media will ratchet up the propaganda and play the divide and conquer strategy. There'll be accusations of people joining movements like this of being communists and that will kick it off. Same strategy being used across the board.
Dear god, the commies are in our software!!! Imagine if those types had a clue just how much digital infrastructure ran on code written by "communists"
Ironically your comment demonstrates exactly what I just said. Political polarisation plays into the hands of the elite, you're just helping to fuel it with this kind of tone.
Yes, due to government infiltration and crackdowns, like with OWS.
Yeah that's gonna pay the mortgage, put food on the table, and cover the insurance premiums LOL.
I think it's great new takes on software comes around, but I hope that anyone that engages in these movements understands two things:
- Not every SaaS have their moat at a 100% of the software, e.g.: You could vibecode a Twilio, but good luck establishing contracts with carriers on getting phone numbers in bulk, which is their actual moat.
- Having the movement's foundation on revenge is a fuel that lasts very little. Once the avengers run out of motivation or the source of rage gets resolved (i.e. these developers get hired for higher salaries at companies with better culture), the steam will just dissipate. I know this myself by having walked this walk.
As long as new implementations of the software solves actual friction points of their would-be users, the chances for adoption/switch are higher than just making drop-in replacements. The justification gap to switch needs to be wide enough. I know graphic designers are pretty mad generally at Adobe's predatory licensing model, but is that true of other SaaS vendors?
Identify these friction points, sometimes it's not just clunky UI/UX, sometimes it's complicated billing (much like AnyDesk guys left TeamViewer and adopted a licensing model that actually makes sense). Sometimes it's just really bad tech support; the pandemic days left some vendors exposed at this particular area.
More often than not it's just customers that feel trapped by vendor lock-in, and have no solid alternatives, but by switching they wonder if this alternate vendor will just get greedy and do the same, which feels treacherous to these (rightfully) hurt, paying individuals and companies (particularly SMBs).
Vote for JIRA: https://github.com/occupysaas/website/issues/7
Most of the organizations that are successful are so because they had a coherent vision for what the product would be and a passion for solving that particular niche's problem. I'm not sure how anger/vengeance rather than a passion for the problem space is going to positively change the customer's perception of the product's long term vision, support and guarantees. Imagine trying to poach a Salesforce client and they ask you why would they need to invest time and money into migrating to your solution and all you got is "haha, fuck salesforce, they fired me".
The idea seems noble, but a good market-fit product is more than just code sitting inside a github repository. That's why there have always been open source alternatives to commercial CRMs long before AI even came into the picture but they never took off.
Products get successful by being good, but after a certain threshold people buy a product because "nobody got fired for buying Salesforce". Which is not all that different from buying a product because "haha, fuck salesforce, they fired me".
You probably don't intend this, but the argument seems like "money talks, so why bother with ideals". How would you solve enshittification in the current market, if not introducing a bit of anarchy?
> Products get successful by being good,…
Products get succesful by fitting the requirements/wants/desires of paying customers, regardless of quality or even usability.
Same reason JIRA still lives, even when it's our favorite product to hate.
> "money talks, so why bother with ideals"
That's definitely not what I'm saying. I'm just saying build a better product and a better company that focuses on its employees. It's not that hard and there are plenty of examples all around. Also, revenge isn't exactly an ideal, it's actually quite the opposite.
Is this Big Tech's 'We demand you use AI! Noooo, not like that! moment?
No, this is big tech slobbering at the idea of pivoting to selling AI infrastructure, and eating medium tech's lunch.
If the whole thing wasn't so harebrained, I would suspect it was a marketing campaign from Anthropic.
Let me get this straight, you’re implying that Anthropic’s other marketing campaigns, like “AI will probably hack all our systems and then kill us all” is not harebrained?
No. Some people want it to be, but it doesn't take a lot of thinking to understand why "we got fired from big tech because of AI, so now we're fighting back by funding said AI out of our own pockets" makes absolutely no sense.
Anthropic seems to be leaving lots of money on the table because it made enough sense that they got pressured into putting up guardrails against it.
Performative "guardrails" consisting of a single vague and easily bypassed prompt. It hasn't stopped anyone, and likely only serves as future legal defense in case of a lawsuit.
exactly, do the people behind this not see the irony of this movement?
no opinion of if this is a good idea or not or the overall statement of the thing... but isn't support a big part of what these saas companies are really providing... its not just salesforce, its salesforce and customer success teams and 24/7 support etc.
i suppose this could provide that also (dont see that they want to) but then its just back to vendor a vs vendor b and vendor a in this case has a lot of history and inertia with the companies these guys would need to switch.
maybe that wouldnt be a big deal longer term, but near term i think we are probably still in a "nobody gets fired for buying ibm" phase at the moment.
ya you could save a ton on that salesforce contract and sticking it to them might feel great, but the project to migrate and then self support this with your own employees is non-trivial and would be a pretty monumental risk to take. like you might as well just internally vibe code a new solution that is perfectly tailored to your biz vs getting a knock off vibe coded version of a saas thing that you only actually use 20% of.
I never use customer support for these types of things unless there is a literal bug or downtime
I don't want to pay for customer support that other incompetent users rely on to function
This is the kind of thing AI labs will use as ammunition to pass regulations.
You may begin with vengeance but I hope vengeance won't be your permanent fuel. It tends to lead with clouded and personal decisions, emotionally charged responses (like the very website copywriting itself) and... well, I have my fair share of grievances and a significant boost of confidence is to persevere in what is right against the wrong that I felt were done to me... but if I make my grievances my customers and supporters' problem, I am dragging them into my cesspool, spreading the negativity and it simply does not create an environment and spirit of productivity..
posting this to a website full of ai bots in the comments and software that gets posted here written with ai
Related:
https://remade.wiki/
The irony of using AI for this...
Turnabout is fair play. Setting aside the overall ethical shitshow that AI presents, I don't really have much objection to turning their own tech against them.
LLMs are an incredible technology, and I would have loved to see them developed organically over time with sensible regulation and strong ethics....it would have taken many more years, but it also wouldn't have stolen the sum of human creativity, generated a hype bubble that threatens the global economy, wrecked the consumer hardware market, or been deployed in the most shortsighted, environmentally destructive ways imagineable.
But that's not what we got, so evoking the same fear and uncertainty that we must face in those who lead global megacorps is not out of bounds, as far as I'm concerned.
I've been threading the needle between my AI loving techbro indiehacker friends and my AI hating artist and FOSS geek lefty friends for the last year now and the dogmatism has been interesting. The extreme of it for AI lovers I don't really get in my friend group since I think it manifests mostly in AI psychosis meltdowns by tech CEOs like with the Proton Mail guy, or religious worship by the anyone with one degree of separation or less from anyone on the the AI doom cult temple sex priestess gang bang Sankey diagram.
For the AI haters the dogmatism turns AI usage basically into a moral contagion. I saw similar with the cancellation of Framework: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/moral-contagion/#where-i-pus...
To them, even a small use of LLMs is a moral endorsement and material contribution to the pillaging of natural resources by data centers, the racial profiling and inherent biases baked into LLM output by their training corpus and prejudices of corporate leaders, the theft of artists, writers, and FOSS contributors for training data, and even could cause irreparable brain damage (they inevitably have studies to link to, on LLM usage reducing problem solving abilities or creativity). Also LLMs still can't write good code, to these people.
I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present, especially in their current token-subsidized form (Claude max still is a hilariously obviously unprofitable endeavor). IMO turning these tokens into liberationist software (OP project and similar) is basically a form of wealth redistribution. Moving beyond clean room software implementation, once you get to the possibly or frankly illegal things you can do with LLMs, their activist potentials seem pretty obvious to me. Cracking and reverse engineering proprietary software, developing hacks against The System (what if we leveraged LLMs to take out Russian datacenters that flood the internet with ultra right wing propaganda? Or... Industrial sabotage <.<), automating social media content in the same way the far right is doing (or the opposite - responding instantly to all far right fake news, solving the "it's easier to create it than debunk it" problem), creating agitprop, or hell creating floods of disinformation. I mean depending on someone's value system in terms of ideologically valid strategy, there's a lot of possibilities unlocked by LLMs!
Personally I'm interested in anything that simply takes the winds of profit out of the sails of as many things as possible, which is why I like projects like this one and why I spun up a similar one a few weeks back: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity Though I'm looking at smaller niche things like, milk collection software or whatever.
> I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present
The problem isn't that they don't have potential, but that the downside isn't worth it.
You're trying to convince people that asbestos has great potential as a building material. You're saying it does an amazing job of fireproofing, and don't worry your pretty little head about cancer.
Asbestos is everywhere in older buildings because it was excellent fireproofing. We're still dealing with the consequences.
> but that the downside isn't worth it.
This is also my argument against militarization and armed revolution as a strategy of establishing anarchist or communist society. The downsides are illustrated and argued against in "The Anarchist Cookbook," a rewrite of the original by Keith McHenry. So, I'm interested in what you think the downsides may be here, since I'm not immediately able to think of any - at least not any caused by me as an individual activist.
It does seem that AI was used effectively recently in the defeat of Bolsanaro's son in Brazil, which I use as evidence for. I'm at this moment looking more into that when I really should be working, heh. Thanks to user solyin, sibling to you.
Look up the translated Lula Army Manual for inspiration. They're all in on AI and they won their election!
The irony is worn on the sleeve, so it's not really ironic. It might be ironic for the target companies if OccupySaaS works.
This is a very interesting mix of tone-deaf, disconnected from reality, AI-hype, and naivety that is just hard to wrap ones head around. where do I start.
First, is tech workers the 99% now? Come on, look at the average salary vs national median anywhere in the world. This is just a stupid take.
Second, this sounds like the idea of "Twitter is just a couple of SQL tables and UI pages" level of "I don't understand the depth of software engineering".
Tech workers are in the 99%, unless perhaps in the C-suite, at which point nobody would call them a "tech worker"
At least in the West, where most global SaaS revenue comes from, Tech workers are not 99%. In fact, most of them are well int the top 5-3%. Just look at median salary in your country.
The top 3-5% is part of the 99%. Only the top 1% isn't. You're stealth changing it to the top 95%; don't.
That is not how it works. 99% is the everyone but top 1%. Tech workers are generally in the top 5%. So they are not the 99% but rather the top 5% so more aligned and part of the 1% they allude to "rebel against".
indeed. the hype is the strongest when the offering is the weakest.
Main focus should be making open weight models to go after the root companies that put you in this position to start with, I suggest.
Slop
these projects don't look very complete
Get used to seeing this kind of cheap shots and half-ass projects everywhere. With AI, going from idea to half-ass now cost only 150$ per month and near zero skills.
The part I find funny is they didn't hire a website designer to make the website, they used AI.
SaaSy!
Most of this stuff should die anyway.
Did anyone ever say any of this was "good software"??
Its lowest common denominator crapware. Why rebuild it? Was it really your lifes dream to build that?
the sirlte copy says all pull request get human eyes, but the 100s of commits and .5M LoC in a few days say otherwise, or that pushing to main is a bypass mechanism
Hah, glad I wasn't the only one that had this idea. Been chewing on it ever since malus.sh or whatever that joke clean room reimplementation of FOSS software project was.
I noticed that others are taking a shot at the big boys like Photoshop, but I don't think that makes sense since 1. Jesus Christ imagine trying to rewrite Photoshop, with or without Astra and reverse engineering, let's be real! And 2. GIMP already exists and people don't use it for various reasons an ultra nerd that doesn't have osx or windows on any device in his house (me) could understand. Instead I'm looking for small niche markets that are locked in by the software equivalent of a petty village despot. Decent examples so far include quilting software and funeral home SASS. I'm also looking for anyone stuck on old dead software with no migration path because of no export functionality or nothing supporting whatever given file format anymore. Apparently QuickBooks desktop falls into this category, but the space feels full enough, with e.g. GnuCash, that I don't think I would be much help there.
https://genairosity.com/
Investigations so far: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity/issues
Basically leveraging subsidized tokens to liberate proprietary software. A bit of a petulant table flip maybe, but it kinda feels like the only thing left to us. Either we can kill ourselves scrambling around doing 996 for startups to try to avoid being a permanent underclass... Or we can light it all on fire.
Also inspired by open weight models tanking possible profit margins on frontier LLMs. One form of anti capitalist activism could be to just make it impossible to monetize something. The Manfred Macx form of activism.
Many other people in this thread with similar projects seem to be following the same workflow:
1. LLM agents sent out to find locked in proprietary software without a FOSS alternative
2. Targets selected by a human for deeper research on feasibility and alternatives
3. Clean room plan established
4. Human uses the software and takes notes
5. Feed notes into a token subsidized frontier model for orchestration. Architecture and plan written, beginning normal agentic development flow.
I'm slowed down significantly by step 4. Perhaps I will look into contributing my efforts to a larger project such as the one linked instead.
>GIMP already exists
PhotoCraft is already better than GIMP3 in every aspect. Usability is much better, binaries are 4 times smaller, and it's way faster. GIMP takes 5+ seconds to start, vibe-coded Rust Photoshop starts instantly.
I think the "old" open source community has very low standards for user experience when it comes to GUI software. It's one of the main reasons I could never get myself to use desktop Linux.
With AI, there are no excuses for open source software to be worse in any aspect at all.