yeah it's weird seeing Salesforce on that site, where if you previously worked for Salesforce, you were definitely part of the problem. This is ridiculous.
The technical infrastructure of Bending Spoons is interesting.
For people who don't know Bending Spoons, their strategy works as follows:
1. Buy SaaS company
2. Set up new product team of 15 people in Europe
3. Re-implement backend on Bending Spoons technical platform
4. Make the original company (100 people?) redundant
But what I find interesting is that their technical platform is fifty different generic reusable parts that work on whatever they put on top of it: Vimeo, Evernote, Miro, Airtable.
Combing back to OccupySaaS: there could be real value in a 'generic core' and then re-engineer all SaaS solutions on top. And then to get service again for the core.
And how you need to accommodate your business to work with it, learn a proprietary too, do training, ask for new features or bug fixes and hope at some point they will be implemented, or create workaround them, all while paying each month a hefty fee. Oh and pay somebody to tackle negotiations when the contract expire comes in, or throw away everything and spend even more human hours to migrate off it when the price is really draconian.
But hey, it gives a living to many HNers so it's good!
I think it depends on the total cost and the size of the company. A 30 person estate agent probably won't clone a SAAS CRM and create a support team. A company the size of JP Morgan might.
Maybe for enterprise box-checking. I'm sure that can be outsourced to some separate liability-shield or narrow consulting service instead. For a lot of companies, the software bit is actually all we need. I hope the current shakeout lays bare the "SaaS" whose only reason to exist as a SaaS is gluttony. ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.
Speaking of ArtCraft, do you know how it's doing? I saw some mixed comments when it was first released. Do you use it? Does the stability approach, say, Photopea?
We have about 50 core developers and we're maturing our processes. If you're interested, you can join us in our Discord.
Each focal area is getting DRIs, and we're doing cross-cutting work to make everything componetizable and cross-platform.
We're scaling up the scope of our mission and ambition, too. We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights. There are a lot of things we want to contribute to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.
> Does the stability approach, say, Photopea?
We had some debate internally about whether to begin diverging the project from what Adobe does and begin innovating on our own.
We instead decided that 100% feature parity is the goal. Parity is a milestone for us because it validates what we've done, and it also serves the muscle memory of the tens of thousands of Adobe users.
After we hit parity, we can easily turn our applications into entirely new ones with more opinionated UI/UX and net new features.
Speaking as someone who uses Adobe apps on a regular basis, I care more about file format compatibility and correctness than feature compatibility. Obviously the two concerns overlap.
But I'd much rather have bulletproof linked file support than "concept to vector" or "live paint" (as cool as those are)
> We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights.. to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.
Love to see this rebellious spirit of sovereignty and collective action. It's what made the "hacker culture" great.
Seeing the meteoric success of the ArtCraft series of applications, I'm hopeful and looking forward to the positive disruption of the industry, by the makers, for the makers - and screw the takers.
The "occupation map" and its current targets are exactly the opposite: services that either have a big support or maintenance component to them.
Especially during the current time of unprecedented pace of security patching, decrying this as "enterprise box-checking" couldn't be be more displaced.
> ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.
Thank you!
I think many of us as a collective profession are going to be doing this.
We're going to open source apps, then infrastructure, then weights. The hyperscalers created the seeds of their own moat dismantlement.
Web 1.0 was great - forums, personal websites, IRC, a million chat options, RSS, APIs. It was this way because the world was technical and everyone had energy to do things. It was a Wild West, and it was fun. You could buy and own things back then.
Web 2.0 brought on our parents and grandparents to the world of broadband. Most of the new users were non-technical, so the tech of Web 1.0 got simplified into "product". The sharp edges were removed, and everything became simple. Over time the leaders built up their moats, removed APIs, turned into walled garden silos. Companies began to become extractive and enshittify their products.
Today the conditions that led to Web 2.0 are no longer true. It doesn't take a ton of energy to build things, and it doesn't require deeply technical people to do it either.
The entire tech sector is going to be a blood bath. Where there were once moats and monopolies, there's now going to be prolific and wide spread open source and a market rife with competition.
Big tech is turning into the food service industry. Passion driven, distributed, highly competitive, though probably lower margin. Plenty of opportunity for small businesses.
Love the big plans, and that Solidcraft is getting integrated! Keep up the good work.
(I hope you guys make a Google docs style cooperative mode. For simple edits this already beats the MS Office suite, but Office 365 cooperation still sucks, so if you can get that working fast ... exiting times)
Thats easy: service providers can train on the spftware to offer the service. Its literally what theyre for. Redhat didnt make linux but charges a reasonable price to support it. Like lets open source slack or something, and enterprises could self host it, or get it served by one of the service providers that pop up. And if there are bugs that are reported, then the service provider could use AI to fix them and upstream the changes so all the users benefit from it
The difference will be that they can have rent seeking practices when the software itself cant be taken hostage. They'll charge for the service and wont leech off the user for way more money than they deserve for making and maintaining the software
It’s amazing to me that it’s 2026 and dev culture has still, after decades, never managed to comprehend the biz side of the industry.
Is this true in other industries? I suppose there’s probably car people who don’t understand that most people don’t buy cars because they love cars. They buy what cars do. If they could get what cars do without having to hassle with a car they would.
Specifically, they pay for the cronyism aspect of the service. They pay because they're friends with the founder (or the decision-maker expects kickbacks now or in the future or at the very least; they share the same VC and are doing someone a favor), 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? The tech sector is fully and thoroughly owned. We're not heading towards feudalism. It's already tech feudalism. The tech landscape has been fully monopolized. You can't do any business in tech without the approval of a tech overlord.
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.
You are right on all accounts. You might even be right these folks are naive and even delusional. That doesn't make it impossible to turn out great though. Let's wait and see.
Richard Stallman must have looked almost as delusional when he started a free compiler and an OS in the 80s.
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?
> After all, that's a problem already solved: CLAs for open source.
With CLA's in place contributors usually sign away their copyright, often to get rug-pulled when an open source project reaches a certain maturity and popularity, and the commercial plans are activated by the company behind it. Better look for community-driven projects that come with a DCO [0] instead.
Not necessarily (just) ego. It's also that greenfield is much, much easier than brownfield. You can make your own decisions, rather than first having to learn what others decided for you. You can start with a naive blue sky vision of the product, not yet tainted by all the complexities that will only surface when you really get into the weeds of the problem you're trying to solve.
> 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.
> 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."
Ah management-style cover-your-ass engineering. Which doesn't work even with things like IBM contracts, never mind with anyone smaller. The problem is what they actually guarantee.
When you actually investigate the question (because you were a Google SRE and you move to a smaller company, and obviously disaster preparation starts with knowing what happens when disaster strikes): "Say, really smart manager, what does the contract actually say happens when you need the cover-your-ass provisions? Let's say AWS fails to give us machines. Let's say this software doesn't deliver. Let's say the bank connection we're paying for breaks". First observation: the managers (at a very big European telco) don't actually know the answer to this question. Or they pretend not to (I'm pretty sure they just lied to me, didn't care about anything but the checkmark, and did in fact know they did not have any option for disaster recovery because their developers had told them many times).
Answers: AWS doesn't give you a cent back, under any circumstances, does NOT get your servers back online but MAY give you 20% reduction on your future bill (and for customers in the UAE with the Iran war, they didn't)
Software doesn't deliver, then we don't have to pay the last milestone payment (10% of the cost), and the supplier does nothing anymore.
If the bank connection breaks, nothing happens. You are forced to keep paying anyway. Although, I guess you get the transaction cost for free because there won't bee any transactions. I do hear there's a small problem with that.
So, obviously, no, this does not cover the company's ass at all. It's about a manager being able to say they very cheaply did something. What will happen to the company in case of actual problems? It'll immediately cease to function, and none of these cover-your-ass provisions will matter at all. Which is, of course, what happened about 4 months later and the company's new SREs were expected to fix the shit ASAP, without ANY help from the "service" part of these platforms. We had to buy new services to get it fixed, once the service was down senior management literally got involved and approved the purchase orders, yelled at a bunch of infrastructure teams to make changes they never would and the company never got the money back from the "guaranteed" platforms. It cost about 15x, for that year, what it would have cost to have 2 providers for the service, and I'm sure that more than covered a development team for the software. And thank god we at least hosted our own source and made sure local builds worked.
By the way: they just switched to the newly ordered much more expensive platform. About 3 weeks later, focus was moved away, by management, from repairing stuff and so the ability to switch back was ... just dropped.
> 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".
It wasn't changing sociopolitics that got them laid off though, it was changing technology. And the technology can indeed bite the other way too. Maybe it won't solve deeper issues on its own, but I see no reason to not bite back.
IMO, the real reason they were laid off is because our economic system is broken. It's wealth concentration for those in the center of the scheme and deprivation for those in the periphery.
Rapid technological improvement is just a convenient justification for letting people go. It sounds a lot better than the real explanation "The system is broken and we need to keep optimizing money flows to sustain the scheme to control inflation." The system destroys value faster than technology can create it; which is quite an impressive feat because technology opens up massive capabilities; but look at reality; AI is being massively misallocated. People are just following the incentives.
Mark my words; the business model for AI, if the current trends continue, isn't going to be about "robots making everyone's lives better"; it's going to be about "AI agents which patch vulnerabilities that AI agents themselves created."
This is the reality we're heading into. No amount of amazing technology is going to solve that problem if it follows the incentives and rules of the current economic system.
If the government paid people to dig holes and fill them up again over and over, we'd probably have super-intelligent tractors and excavators by now.
For source coude to source code rewrites (which would be the case here when we talk about license laundering), AI is leagues ahead compared to binary to source code rewrites.
I am working toward similar goals but with a different approach. With LLMs, software can become more personal, customized, quirky even. Software will fit the last mile better than ever.
The solution is not another SaaS. But desktop apps. Less dependence on a cloud. Of course we need backups. And we need networking. Perhaps peer to peer. Or run a tiny VPS.
Businesses, families, communities building their own workflows. The agent is at the core. And an agent that can work with any LLM. Build agents for non-technical people. Stick to a tech stack, offer end to end (from prompt to deploying generated code on VPS) out of the box from the harness.
Someone else taking responsibility for running the service is the value that SaaS offers and what SaaS buyers are looking for. Having it as a desktop app doesn't have what SaaS has.
Consumers hate subscriptions. Businesses love subscriptions. They love paying to make their problems become someone else's problems, so they can fokus on running their actual business.
I doubt this. SaaS was created by enterprises who wanted to ship features into a pipeline they control end to end. The user gets to use it through a UI. Slowly SaaS became good enough and people stopped investing into their own custom workflow.
If building own workflow was cheap, I doubt SaaS would even take off. Businesses used to build on top of Drupal, Django, Rails, Magento and everything else like that. But those frameworks also become complex as they try to fit everyone's need.
LLMs cut that. You build what you want, perhaps on top of a lean framework. This "someone else taking responsibility" is how SaaS marketing won, but in this era, maintaining a small software should not be an issue. SaaS is complex because it has to serve needs of many. It has different requirements. A custom automation does not.
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 individual project may die, but the AI rewrite movement is only accelerating, and for many people there’s a feeling of vengeance against the software companies that pushed AI so hard and treated their workers as disposable. That feeling is incredibly potent for motivation.
Anthropic just blocked REA but it doesn’t matter, we’ll just lean harder into the Chinese models.
It’s completely open-source and it’s our mission to make sure these are always 1-click deployable to PaaS like Vercel and Railway.
We also are not like other opensource that depend on external services like Clerk, Resend, other external SaaS. All you need to deploy Openfront and Openship is Node and Postgres.
And the stack is completely agent-first. Next.js, Tailwind, GraphQL powered by Prisma and Keystone.js. Openfront is meant to be taken and adapted by each business. Like if your barbershop wants to sell merch, you can tell your agent to bring in features from e-commerce to the barbershop. We believe this is the future versus SaaS now, where you have to go into settings and configure everything. The future is changing the SaaS at the code level with an agent that has access to the code, deployment, etc.
We have cloud hosting too. But users always have the option to self host. Our long term goal is a decentralized, interoperable marketplace powered by this software:
Shouldn't we encourage more companies starting like this, have a (permissive) open source platform anyone can use, while also offering a commercial managed service.
It's a model that's been around for a long time, but is now gaining more traction thanks to AI commoditizing software development. And I think it's an improvement over the closed-source giants we are used to having dominate each market (and strangle customers through annual price increases, especially when acquired and their investors are looking to squeeze out a return).
unfortunately, this openship thing is copyleft though, so not particularly permissive vs. Apache 2.0 or MIT-licensed alternatives, but still...
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.
My first impression when reading the landing page is that this was made by one guy, but on Github, I can see two contributors: one guy and Claude.
Why use plural ("us", "Laid-off engineers") when this is just one guy's idea and none of the questions are about a group of people, there does not even seem to be a plan for others to join? Thousands marched for Occupy Wall Street, which this is referring to.
Those deep on AI psychosis start using "we" and "us" to refer to themselves and their AI. You see it here on HN all the time and it's weird as shit. Makes it sound like there is a real team, then you figure out it's some vibe bro that's lost his damn mind and started spamming clickbench with PRs for bemchmaxxing cheat slop.
Where is "OccupyResponsibility"? The point of SaaS is not anymore the software, but a team of humans still being responsible when something goes wrong.
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 think most people don't even think about where software comes from, I am a software engineer and if I find a product that I like and solves a pain for me and does it correctly , my first thought isn't "I could do this mnyself" , I buy it, more so if it is like 15-20 dollars.
My time is more precious than spending 2 weeks makins sure whatever software I am clonign does the job better.
2 weeks of dev time is worth way more than 20$. So people buy to solve their problem faster and with less of a headache than they would themselves.
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.
Sure, use LLMs to build the website, but put your own words on there! To me it just screams laziness; LLM prose is much worse at getting its point across than normal human writing, and is somewhat painful to read. If you can’t be bothered to spend a little while putting your thoughts to paper (or into a text file to give to $AGENT), what’s the point of doing this at all? Do people have this idea that LLMs produce better prose?
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.
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...
However, I believe Service-as-a-Software has a more powerful future. Business pay for shifting a problem to someone else (like hosting, or accounting, ...). The software isn't the solution, it's not what's valuable, the service is.
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.
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 because it's not trivial for SaaS to support your self-hosted IDP.
We have standards like OIDC 2.0, but every IDP (including the big ones like Entra and Google) have subtle differences that still requires custom code per IDP. So all SaaS you interact with will have to do work to support your specific IDP solution.
Then there is support, you can't reasonably expect a SaaS that you pay a few bucks a month for to help you troubleshoot problems when authenticating using your self-hosted IDP solution inevitably fails.
> 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?
I would be happy to see these companies have their lunch eaten by open source but I don't understand who the audience is for this populist framing. Tech workers by and large wouldn't have supported the Occupy movement. The people sympathetic to Occupy generally don't like the tech industry and especially not AI. It's difficult to imagine serious teams deploying anticapitalist branded software within their enterprise. Who is this project for?
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?
I'm skeptical that they really believe it - at least, not the people at the top.
There's no question that AI can, and almost certainly will, be used to do great harm, but the idea that AIs are just going to up and decide to kill us on their own is unlikely fanfic at best.
And at worst, it's projection by people who are really telling on themselves about what they want to do to anyone they consider either useless or a threat. They're also thinking of the consequences of the way they plan to use AI themselves.
They read or watched "Ender's Game" and thought it was a model for how to deal with competition. Or, as we see with Thiel for example, they read Lord of the Rings and thought "Sauron did nothing wrong." Or in Musk's case, substitute Sauron with the guy whose salute he likes to copy.
I realize neither of those people are really central to the AI race, but they're symptomatic of the thinking of the cult. In the 1980s, the people who deluded themselves that they were "masters of the universe" were on Wall Street. Now, they're in Silicon Valley.
In fact, if AI were to turn on its creators, we might end up with the best of all possible worlds.
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.
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.
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.
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?
AI, like all technologies, is neutral and it's how we use it that makes it good or bad. Lately however people are perceiving more of the bad and it could be argued that layoffs are the biggest "use" for AI in recent years.
I suppose everybody is allowed to feel however they wish about such and it seems that this project is the culmination of some of these feelings.
Yeah, as much as I have real sympathy for those who've been impacted by the waves of layoffs over the past few years, I can't help but feel this level of vengeful bitterness isn't productive, or going to lead anyone anywhere good. It's uncomfortable to talk about, because layoffs certainly are not "fair", but I don't think people like working with people who are bitter. I don't think that's an attitude conducive to getting hired in the current environment, either.
I agree. With that said, I don't have a problem with this motivation. With that said, it would however have been even better overall to have made this a credible threat used to keep the original developers in their original jobs. As it stands, it's basically Mutually Assured Destruction after one side already pushed the button.
it's a bit naive to think that you can make any harm to those corporations just by recreating their software :( they have much more than software (power, service, structure, organisation, contracts, etc.)
on the other hand building this stuff would be a nice portfolio project for those laid-off people and it might help them find a new job :)
While admirable in vision this is just the masses tearing each other apart, with the feudal lord 1%-ers just looking on.
While tearing down Adobe you’ve probably paid Nvidia, Anthropic, and Microsoft in the process, while at the same time no amount of Claude will make a dent in any of these behemoth strongholds. Adobe, evil as they are, aren’t the ones controlling the world’s knowledge, flow of goods or compute.
This is almost comically similar to “the immigrants are taking our jobs and are eating our pets” and how in-fighting about this has enshitified the real world, while not having solved any single problem along the way.
It’s like overthrowing governments with machine guns and guerilla armies. Yes, the playfield has been leveled. Literally.
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).
I don't get the concept. A small business can pay Salesforce $25 per month per seat, or they can hire somebody technical - at more expense - to take total responsibility for a self-hosted instance by installing it, securing it, backing it up, updating it, and dealing with downtime when the vibecoded mess inevitably has an update that breaks it...
What a weird idea. “We were fired, so let’s give thousands of dollars to the AI providers to copy existing software”, how can that help anyone? Why not use that energy to build new ideas that compete with the existing ones, instead of this focus on cloning what is successful? That feels so anti-hacker mentality to me
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.
Well, we can start by pointing out that every widely available model is either directly funds or bolsters authoritarians of the worst kind.
Then we can move to the damage it does to your mental abilities.
We can continue to the ongoing effect on society, the damage to the environment, and so on.
And we can finish with extrapolating on the abilities of the models, and the dystopia that having full AGI would be. Especially if that AGI is built by the current leaders.
I think you're aware of the downsides, but you don't want to put down your precious.
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 everyone but top 1%. Tech workers are generally in the top 3-5%. So they are not the 99% but rather the top 3-5% and so more aligned and part of the 1% they allude to "rebel against".
I get the anger; I think this is misguided. I know this will be distinctly unpopular (bye-bye karma!)
SWEs in general have been paid significantly higher salaries for decades in part because of the skill level needed and that they are generally working on capital projects (build new thing) vs operational projects (maintain thing built). It's the difference between needing a Landscaper to come in a completely reshape a bit of land for £10k once, and Gardener to come in a mow/prune once a week for £10. Most salaried SWEs don't necessarily see that every project they work on is a new patch of land to be landscaped; those who've contracted do.
SWEs have been effectively paid this "danger money" because of that inherent volatility in projects being shut down, which has been there since the dot com bubble but is now amplified because of the relative size of the tech sector.
The skills barrier which has been eroded in part by the lack of professional standards (anyone who can edit a PHP script can call themselves an SWE vs a Chartered Accountant which has to be certified), and now explicitly because of AI.
In some ways this just looks like "FOSS for Angry Millennials" without the understanding of the further damage that this will do to them and their industry. These are the forces its trying to get revenge for: (a) high inflationary creating risky environments for businesses to navigate, (b) tax changes which have impacted how organisations pay for SWEs, (c) AI offering "efficiencies" in all parts of the value chain, (d) the demand for ever-growing returns by shareholders as we enter the end-state of neoliberalism.
None of that is improved by this movement. Regardless of what you think of them, the original Occupy movement made it impossible for the people responsible for the crash to not be aware of/somewhat put out by those impacted by the crash. This is Just Another Open Source project. The way for those impacted is: (a) keep their skills sharp by helping charity projects that need the volunteer support; (b) get active politically on a local level; (c) use the time to start their own businesses with others.
There is a firmament that is needed on which all tech grows like Linux which is a good thing. This is not good for the Landscapers or the Gardeners, nor does it fix the issues which have led to the layoffs.
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.
I agree with you on UX. In terms of contributing to these projects, most maintainers are still opposed to LLM contributions, perhaps not for bad reasons considering they're interested in the long term maintainability not only of the software, but of a community of contributors knowledgeable enough to maintain it.
Regarding Photocraft, I've been following it with interest. My impression is that it comes off initially as an incredible accomplishment, 1:1 with Photoshop, however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGShygDux9o
This is my general impression as well with overall excitement around LLM assisted reverse engineering: very easy to get something that looks like a slam dunk, until you actually try to use it. Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.
Photocraft may not be ready as a drop-in Photoshop replacement for professionals yet, and I didn't say it was. I said it was better than GIMP 3 (and all other free image editors, for that matter). I've been using pirated Photoshop for random image edits for most of my life, and Photocraft does exactly what my muscle memory expects Photoshop to do.
The video you linked is also three weeks old, which is an eternity in the scope of this project, since each week hundreds of PRs are merged, and several versions are released. At the speed they are going and with the amount of attention and usage they're getting, I expect they'll manage parity in months, but even in the current state, it's still useful enough.
The person testing it also seems to be an artist, so their workflow demands can be significantly different from someone doing image editing. Most artists I know use more specialized software like Clip Studio Paint over Photoshop anyway.
I think to stay competitive, open source software needs to adopt AI-first workflows that mostly automate quality control and review, rather than just allow LLM contributions. Allowing LLM contributions without sufficient infrastructure will just drown maintainers in slop.
> however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable yet
> Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.
We think it can be. This is just Pareto principle. We're hill climbing the finer curves.
It upsets me somewhat that they’re protesting things like lock-in only after being laid off, while beforehand they were the ones implementing them.
I do like the paradox (oxymoron?) of being made redundant with AI, so they’re using AI to render their former companies redundant.
But in the end it pushes for more AI software; I’m not sure who wins.
There is no "they", only Claude.
yeah it's weird seeing Salesforce on that site, where if you previously worked for Salesforce, you were definitely part of the problem. This is ridiculous.
AI labs win, everyone else loses. It's Trump's American Way.
That's not true. Trump also wins.
The mistake is thinking the first S is what people pay for when it is the second S.
The technical infrastructure of Bending Spoons is interesting.
For people who don't know Bending Spoons, their strategy works as follows:
1. Buy SaaS company
2. Set up new product team of 15 people in Europe
3. Re-implement backend on Bending Spoons technical platform
4. Make the original company (100 people?) redundant
But what I find interesting is that their technical platform is fifty different generic reusable parts that work on whatever they put on top of it: Vimeo, Evernote, Miro, Airtable.
Combing back to OccupySaaS: there could be real value in a 'generic core' and then re-engineer all SaaS solutions on top. And then to get service again for the core.
bending spoons acquires products that already have users / customers though.
the software is hardly any difficult but sales or customer acquisition.
To expand on that, yes bunch of people believe they pay for buttons, text boxes so features and UI.
Completely forgetting, security updates with regression testing , backups, data structuring, performance engineering.
And how you need to accommodate your business to work with it, learn a proprietary too, do training, ask for new features or bug fixes and hope at some point they will be implemented, or create workaround them, all while paying each month a hefty fee. Oh and pay somebody to tackle negotiations when the contract expire comes in, or throw away everything and spend even more human hours to migrate off it when the price is really draconian.
But hey, it gives a living to many HNers so it's good!
And a phone number
And "one throat to choke"... although I'm informed that not very PC these days, it should be "one hand to shake"...
"Why Homer, your hands are so soft". It got dropped years ago, so safe to say, yea it's not very PC.
To some extent, but for the most part, they're paying to shift responsibility to somebody else.
The people who buy software are not the ones who pay the bill. If you hire a contractor to build custom-tailored software:
- If it is buggy or lacking, you'll be blamed.
- If it gets hacked, you'll be fired.
- If it works well and saves the company millions, you get a pat on the back.
The incentives are off. Why on earth would you not go with the established provider?
I think it depends on the total cost and the size of the company. A 30 person estate agent probably won't clone a SAAS CRM and create a support team. A company the size of JP Morgan might.
Maybe for enterprise box-checking. I'm sure that can be outsourced to some separate liability-shield or narrow consulting service instead. For a lot of companies, the software bit is actually all we need. I hope the current shakeout lays bare the "SaaS" whose only reason to exist as a SaaS is gluttony. ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.
Speaking of ArtCraft, do you know how it's doing? I saw some mixed comments when it was first released. Do you use it? Does the stability approach, say, Photopea?
We have about 50 core developers and we're maturing our processes. If you're interested, you can join us in our Discord.
Each focal area is getting DRIs, and we're doing cross-cutting work to make everything componetizable and cross-platform.
We're scaling up the scope of our mission and ambition, too. We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights. There are a lot of things we want to contribute to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.
> Does the stability approach, say, Photopea?
We had some debate internally about whether to begin diverging the project from what Adobe does and begin innovating on our own.
We instead decided that 100% feature parity is the goal. Parity is a milestone for us because it validates what we've done, and it also serves the muscle memory of the tens of thousands of Adobe users.
After we hit parity, we can easily turn our applications into entirely new ones with more opinionated UI/UX and net new features.
Speaking as someone who uses Adobe apps on a regular basis, I care more about file format compatibility and correctness than feature compatibility. Obviously the two concerns overlap.
But I'd much rather have bulletproof linked file support than "concept to vector" or "live paint" (as cool as those are)
> We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights.. to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.
Love to see this rebellious spirit of sovereignty and collective action. It's what made the "hacker culture" great.
Seeing the meteoric success of the ArtCraft series of applications, I'm hopeful and looking forward to the positive disruption of the industry, by the makers, for the makers - and screw the takers.
The "occupation map" and its current targets are exactly the opposite: services that either have a big support or maintenance component to them.
Especially during the current time of unprecedented pace of security patching, decrying this as "enterprise box-checking" couldn't be be more displaced.
> ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.
Thank you!
I think many of us as a collective profession are going to be doing this.
We're going to open source apps, then infrastructure, then weights. The hyperscalers created the seeds of their own moat dismantlement.
Web 1.0 was great - forums, personal websites, IRC, a million chat options, RSS, APIs. It was this way because the world was technical and everyone had energy to do things. It was a Wild West, and it was fun. You could buy and own things back then.
Web 2.0 brought on our parents and grandparents to the world of broadband. Most of the new users were non-technical, so the tech of Web 1.0 got simplified into "product". The sharp edges were removed, and everything became simple. Over time the leaders built up their moats, removed APIs, turned into walled garden silos. Companies began to become extractive and enshittify their products.
Today the conditions that led to Web 2.0 are no longer true. It doesn't take a ton of energy to build things, and it doesn't require deeply technical people to do it either.
The entire tech sector is going to be a blood bath. Where there were once moats and monopolies, there's now going to be prolific and wide spread open source and a market rife with competition.
Big tech is turning into the food service industry. Passion driven, distributed, highly competitive, though probably lower margin. Plenty of opportunity for small businesses.
Love the big plans, and that Solidcraft is getting integrated! Keep up the good work.
(I hope you guys make a Google docs style cooperative mode. For simple edits this already beats the MS Office suite, but Office 365 cooperation still sucks, so if you can get that working fast ... exiting times)
Thats easy: service providers can train on the spftware to offer the service. Its literally what theyre for. Redhat didnt make linux but charges a reasonable price to support it. Like lets open source slack or something, and enterprises could self host it, or get it served by one of the service providers that pop up. And if there are bugs that are reported, then the service provider could use AI to fix them and upstream the changes so all the users benefit from it
The difference will be that they can have rent seeking practices when the software itself cant be taken hostage. They'll charge for the service and wont leech off the user for way more money than they deserve for making and maintaining the software
I can’t believe you’ve summed this up so succinctly.
It’s amazing to me that it’s 2026 and dev culture has still, after decades, never managed to comprehend the biz side of the industry.
Is this true in other industries? I suppose there’s probably car people who don’t understand that most people don’t buy cars because they love cars. They buy what cars do. If they could get what cars do without having to hassle with a car they would.
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 the decision-maker expects kickbacks now or in the future or at the very least; they share the same VC and are doing someone a favor), 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? The tech sector is fully and thoroughly owned. We're not heading towards feudalism. It's already tech feudalism. The tech landscape has been fully monopolized. You can't do any business in tech without the approval of a tech overlord.
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.
You are right on all accounts. You might even be right these folks are naive and even delusional. That doesn't make it impossible to turn out great though. Let's wait and see.
Richard Stallman must have looked almost as delusional when he started a free compiler and an OS in the 80s.
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.
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.
> After all, that's a problem already solved: CLAs for open source.
With CLA's in place contributors usually sign away their copyright, often to get rug-pulled when an open source project reaches a certain maturity and popularity, and the commercial plans are activated by the company behind it. Better look for community-driven projects that come with a DCO [0] instead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi...
Not necessarily (just) ego. It's also that greenfield is much, much easier than brownfield. You can make your own decisions, rather than first having to learn what others decided for you. You can start with a naive blue sky vision of the product, not yet tainted by all the complexities that will only surface when you really get into the weeds of the problem you're trying to solve.
> 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.
> 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."
Ah management-style cover-your-ass engineering. Which doesn't work even with things like IBM contracts, never mind with anyone smaller. The problem is what they actually guarantee.
When you actually investigate the question (because you were a Google SRE and you move to a smaller company, and obviously disaster preparation starts with knowing what happens when disaster strikes): "Say, really smart manager, what does the contract actually say happens when you need the cover-your-ass provisions? Let's say AWS fails to give us machines. Let's say this software doesn't deliver. Let's say the bank connection we're paying for breaks". First observation: the managers (at a very big European telco) don't actually know the answer to this question. Or they pretend not to (I'm pretty sure they just lied to me, didn't care about anything but the checkmark, and did in fact know they did not have any option for disaster recovery because their developers had told them many times).
Answers: AWS doesn't give you a cent back, under any circumstances, does NOT get your servers back online but MAY give you 20% reduction on your future bill (and for customers in the UAE with the Iran war, they didn't)
Software doesn't deliver, then we don't have to pay the last milestone payment (10% of the cost), and the supplier does nothing anymore.
If the bank connection breaks, nothing happens. You are forced to keep paying anyway. Although, I guess you get the transaction cost for free because there won't bee any transactions. I do hear there's a small problem with that.
So, obviously, no, this does not cover the company's ass at all. It's about a manager being able to say they very cheaply did something. What will happen to the company in case of actual problems? It'll immediately cease to function, and none of these cover-your-ass provisions will matter at all. Which is, of course, what happened about 4 months later and the company's new SREs were expected to fix the shit ASAP, without ANY help from the "service" part of these platforms. We had to buy new services to get it fixed, once the service was down senior management literally got involved and approved the purchase orders, yelled at a bunch of infrastructure teams to make changes they never would and the company never got the money back from the "guaranteed" platforms. It cost about 15x, for that year, what it would have cost to have 2 providers for the service, and I'm sure that more than covered a development team for the software. And thank god we at least hosted our own source and made sure local builds worked.
By the way: they just switched to the newly ordered much more expensive platform. About 3 weeks later, focus was moved away, by management, from repairing stuff and so the ability to switch back was ... just dropped.
It's the NIH disease
> 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.
They are aiming for 100% parity with existing SDKs and APIs. Most FOSS alternatives won't get anywhere near that.
They can aim at anything. I'm aiming to be an alchemist.
Let me rephrase your remark: “Is 55 or 75 or 95 per cent larger than zero?”
In case anyone is interested in existing FOSS alternatives:
Auth0: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/auth0
Salesforce: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/salesforce
> Why not support one of those ventures
It appears their end goal is 1:1 drop-in replacements, which other projects usually don’t strive for.
Yeah this is a bunch of nerds trying to solve a socio-political problem with technical solutions...
It wasn't changing sociopolitics that got them laid off though, it was changing technology. And the technology can indeed bite the other way too. Maybe it won't solve deeper issues on its own, but I see no reason to not bite back.
IMO, the real reason they were laid off is because our economic system is broken. It's wealth concentration for those in the center of the scheme and deprivation for those in the periphery.
Rapid technological improvement is just a convenient justification for letting people go. It sounds a lot better than the real explanation "The system is broken and we need to keep optimizing money flows to sustain the scheme to control inflation." The system destroys value faster than technology can create it; which is quite an impressive feat because technology opens up massive capabilities; but look at reality; AI is being massively misallocated. People are just following the incentives.
Mark my words; the business model for AI, if the current trends continue, isn't going to be about "robots making everyone's lives better"; it's going to be about "AI agents which patch vulnerabilities that AI agents themselves created."
This is the reality we're heading into. No amount of amazing technology is going to solve that problem if it follows the incentives and rules of the current economic system.
If the government paid people to dig holes and fill them up again over and over, we'd probably have super-intelligent tractors and excavators by now.
So the same as FOSS came to be. Thus its utter failure at "liberation" part. For freedom is political.
What is wrong with the many open source IdPs? https://github.com/jruizaranguren/best-of-digital-identity#i...
goal seems to be to create 1-1 API and feature compatibility, which is very different from various open source IdPs
So... If I'm a solo founder that runs a bootstrapped SaaS (single-person business)... which side of the barricade am I on?
Am I allowed to make a living, or should I recreate my SaaS and give it away for free so that I can live without income?
A membership at the Y is worth it for the showers.
> The software built by the 99% belongs to the 99%.
Aren't the 99% received salary for their work and produced this after being fully paid what they agreed voluntary for their work?
If my house was build by 10 people, can they just get the house back after I've paid them?
I've been making people redundant all my life with automations, including myself, and willingly so.
It's only fair and logical that the redundancy machine has come for the job of the redundancy engineers.
[Thanks for the downvotes. I guess I'm supposed to be sorry for being honest and a realist.]
> 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.
>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
For source coude to source code rewrites (which would be the case here when we talk about license laundering), AI is leagues ahead compared to binary to source code rewrites.
If you’re going to go all the way, make it public domain.
If "it can be re-made by AI as easily" how MIT is supposed to help with adoption?
I know who you are.
Yeah why is this Apache-2.0 ??
I am working toward similar goals but with a different approach. With LLMs, software can become more personal, customized, quirky even. Software will fit the last mile better than ever.
The solution is not another SaaS. But desktop apps. Less dependence on a cloud. Of course we need backups. And we need networking. Perhaps peer to peer. Or run a tiny VPS.
Businesses, families, communities building their own workflows. The agent is at the core. And an agent that can work with any LLM. Build agents for non-technical people. Stick to a tech stack, offer end to end (from prompt to deploying generated code on VPS) out of the box from the harness.
Someone else taking responsibility for running the service is the value that SaaS offers and what SaaS buyers are looking for. Having it as a desktop app doesn't have what SaaS has.
Consumers hate subscriptions. Businesses love subscriptions. They love paying to make their problems become someone else's problems, so they can fokus on running their actual business.
I doubt this. SaaS was created by enterprises who wanted to ship features into a pipeline they control end to end. The user gets to use it through a UI. Slowly SaaS became good enough and people stopped investing into their own custom workflow.
If building own workflow was cheap, I doubt SaaS would even take off. Businesses used to build on top of Drupal, Django, Rails, Magento and everything else like that. But those frameworks also become complex as they try to fit everyone's need.
LLMs cut that. You build what you want, perhaps on top of a lean framework. This "someone else taking responsibility" is how SaaS marketing won, but in this era, maintaining a small software should not be an issue. SaaS is complex because it has to serve needs of many. It has different requirements. A custom automation does not.
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 individual project may die, but the AI rewrite movement is only accelerating, and for many people there’s a feeling of vengeance against the software companies that pushed AI so hard and treated their workers as disposable. That feeling is incredibly potent for motivation.
Anthropic just blocked REA but it doesn’t matter, we’ll just lean harder into the Chinese models.
Does it count as clean room if you copy your employer’s product?
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.
It’s completely open-source and it’s our mission to make sure these are always 1-click deployable to PaaS like Vercel and Railway.
We also are not like other opensource that depend on external services like Clerk, Resend, other external SaaS. All you need to deploy Openfront and Openship is Node and Postgres.
And the stack is completely agent-first. Next.js, Tailwind, GraphQL powered by Prisma and Keystone.js. Openfront is meant to be taken and adapted by each business. Like if your barbershop wants to sell merch, you can tell your agent to bring in features from e-commerce to the barbershop. We believe this is the future versus SaaS now, where you have to go into settings and configure everything. The future is changing the SaaS at the code level with an agent that has access to the code, deployment, etc.
> It’s completely open-source and it’s our mission to make sure these are always 1-click deployable to PaaS like Vercel and Railway.
How do you get paid?
We have cloud hosting too. But users always have the option to self host. Our long term goal is a decentralized, interoperable marketplace powered by this software:
https://marketplace.openship.org/ethos
And what's wrong with that?
Shouldn't we encourage more companies starting like this, have a (permissive) open source platform anyone can use, while also offering a commercial managed service.
It's a model that's been around for a long time, but is now gaining more traction thanks to AI commoditizing software development. And I think it's an improvement over the closed-source giants we are used to having dominate each market (and strangle customers through annual price increases, especially when acquired and their investors are looking to squeeze out a return).
unfortunately, this openship thing is copyleft though, so not particularly permissive vs. Apache 2.0 or MIT-licensed alternatives, but still...
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.
Eh ok, already have people using these in production. I’m having an AI agent run a full e-commerce business using Openfront and Openship.
Fever dreams can feel very real
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.
My first impression when reading the landing page is that this was made by one guy, but on Github, I can see two contributors: one guy and Claude.
Why use plural ("us", "Laid-off engineers") when this is just one guy's idea and none of the questions are about a group of people, there does not even seem to be a plan for others to join? Thousands marched for Occupy Wall Street, which this is referring to.
Those deep on AI psychosis start using "we" and "us" to refer to themselves and their AI. You see it here on HN all the time and it's weird as shit. Makes it sound like there is a real team, then you figure out it's some vibe bro that's lost his damn mind and started spamming clickbench with PRs for bemchmaxxing cheat slop.
Where is "OccupyResponsibility"? The point of SaaS is not anymore the software, but a team of humans still being responsible when something goes wrong.
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.
Apache 2.0... so someone can take your code and turn it into saas again!
If they had chosen something like AGPL, they would have had comments saying noone is going to use it.
Can't make everyone happy.
I think most people don't even think about where software comes from, I am a software engineer and if I find a product that I like and solves a pain for me and does it correctly , my first thought isn't "I could do this mnyself" , I buy it, more so if it is like 15-20 dollars. My time is more precious than spending 2 weeks makins sure whatever software I am clonign does the job better.
2 weeks of dev time is worth way more than 20$. So people buy to solve their problem faster and with less of a headache than they would themselves.
Should I pay $20/mo for this sass or use my $200/mo AI sub to rebuild it?
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.
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?
No, the FAQ describes why they use AI to write the software. It's just a logical extension that they would also use it to build the website.
Sure, use LLMs to build the website, but put your own words on there! To me it just screams laziness; LLM prose is much worse at getting its point across than normal human writing, and is somewhat painful to read. If you can’t be bothered to spend a little while putting your thoughts to paper (or into a text file to give to $AGENT), what’s the point of doing this at all? Do people have this idea that LLMs produce better prose?
Everything is made with LLMs today. Even sites that claim to be anti-LLM. I guess vibe coders are immune to hypocrisy.
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.
I do not feel remotely bad about mocking anyone who is stuck in a red scare, and I am unconvinced this post moves the needle in any measurable way.
Yes, due to government infiltration and crackdowns, like with OWS.
I really doubt this goes anywhere
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...
This genuinely feels either misguided or like a false flag psyop that will end in harm to the goals of the common people.
Possibly also a PR stunt
I love this from a societal point of view.
However, I believe Service-as-a-Software has a more powerful future. Business pay for shifting a problem to someone else (like hosting, or accounting, ...). The software isn't the solution, it's not what's valuable, the service is.
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.
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…
And because it's not trivial for SaaS to support your self-hosted IDP.
We have standards like OIDC 2.0, but every IDP (including the big ones like Entra and Google) have subtle differences that still requires custom code per IDP. So all SaaS you interact with will have to do work to support your specific IDP solution.
Then there is support, you can't reasonably expect a SaaS that you pay a few bucks a month for to help you troubleshoot problems when authenticating using your self-hosted IDP solution inevitably fails.
> 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?
I would be happy to see these companies have their lunch eaten by open source but I don't understand who the audience is for this populist framing. Tech workers by and large wouldn't have supported the Occupy movement. The people sympathetic to Occupy generally don't like the tech industry and especially not AI. It's difficult to imagine serious teams deploying anticapitalist branded software within their enterprise. Who is this project for?
I supported Occupy, but it was a losing effort, so the very mention of its name is discouraging.
Vote for JIRA: https://github.com/occupysaas/website/issues/7
Don't think the incentive is right. Who is going to do free protest forever? Real replacement takes time, take sales...
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?
They seem to believe that one. I suspect extreme harm to human well-being is far more likely.
I'm skeptical that they really believe it - at least, not the people at the top.
There's no question that AI can, and almost certainly will, be used to do great harm, but the idea that AIs are just going to up and decide to kill us on their own is unlikely fanfic at best.
And at worst, it's projection by people who are really telling on themselves about what they want to do to anyone they consider either useless or a threat. They're also thinking of the consequences of the way they plan to use AI themselves.
They read or watched "Ender's Game" and thought it was a model for how to deal with competition. Or, as we see with Thiel for example, they read Lord of the Rings and thought "Sauron did nothing wrong." Or in Musk's case, substitute Sauron with the guy whose salute he likes to copy.
I realize neither of those people are really central to the AI race, but they're symptomatic of the thinking of the cult. In the 1980s, the people who deluded themselves that they were "masters of the universe" were on Wall Street. Now, they're in Silicon Valley.
In fact, if AI were to turn on its creators, we might end up with the best of all possible worlds.
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?
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.
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.
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.
AI, like all technologies, is neutral and it's how we use it that makes it good or bad. Lately however people are perceiving more of the bad and it could be argued that layoffs are the biggest "use" for AI in recent years.
I suppose everybody is allowed to feel however they wish about such and it seems that this project is the culmination of some of these feelings.
Revenge. The answer is revenge. That's obviously driving motivation behind this.
Yeah, as much as I have real sympathy for those who've been impacted by the waves of layoffs over the past few years, I can't help but feel this level of vengeful bitterness isn't productive, or going to lead anyone anywhere good. It's uncomfortable to talk about, because layoffs certainly are not "fair", but I don't think people like working with people who are bitter. I don't think that's an attitude conducive to getting hired in the current environment, either.
I agree. With that said, I don't have a problem with this motivation. With that said, it would however have been even better overall to have made this a credible threat used to keep the original developers in their original jobs. As it stands, it's basically Mutually Assured Destruction after one side already pushed the button.
it's a bit naive to think that you can make any harm to those corporations just by recreating their software :( they have much more than software (power, service, structure, organisation, contracts, etc.)
on the other hand building this stuff would be a nice portfolio project for those laid-off people and it might help them find a new job :)
While admirable in vision this is just the masses tearing each other apart, with the feudal lord 1%-ers just looking on.
While tearing down Adobe you’ve probably paid Nvidia, Anthropic, and Microsoft in the process, while at the same time no amount of Claude will make a dent in any of these behemoth strongholds. Adobe, evil as they are, aren’t the ones controlling the world’s knowledge, flow of goods or compute.
This is almost comically similar to “the immigrants are taking our jobs and are eating our pets” and how in-fighting about this has enshitified the real world, while not having solved any single problem along the way.
It’s like overthrowing governments with machine guns and guerilla armies. Yes, the playfield has been leveled. Literally.
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).
this fine, but don't forget to hire the laid of sales and marketing folks. without them, this is going no where.
Yeah that's gonna pay the mortgage, put food on the table, and cover the insurance premiums LOL.
I don't get the concept. A small business can pay Salesforce $25 per month per seat, or they can hire somebody technical - at more expense - to take total responsibility for a self-hosted instance by installing it, securing it, backing it up, updating it, and dealing with downtime when the vibecoded mess inevitably has an update that breaks it...
...why?
and then, when it gets big enough it becomes it's own saas with the same exact problems thus completing the cycle!
What a weird idea. “We were fired, so let’s give thousands of dollars to the AI providers to copy existing software”, how can that help anyone? Why not use that energy to build new ideas that compete with the existing ones, instead of this focus on cloning what is successful? That feels so anti-hacker mentality to me
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
The irony of hosting this on Github
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..
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.
Well, we can start by pointing out that every widely available model is either directly funds or bolsters authoritarians of the worst kind.
Then we can move to the damage it does to your mental abilities.
We can continue to the ongoing effect on society, the damage to the environment, and so on.
And we can finish with extrapolating on the abilities of the models, and the dystopia that having full AGI would be. Especially if that AGI is built by the current leaders.
I think you're aware of the downsides, but you don't want to put down your precious.
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 the kind of thing AI labs will use as ammunition to pass regulations.
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 everyone but top 1%. Tech workers are generally in the top 3-5%. So they are not the 99% but rather the top 3-5% and 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.
How is this going to get customers?
Related:
https://remade.wiki/
posting this to a website full of ai bots in the comments and software that gets posted here written with ai
I get the anger; I think this is misguided. I know this will be distinctly unpopular (bye-bye karma!)
SWEs in general have been paid significantly higher salaries for decades in part because of the skill level needed and that they are generally working on capital projects (build new thing) vs operational projects (maintain thing built). It's the difference between needing a Landscaper to come in a completely reshape a bit of land for £10k once, and Gardener to come in a mow/prune once a week for £10. Most salaried SWEs don't necessarily see that every project they work on is a new patch of land to be landscaped; those who've contracted do.
SWEs have been effectively paid this "danger money" because of that inherent volatility in projects being shut down, which has been there since the dot com bubble but is now amplified because of the relative size of the tech sector.
The skills barrier which has been eroded in part by the lack of professional standards (anyone who can edit a PHP script can call themselves an SWE vs a Chartered Accountant which has to be certified), and now explicitly because of AI.
In some ways this just looks like "FOSS for Angry Millennials" without the understanding of the further damage that this will do to them and their industry. These are the forces its trying to get revenge for: (a) high inflationary creating risky environments for businesses to navigate, (b) tax changes which have impacted how organisations pay for SWEs, (c) AI offering "efficiencies" in all parts of the value chain, (d) the demand for ever-growing returns by shareholders as we enter the end-state of neoliberalism.
None of that is improved by this movement. Regardless of what you think of them, the original Occupy movement made it impossible for the people responsible for the crash to not be aware of/somewhat put out by those impacted by the crash. This is Just Another Open Source project. The way for those impacted is: (a) keep their skills sharp by helping charity projects that need the volunteer support; (b) get active politically on a local level; (c) use the time to start their own businesses with others.
There is a firmament that is needed on which all tech grows like Linux which is a good thing. This is not good for the Landscapers or the Gardeners, nor does it fix the issues which have led to the layoffs.
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.
In fairness, nor does Salesforce.
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.
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
Slop
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.
I agree with you on UX. In terms of contributing to these projects, most maintainers are still opposed to LLM contributions, perhaps not for bad reasons considering they're interested in the long term maintainability not only of the software, but of a community of contributors knowledgeable enough to maintain it.
Regarding Photocraft, I've been following it with interest. My impression is that it comes off initially as an incredible accomplishment, 1:1 with Photoshop, however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGShygDux9o
This is my general impression as well with overall excitement around LLM assisted reverse engineering: very easy to get something that looks like a slam dunk, until you actually try to use it. Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.
Photocraft may not be ready as a drop-in Photoshop replacement for professionals yet, and I didn't say it was. I said it was better than GIMP 3 (and all other free image editors, for that matter). I've been using pirated Photoshop for random image edits for most of my life, and Photocraft does exactly what my muscle memory expects Photoshop to do.
The video you linked is also three weeks old, which is an eternity in the scope of this project, since each week hundreds of PRs are merged, and several versions are released. At the speed they are going and with the amount of attention and usage they're getting, I expect they'll manage parity in months, but even in the current state, it's still useful enough.
The person testing it also seems to be an artist, so their workflow demands can be significantly different from someone doing image editing. Most artists I know use more specialized software like Clip Studio Paint over Photoshop anyway.
I think to stay competitive, open source software needs to adopt AI-first workflows that mostly automate quality control and review, rather than just allow LLM contributions. Allowing LLM contributions without sufficient infrastructure will just drown maintainers in slop.
> however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable yet
> Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.
We think it can be. This is just Pareto principle. We're hill climbing the finer curves.