OccupySaaS

misswaterfairy

Is this Big Tech's 'We demand you use AI! Noooo, not like that! moment?

toomuchtodo

Related: https://remade.wiki/

Terr_

An interesting idea, but if it's like Occupy Wall-street, the tricky part will be getting (and keeping) everyone on the same page.

hmokiguess

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.

neya

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.

RomanPushkin

Vote for JIRA: https://github.com/occupysaas/website/issues/7

someothherguyy

these projects don't look very complete

theturtletalks

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

74948494i4

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.

Sydrik

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..

asdfsa32

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".

usernametaken2

posting this to a website full of ai bots in the comments and software that gets posted here written with ai

everfrustrated

Apache 2.0... so someone can take your code and turn it into saas again!

0c3ca83

The irony of using AI for this...

ivanmontillam

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).

BatchJob

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?

fishgoesblub

> 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.

komali2

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.

dgently7

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.

baubino

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.