alt Hacker NewsOccupySaaS
Comments
What is wrong with the many open source IdPs? https://github.com/jruizaranguren/best-of-digital-identity#i...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
So... If I'm a solo founder that runs a bootstrapped SaaS... 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?
I’m already building this:
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
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.
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!
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.
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?
An interesting idea, but if it's like Occupy Wall-street, the tricky part will be getting (and keeping) everyone on the same page.
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.
Don't think the incentive is right. Who is going to do free protest forever? Real replacement takes time, take sales...
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.
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.
Vote for JIRA: https://github.com/occupysaas/website/issues/7
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.
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 :)
Is this Big Tech's 'We demand you use AI! Noooo, not like that! moment?
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?
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.
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.
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?
this fine, but don't forget to hire the laid of sales and marketing folks. without them, this is going no where.
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).
and then, when it gets big enough it becomes it's own saas with the same exact problems thus completing the cycle!
Yeah that's gonna pay the mortgage, put food on the table, and cover the insurance premiums LOL.
The irony of hosting this on Github
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..
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".
How is this going to get customers?
Related:
posting this to a website full of ai bots in the comments and software that gets posted here written with ai
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.
The mistake is thinking the first S is what people pay for when it is the second S.