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.
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?
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.
Also odd to advocate for control of tech only to cede the entire project to AI.
It's all just performative.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Ironically attaching your company to a movement like this will deter people from using it.
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.
Auth0: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/auth0
Salesforce: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/salesforce
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.
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.
Does anyone else feel that this discredits it?
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
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.
Also I have zero clue what I’m looking at here? What is this?
Happy to answer more questions. We’re making open source alternatives to Shopify, Toast, GlossGenius, MindBody, Booksy, Cloudbeds, Dutchie, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
- 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).
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.
And the network effects of taking frontally cloud IDPs like Google, or even OpenID…
Could it be that Marc Benioff knows a few things that you don't know? If so, any guesses what those could be?
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.
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 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.
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.
If the whole thing wasn't so harebrained, I would suspect it was a marketing campaign from Anthropic.
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 don't want to pay for customer support that other incompetent users rely on to function
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.