OccupySaaS is protest movement written in code.
Story is simple. Many engineers got laid off in tech. But the SaaS platforms they built keep growing and keep charging per seat. So the same industry rent our own work back to us. This project is answer to that. Laid off engineers use AI and public documentation to rebuild those platforms as free open source drop-in replacements. One seat at a time.
Method is clean room. Public docs only, open standards, public SDK behaviour. No leaked code, no decompile, no confidential info from former employer. AI help with build, humans write spec and review every change. Compatible is proven by running vendors own public SDKs against the server. If your existing code dont work unchanged, it is not done.
Two early releases: ZeroAuthy ( Auth0 compatible identity server) and SalesCompel( Salesforce compatible CRM)
They are early, not production ready yet. But the goal is the point.
Lost me at:
Is it a clean room concept if the LLM has sucked up every source code it could find ?
This is actually the first instance I can personally get behind AI. Useing big tech to fuck with big tech.
Yeah, but if your aim is to write FOSS clones of proprietary software (be it SaaS or otherwise, or even if your aim is to write something bespoke rather than a clone of something that exists), doing it with LLMs is either going to take you longer than writing it yourself or result in laughably glitchy, inferior software.
Remember the news that went around not too long ago about how a company “used AI to make an Open Source Photoshop”? The part everyone left out is that even the company behind it calls their “Open Source Photoshop clone” “early alpha”. (At the top-right.) It’s barely a tech demo. Not a product. And I doubt it ever will be, despite the hype about it in the news. If it ever does end up rivaling Photoshop, it’ll only be because they gave up on using LLMs (which will be more work in the long run than if they just hadn’t used LLMs in the first place – or just contributed to Gimp) or because Photoshop will enshittify enough that the terrible quality of whatever PhotoCraft eventually becomes will be preferable.
Same with any other effort to make FOSS clones of existing proprietary software.
I’m 100% all for making compatible FOSS clones of existing proprietary and SaaS software specifically to break the monopolies held by companies like Adobe and Microsoft and Amazon. I would love to be able to recommend ReactOS to relatives. And I’ve played a “lot” (compared to most people, at least) of FOSS re-implementations and/or clones of originally-proprietary games or game engines (OpenMW, OpenJK, DXX-Rebirth, Lilium Voyager, Luanti). But LLMs aren’t magic and won’t help.
Yeah… Totally going to use the vibe coded authentication service. Not
AI assisted software development != Vibecoding
A lot of that AI will presumably be rented from the companies that persuaded your boss to fire you and use their tools instead. So it’s an odd kind of protest, that starts by paying those companies more money.
I do like the idea of software engineers collectivizing and prioritizing work on projects that don’t have good enough open-source options, particularly where it targets the nastier companies in the SaaS space. But there’s nothing new about that work; what’s new is that we have a lot of people motivated to take software in a new direction, who miss being able to take pride in the quality of their work, and who may be more receptive to acting collectively than these people have traditionally been. I know whenever I’ve proposed any kind of collective stance at my workplaces I’ve been met with blank stares, silence, and developers nervously looking at their feet. Maybe that can change when more people have recent experience of what happens when you don’t act together.
If we want to do something new, how about worker-owned cooperatives which actually offer good-quality software and support with ethical terms of use? Build it and sell it to the companies paying for SaaS, and make your software and support deal more attractive than the one they’re being gouged for. The support is particularly important when anyone can dash off some software using AI. Make your company worker-owned, nonprofit and cheap, market it professionally, offer good support and maintenance, and make a living doing it.
I’ve been scrolling for five minutes and this is the third self-promoted AI project I’ve seen. This is what lemmy/the Internet is now, I guess.
Mmhmm. Thanks for the ad.
My favorite part is Auth0 is the sponsor of Passport.js, you guessed it, an Open Source identity management library. And they play a big role at places like IETF where standards are actually written.
Same.
Any good programmer is only spending 10-20% of their time actually writing code. Replacing that with LLMs isn’t making you significantly faster, especially if you’re spending more time per line reviewing what it puts out while also atrophying your skills kn programming
Agreed. Plus most people pay companies for the support and trust they have, rather than for the simple functionality of a component or product. There’s always been cheaper and even free alternatives to lots of established products, but companies understand there’s value in having support when things go badly, and in having a different set of eyes handling that component instead of having to dedicate your own workers in house. So even from a business proposition cloning these apps doesn’t do shit. We need either more work in existing foss projects (if they’re designed well enough) or make new ones with extreme care if we ever want to make good replacements for proprietary stuff.