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.
This is something that my current company is learning the hard way sadly.
You don’t pay saas companies for a code base. You pay them for maintenance, hosting, and figuring out complexity for you.
Vibe coded stuff is garbage because the only thought that went into it was a 5 minute “build this for me”.
This 100%. I worked for an enterprise software vendor and even though our product was expensive and open source options existed that did the same thing, the support, maintenance, compliance certifications, etc is what people pay for. The vibe-coded clones might get feature parity, but now support and compliance is totally on the teams using the software.
I would prefer middleware and quality PRs to existing alternitives more tbh, but more options opposed to the demonic contracts the better
Competition is good. These oligarchs eliminated all the competition as big brothers
Everyone walking away from this because it touches AI is losing the plot. This is probably the closest thing to digital revolution we can get. Hear me out.
There are a lot of opinions and lots of anger about how things are going in the world today and particularly the USA. More people are getting out to meat space and doing something but those protests, especially in geographically spread out areas like the USA , will never physically embody all of the frustrated people like it does in more concentrated areas, like the EU.
The next layer is the current world order, which, like it or not, has global corporatism acting as second order governance. Their ability to influence not just politics but the employment of millions leaves them in a powerful, dark, and self perpetuating unregulated position, moving from puppets to the puppet masters. This appears to be changing, hopefully. Time will tell.
AI is an extremely powerful tool. Like any globally influential idea, it requires critical thinking and a nuanced understanding to properly leverage. The cold take, at least in left of center circles (generally), is to throw out the baby with the bath water, and shut down anyone that would use it or advocate using it in any way.
At the risk of sounding too Boromir-ish to those people, nay, it is a gift.
The current world order is built on digital life. Social media. Mass marketing via ads. Screens are cheap, eyeballs plentiful, minds accessible and moods malleable. The tech world and tech bros have taken first mover advantage and turned it into a stranglehold on modern life.
Oh you’re still reading? Good, then here’s the payoff. This initiative is one of the strongest steps to take it all back or remove its power.
What if we could open source every major digital platform out there? Every app, every social media, every game, every utility free and downloadable. Open source has always been here but the ability to develop it has been hamstrung by time, effort, manpower or a combination of all three. You’re reading this on the fediverse so odds are you already share that ideology somewhat.
Open sourcing the worlds digital platforms means reducing individual and business reliance on the current monoliths of tech. There’s is nothing out there that cannot be developed and copied for use for free now. Everything can be reverse engineered and offered for a fraction of the overhead. The cornerstone of tech, programming - control over the digital bricks used to shape the world - has had the cost of creation nigh abolished. Hardware and infrastructure are the limiters, but that isn’t new. What’s new is we now have a tool, AI, that can help us build the new hardware and infrastructure for our own purposes, individuals or businesses, to free ourselves from their control.
The very tool that they use to make their system more efficient is the same tool we must use to REPLACE THEM just as they replace us. AI is power to the people as much as it is power to the corps.
However it’s the ENERGY and EFFORT to adopt, support, and use these open-source, free-world initiatives that were must cultivate. If the people abolish all use of AI and corporations keep using it, will it’s like racing a horse against a car. Blind rejection is unwitting surrender.
That’s why this project and anything else like it is vital.
There are plenty of valid reasons on both sides of the AI argument, but I feel like in the long run, if the resources used to provide AI are kept in check (harmonious with the environment) and a humanistic approach is made by businesses to adopt it, no one would have a problem with it. However, capitalism dictates otherwise so we must fight with the same weapons our opposition has, the same weapons that threaten our ability to provide for our families in this day and age, or risk failure. Ironically the same argument the frontier labs have against each other.
I didn’t mean to ramble so much. I guess I feel pretty strongly about this. I think i probably lost my train of thought a time or two but hopefully my point came across. Thanks for reading and I hope I swayed a few minds.
One only needs to look at how people are responding to Linux Torvalds allowing AI in Linux development to see that people really neef to calm down a little with the hate.
Yeah, fuck all AI from the big tech comps, but that doesn’t mean that any and all AI applications are automatically evil or something
FLOSS existed far before LLMs, and now companies are using them to pull the teeth from hard copyleft licenses.
We didn’t need artcraft, we already had Gimp, Darktable, KDEnlive, and Blender. The main complaint from users is UI. The fix isn’t AI, the fix is users putting in a week to two to retrain muscle memory.
You didn’t sway me, but you didn’t have to either. I strongly believe having the right mindset is crucial whenever there’s any competition to be had. Mindset that takes into account not only the rules of the game but the overall landscape. Failing to ignore that is as bad as if we were to come to a sumo competition being really underweight.
There is one thing that you didn’t capture though: what is our edge? What can we do as people that AI won’t give us on a silver platter?
That’s my 5 cents, happy to hear some answers
There is one thing that you didn’t capture though: what is our edge? What can we do as people that AI won’t give us on a silver platter?
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking or what angle your coming from but it feels like the answer is ingenuity. And of course anything that involves the physical world not the digital one.
Ai is imo a force multiplier or augmentation currently. That is if you are skilled in a field and can catch/correct the incongruities of llm output over the course of a project it’s an extremely powerful tool. When you can come up with new ideas and leverage that agentic harness its powerful. Ai does a mediocre, but getting better faster, job at being a stand-in “consultant” but that mediocre stand in is comparable to a hobbyist in the field. The spark of creation though, the ability to lucidly imagine what could be, is still ours though. For now.
I don’t have a lot to say on that I suppose. I’ll have to chew on that question. Maybe others have thoughts.
I mean in principle, stealing IP from big tech would be great, but do they have to have even the English written by AI? It writes in the most grating tech bro tone I have ever had the misfortune of reading. Can’t be bothered to write all the code, fine, but can you at least write the introduction to your project? Do you even not care about that?
💯 I agree. You can open an issue to give them feedback.
Your protest against AI also uses AI?
yawn
that’s a protest against using AI to devalue workers. technology isn’t inherently evil.
these people wouldn’t know what a “clean-room” was if it swallowed them whole
Yeah, as much as I’d like to applaud this sort of thing, ArtCraft, for example, is going to end up with some major legal woes, in addition to the fact that it’s a pile of slop that doesn’t work worth a damn. The only winner is Anthropic or OpenAI getting big money for all those wasted tokens.
Hey if it means we get another shot at fixing what they broke with the GPL, I’m in.
*Whisper: self hosted LLMs
Dario: We gotta pace the frontier 😆
But in all seriousness, they’re still unmaintaible slop. But who knows maybe in X years they get better. I see a better use case in software
crackinglibre sourcingBut in all seriousness, they’re still unmaintaible slop
They are definitely more user-friendly and community-maintainable than the closed-source originals.
Originals are either binaries you can’t modify, or completely black-box inaccessible software someone else runs which you only interact with.
Having some source code which does almost the same thing, even if it’s buggy, is much better than having nothing at all.
Of course AI has its own issues and the resulting software is pretty bad. It is a great starting point to be improved tho.
I wouldn’t be so sure about the legal actions. There has been some discussions about the room for action of Adobe and that did not seem very big. And the projects will never disappear.
I definitely agree that, at least for the moment, the only winners are token sellers. Those application are definitely not feature complete nor do they claim that at present time.
I have creative cloud that work pays for. It’s awful, I hate it, I hate the launcher, I hate having to kick off my laptop so I can work on my desktop, I hate the whole sign in experience, and I hate how slow everything is. Most of all, I hate that I have to use windows for it.
Calling artcraft slop that doesn’t work is just coping with refusing to accept that AI could be used to make something good. I don’t open Photoshop anymore, photocraft launches in 1 second, I don’t have to boot windows for it, it opens all my PSDs, and while I’m not the most advanced Photoshop user, it works well for everything I’ve tried.
Film craft works well too, I had missed results with ultra key and it’s missing features, but it mostly works.
Pdfcraft replaced Acrobat, it can sign, it can stamp, it can do pretty much everything most people need already.
I use LLMs for coding every day at work and also use local LLMs at home. From my experience, LLMs can be used to create a better end product than humans alone if the proper discipline is followed.
However, my impression is that ArtCraft is a bunch of vibe coded slop where the goal is to reproduce several apps as quickly as possible by letting the LLM go wild. In that case, you usually end up with something that seems to work in many respects, but eventually collapses under its own weight.
We will see whether ArtCraft ever gets out of alpha and shapes up to be solid, but as someone who has been a software engineer over 20 years, hastily creating a mountain of code and then expecting to come back and fix all the problems later never works. It’s always better to work incrementally and add one feature at a time while building in quality every step of the way.
What I expect is that they will continue adding features and trying to fix the problems, play an extended game of whack-a-mole, then eventually get frustrated and abandon the project.
I detest companies like Adobe and I’d be delighted to have my skepticism be proven wrong and see them end up with replacements for the whole suite that work well and are on solid ground legally. I’d also feel better about this if they were using local models, since spending a fortune in tokens to support a company like Anthropic is certainly not on higher moral ground than supporting Adobe with subscription fees.
I hear you, and I agree with the sentiment.
Checkout their GitHub, they are completing pull requests from many people (no doubt using their own AI) that incrementally add features and fix bugs. They maintain architecture plan and docs so it’s maintainable, with future phases planned out. It’s not purely “make Photoshop” slop, there’s a bit of planning.
I don’t know if they’re competent engineers who review the plans and docs for potential issues or hallucinations, I haven’t investigated it deeply, but it’s not lowest hanging fruit slop.
In all fairness, I haven’t investigated it thoroughly myself, and my skepticism mainly comes from the proposed timeframe. I’d be less skeptical if they said they were going to focus only on, say, Photoshop and spend a few months reproducing a small subset of its features without decompiling the code while creating a public audit trail of their clean room process that a lawyer helped them create.
Why?
they brag about reimplementing software from companies they were laid off from with llms. llms are trained on shittons of source code both open and proprietary, which they are known to be able to regurgitate verbatim. also, if you’ve worked with a proprietary codebase at all, you can not be let even close to a reimplementation or it’s legally not clean-room, no matter how much you pinkie promise to not use any of what you learned at your former workplace.
If the copyright holders bring action and win it would completely undermine LLMs use in any industry. 🥲
oh nooooo whatever would we dooooo
which they are known to be able to regurgitate verbatim.
there are only so many ways you can write certain functions, and the most tedious part of generic application programming is configuration, where mostly there is no room for improvement; either the code is verbose or only decipherable by an established code breaker. hence modern SE has evolved certain patterns which you will find common across a variety of codebases.
not ones that involve pasting the gpl into files.
if you’ve worked with a proprietary codebase at all, you can not be let even close to a reimplementation or it’s legally not clean-room
That is incorrect though. The idea behind clean room is in the name: if you take even the same idea, write a spec, and SOMEONE ELSE does a different implementation, you’re fine. The someone else here is AI. And no, AI output is not patentable nor IP infringement, unless there is a case I missed something. Adobe is extremely litigious, so they haven’t made a move yet. They have no case.
companies have been sued over using the same names for functions. this is absolutely not clean room.
Lost me at:
armed with AI
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.
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.
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.
us
movement
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.
ZeroAuthy? whats wrong with Keycloak? its good to have multiple options but why bother if you are just going to vibe the whole thing?
I imagine it’s to make an exact drop in replacement. The auth may be a similar path but the management interfaces might be different? I’m spit balling
sensible comment 👍
People pays for long term maintenance and support. I’m sympathetic to the mouvement and motivation but it’s not going to change much.
The main outcome from this is that it forces the companies to not out-source the development/maintenance/support to AI. If they do, they are literally no different from just self-hosting this and asking your own LLM for help, which is going to be cheaper.
As usual, automation actually reduces the rate of profit in the long run.
This is probably the most realistic goal of the movement.
That is true
True. But tech companies do out source support.
ServiceNow next please. Fuck the “SI” Control Tower
Honestly, as many objections as I have to LLMs and codegen, I honestly don’t object to using it in this context as a tool to counterattack. I feel like this is a relatively reasonable way to fuck with the megacorps and take a slice of their pie.
If an employee can’t have a job, these companies should also suffer
Precisely what I’m getting at 🍻
Yeah I’m good thanks I’d rather use kanidm as SSO Server. It’s also opensource and made by people who know what they are doing.
spite software is the best kind of software
Remember when there was the threat of this happening to open source software and people thought it was the end of open source? This is dumb and the only good that could come out of it is that someone is forced to rule that there is no such thing as a clean room implementation.
I like the idea but you’ll never ever get me feeling sorry for laid off tech workers after how they’ve behaved the last 20 years absolutely disgusting. Now we are suppose to support them building the same shit again yeah I wonder how that goes.
But why clean room and public docs? the cat is out of the bag you can blatantly steal now. AI companies have done this and all these big tech companies use AI code. If you have concerns just host the code out of US jurisdiction. Make them fight the case of AI replication.
Wild how anti piracy lemmy is. It took ai to make you all call copying software stealing. We are so fucked.
Ive always been of the opinion that piracy is stealing. Doesnt mean I’m anti piracy. These companies arent fucking scum its perfectly fine to steal their shit. They’d do it to you in a heartbeat
How, exactly, have tech workers behaved disgustingly over the past 20 years? Be specific
Think of the worst companies. Now think of who built them. Think of the most authoritarian government surveillance and think who built it.
So… Blame all the workers for a few shitty techbro oligarchs… Solid logic there
The workers didn’t have control of the ship.
You’re talking about C-staff, which is like 1,000 people in all of the Bay Area.
They haven’t. It’s the techbro ceo oligarchy.
