If the whole thing wasn't so harebrained, I would suspect it was a marketing campaign from Anthropic.
There's no question that AI can, and almost certainly will, be used to do great harm, but the idea that AIs are just going to up and decide to kill us on their own is unlikely fanfic at best.
And at worst, it's projection by people who are really telling on themselves about what they want to do to anyone they consider either useless or a threat. They're also thinking of the consequences of the way they plan to use AI themselves.
They read or watched "Ender's Game" and thought it was a model for how to deal with competition. Or, as we see with Thiel for example, they read Lord of the Rings and thought "Sauron did nothing wrong." Or in Musk's case, substitute Sauron with the guy whose salute he likes to copy.
I realize neither of those people are really central to the AI race, but they're symptomatic of the thinking of the cult. In the 1980s, the people who deluded themselves that they were "masters of the universe" were on Wall Street. Now, they're in Silicon Valley.
In fact, if AI were to turn on its creators, we might end up with the best of all possible worlds.
And the network effects of taking frontally cloud IDPs like Google, or even OpenID…
We have standards like OIDC 2.0, but every IDP (including the big ones like Entra and Google) have subtle differences that still requires custom code per IDP. So all SaaS you interact with will have to do work to support your specific IDP solution.
Then there is support, you can't reasonably expect a SaaS that you pay a few bucks a month for to help you troubleshoot problems when authenticating using your self-hosted IDP solution inevitably fails.
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.
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
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.
LLMs are solving millennium problems, but can’t make CRUD SaaS alternatives? Listen to yourself man. Claude and ChatGPT used their own AI to build trillion dollar companies. But it making a e-commerce SaaS is a bridge too far huh?
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.
How do you get paid?
Shouldn't we encourage more companies starting like this, have a (permissive) open source platform anyone can use, while also offering a commercial managed service.
It's a model that's been around for a long time, but is now gaining more traction thanks to AI commoditizing software development. And I think it's an improvement over the closed-source giants we are used to having dominate each market (and strangle customers through annual price increases, especially when acquired and their investors are looking to squeeze out a return).
unfortunately, this openship thing is copyleft though, so not particularly permissive vs. Apache 2.0 or MIT-licensed alternatives, but still...
I am both a buyer and seller of this business model, myself.
I don’t have a good model for what lower B2B prices would look like when company age/growth aggression/pricing unsophistication are factored, though. I don’t take the presence of some downside for granted because projects like this can be taken by incumbents and bundled into high margin services (copyleft helps a bit here.) Would welcome data.
This model to depress prices does definitely work in B2C, but it’s not necessary to develop an open source app to get cloned to drive down prices there; it happens to everyone.
Ask the vape companies that were on Shopify for nearly a decade and Shopify kicked them off a couple months back. I bet they wish they went with open-source instead of blindly trusting a company to whom you are expendable.
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.
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.
Lots of smaller/medium sized companies where money is definitely an issue are also tethered to way too many SaaS subscriptions.
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".
> and so more aligned and part of the 1% they allude to "rebel against".
This is your fundamental misunderstanding and exactly the one that the 0.1% (or 1%) depends on maintaining. It's this misunderstanding that they've been ruthlessly exploiting to immense success. You need some exposure to how the top 1% lives and thinks, then the 0.1%, then the 0.01%. Then you'll see that those tech workers have much more in common and are much more aligned with the rest of the 99%. These are entirely different worlds.
Can't make everyone happy.
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.
Then we can move to the damage it does to your mental abilities.
We can continue to the ongoing effect on society, the damage to the environment, and so on.
And we can finish with extrapolating on the abilities of the models, and the dystopia that having full AGI would be. Especially if that AGI is built by the current leaders.
I think you're aware of the downsides, but you don't want to put down your precious.
- 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).
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?
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.
Why even bother with the extra "protection". It can be re-made by AI as easily.
Just go all the way, MIT or BSD. Maximize reusability and adoption.
If I can copyright the outputs of a code generator when I feed it my own inputs, then believe there is a similar line for LLM output.
And the disclaimer of liability is kind of important.
The proliferation of BSD licenses dilutes the meaning of "bsd license". There's only one MIT license, so there's no confusion.
Because that's not actually true yet, and may not be for a while
I know who you are.
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.
> 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.
We think it can be. This is just Pareto principle. We're hill climbing the finer curves.
The video you linked is also three weeks old, which is an eternity in the scope of this project, since each week hundreds of PRs are merged, and several versions are released. At the speed they are going and with the amount of attention and usage they're getting, I expect they'll manage parity in months, but even in the current state, it's still useful enough.
The person testing it also seems to be an artist, so their workflow demands can be significantly different from someone doing image editing. Most artists I know use more specialized software like Clip Studio Paint over Photoshop anyway.
I think to stay competitive, open source software needs to adopt AI-first workflows that mostly automate quality control and review, rather than just allow LLM contributions. Allowing LLM contributions without sufficient infrastructure will just drown maintainers in slop.
Developers should have higher performance standards now that DX matters way less (you're not writing code by hand anyway).
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
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).
With CLA's in place contributors usually sign away their copyright, often to get rug-pulled when an open source project reaches a certain maturity and popularity, and the commercial plans are activated by the company behind it. Better look for community-driven projects that come with a DCO [0] instead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi...
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.
Ah management-style cover-your-ass engineering. Which doesn't work even with things like IBM contracts, never mind with anyone smaller. The problem is what they actually guarantee.
When you actually investigate the question (because you were a Google SRE and you move to a smaller company, and obviously disaster preparation starts with knowing what happens when disaster strikes): "Say, really smart manager, what does the contract actually say happens when you need the cover-your-ass provisions? Let's say AWS fails to give us machines. Let's say this software doesn't deliver. Let's say the bank connection we're paying for breaks". First observation: the managers (at a very big European telco) don't actually know the answer to this question. Or they pretend not to (I'm pretty sure they just lied to me, didn't care about anything but the checkmark, and did in fact know they did not have any option for disaster recovery because their developers had told them many times).
Answers: AWS doesn't give you a cent back, under any circumstances, does NOT get your servers back online but MAY give you 20% reduction on your future bill (and for customers in the UAE with the Iran war, they didn't)
Software doesn't deliver, then we don't have to pay the last milestone payment (10% of the cost), and the supplier does nothing anymore.
If the bank connection breaks, nothing happens. You are forced to keep paying anyway. Although, I guess you get the transaction cost for free because there won't bee any transactions. I do hear there's a small problem with that.
So, obviously, no, this does not cover the company's ass at all. It's about a manager being able to say they very cheaply did something. What will happen to the company in case of actual problems? It'll immediately cease to function, and none of these cover-your-ass provisions will matter at all. Which is, of course, what happened about 4 months later and the company's new SREs were expected to fix the shit ASAP, without ANY help from the "service" part of these platforms. We had to buy new services to get it fixed, once the service was down senior management literally got involved and approved the purchase orders, yelled at a bunch of infrastructure teams to make changes they never would and the company never got the money back from the "guaranteed" platforms. It cost about 15x, for that year, what it would have cost to have 2 providers for the service, and I'm sure that more than covered a development team for the software. And thank god we at least hosted our own source and made sure local builds worked.
By the way: they just switched to the newly ordered much more expensive platform. About 3 weeks later, focus was moved away, by management, from repairing stuff and so the ability to switch back was ... just dropped.
Let me introduce you to Red Hat.
But I suspect whoever is behind this doesn't want it to be just performative. They hope that companies will actually switch to these drop-in OSS replacements, otherwise what exactly is the point? The website? Mission accomplished I guess.
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.
Except that already has some of the most textbook-perfect standard and documented API suites on the planet, and full fidelity company data import and export in any of a hundred ways.
There’s already functionally zero lock-in beyond wanting their platform and associated services.
Also, there are already far more mature alternative oss crm packages, where none have never actually threatened Salesforce.
I don't see any reason why a project with a head start can't reach such parity.
Auth0: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/auth0
Salesforce: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/salesforce
Rapid technological improvement is just a convenient justification for letting people go. It sounds a lot better than the real explanation "The system is broken and we need to keep optimizing money flows to sustain the scheme to control inflation." The system destroys value faster than technology can create it; which is quite an impressive feat because technology opens up massive capabilities; but look at reality; AI is being massively misallocated. People are just following the incentives.
Mark my words; the business model for AI, if the current trends continue, isn't going to be about "robots making everyone's lives better"; it's going to be about "AI agents which patch vulnerabilities that AI agents themselves created."
This is the reality we're heading into. No amount of amazing technology is going to solve that problem if it follows the incentives and rules of the current economic system.
If the government paid people to dig holes and fill them up again over and over, we'd probably have super-intelligent tractors and excavators by now.
It appears their end goal is 1:1 drop-in replacements, which other projects usually don’t strive for.
Because they're all deeply mired in their own bureaucracy, and the ramp up to be a major contributor takes years?
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.
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...
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.
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.
Richard Stallman must have looked almost as delusional when he started a free compiler and an OS in the 80s.
Worst part is when they used to leave their cushy big tech job and then the algorithms helped them drive traffic to their new startups. It's like people get a special flag on their projects when they are ex-FAANG which helps them get discovered. I don't know if this still happens now though.
Especially during the current time of unprecedented pace of security patching, decrying this as "enterprise box-checking" couldn't be be more displaced.
Thank you!
I think many of us as a collective profession are going to be doing this.
We're going to open source apps, then infrastructure, then weights. The hyperscalers created the seeds of their own moat dismantlement.
Web 1.0 was great - forums, personal websites, IRC, a million chat options, RSS, APIs. It was this way because the world was technical and everyone had energy to do things. It was a Wild West, and it was fun. You could buy and own things back then.
Web 2.0 brought on our parents and grandparents to the world of broadband. Most of the new users were non-technical, so the tech of Web 1.0 got simplified into "product". The sharp edges were removed, and everything became simple. Over time the leaders built up their moats, removed APIs, turned into walled garden silos. Companies began to become extractive and enshittify their products.
Today the conditions that led to Web 2.0 are no longer true. It doesn't take a ton of energy to build things, and it doesn't require deeply technical people to do it either.
The entire tech sector is going to be a blood bath. Where there were once moats and monopolies, there's now going to be prolific and wide spread open source and a market rife with competition.
Big tech is turning into the food service industry. Passion driven, distributed, highly competitive, though probably lower margin. Plenty of opportunity for small businesses.
(I hope you guys make a Google docs style cooperative mode. For simple edits this already beats the MS Office suite, but Office 365 cooperation still sucks, so if you can get that working fast ... exiting times)
Each focal area is getting DRIs, and we're doing cross-cutting work to make everything componetizable and cross-platform.
We're scaling up the scope of our mission and ambition, too. We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights. There are a lot of things we want to contribute to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.
> Does the stability approach, say, Photopea?
We had some debate internally about whether to begin diverging the project from what Adobe does and begin innovating on our own.
We instead decided that 100% feature parity is the goal. Parity is a milestone for us because it validates what we've done, and it also serves the muscle memory of the tens of thousands of Adobe users.
After we hit parity, we can easily turn our applications into entirely new ones with more opinionated UI/UX and net new features.
Love to see this rebellious spirit of sovereignty and collective action. It's what made the "hacker culture" great.
Seeing the meteoric success of the ArtCraft series of applications, I'm hopeful and looking forward to the positive disruption of the industry, by the makers, for the makers - and screw the takers.
But I'd much rather have bulletproof linked file support than "concept to vector" or "live paint" (as cool as those are)
On the same hardware (128GB RAM), there's just no comparison. Much faster, and better in every way, I don't see myself using Photopea again.
Completely forgetting, security updates with regression testing , backups, data structuring, performance engineering.
But hey, it gives a living to many HNers so it's good!
You might not have per-seat pricing but still all the feature negotiations with product owner, all the salary negotiations with developers - oh wait nowadays we have AI providers that will hike token prices ;)
The difference will be that they can have rent seeking practices when the software itself cant be taken hostage. They'll charge for the service and wont leech off the user for way more money than they deserve for making and maintaining the software
Is this true in other industries? I suppose there’s probably car people who don’t understand that most people don’t buy cars because they love cars. They buy what cars do. If they could get what cars do without having to hassle with a car they would.
The people who buy software are not the ones who pay the bill. If you hire a contractor to build custom-tailored software:
- If it is buggy or lacking, you'll be blamed.
- If it gets hacked, you'll be fired.
- If it works well and saves the company millions, you get a pat on the back.
The incentives are off. Why on earth would you not go with the established provider?
For people who don't know Bending Spoons, their strategy works as follows:
1. Buy SaaS company
2. Set up new product team of 15 people in Europe
3. Re-implement backend on Bending Spoons technical platform
4. Make the original company (100 people?) redundant
But what I find interesting is that their technical platform is fifty different generic reusable parts that work on whatever they put on top of it: Vimeo, Evernote, Miro, Airtable.
Combing back to OccupySaaS: there could be real value in a 'generic core' and then re-engineer all SaaS solutions on top. And then to get service again for the core.
the software is hardly any difficult but sales or customer acquisition.
Very interesting. Any idea what those parts are and/or how they work?
– "Xina", alternative to Adjust.com or Kochava or AppsFlyer, written in Rust
– "Pantheon", inference platform/VMs to run Al models on GPUs
- "Minerva", AI-based user lifetime value estimates
– "Juno", payment management
– "Galf", access control
– "Matrix", UX patterns
– "Pico", data ingestion (user analytics)
– "Lumen", data transformation
– "Abacus", data computation
– "Janus", experimentation toolkit
– "Orion", experimentation toolkit
– "Role Model", AI hiring
– "Crystal", market intelligence (helps find targets to acquire)The only thing we need to do now is not second S. Companies who build first S, while letting companies keep their data within their own walls, are going to be future winners. In other words, we are returning back to pre-SaaS era but allowing flexibility of Companies to run first S on their own systems (actually run it on their own systems and not via a VPC).
Even what the OP posted is bound to fail because Companies have realized the value of the data they hold, especially in this AI age. They are not willing to part with their data as easily as they did before (see how many companies are wanting to move over from traditional ERPs to SaaS/Cloud ERPs. many are not willing to upgrade).
However that does open space for free software plus pay for supporting it. Good example would be WPEngine maybe. You can easily move from them to someone else if you use WP. Not so easy to move from Jira to something else because then the software changes.
1. Alert is created due to something in the SaaS not working
2. On-call engineer is pinged
3. On-call engineer creates an issue with the SaaS provider
4. On-call engineer twiddles their thumbs waiting for an update from the SaaS provider
I've been that on-call engineer dozens of times. I'd rather be able to have some kind of agency when triaging an issue.
All the incumbents should be afraid of pissed off engineers trying to get their business or building custom stacks inside their biggest clients. Screaming into the void by releasing more code isn't going to move the needle.
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 suppose everybody is allowed to feel however they wish about such and it seems that this project is the culmination of some of these feelings.
Anthropic just blocked REA but it doesn’t matter, we’ll just lean harder into the Chinese models.
Does anyone else feel that this discredits it?
This has a very similar vibe.
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.
Consumers hate subscriptions. Businesses love subscriptions. They love paying to make their problems become someone else's problems, so they can fokus on running their actual business.
If building own workflow was cheap, I doubt SaaS would even take off. Businesses used to build on top of Drupal, Django, Rails, Magento and everything else like that. But those frameworks also become complex as they try to fit everyone's need.
LLMs cut that. You build what you want, perhaps on top of a lean framework. This "someone else taking responsibility" is how SaaS marketing won, but in this era, maintaining a small software should not be an issue. SaaS is complex because it has to serve needs of many. It has different requirements. A custom automation does not.
Possibly also a PR stunt
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.
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 :)
Microsoft logo is right on the opening screen, implied to be an enemy.
Does the author even knows Github is not independent?
Like another comment said, it's more that Service is being bought through Software, not Software itself.
We as an industry seem to keep forgetting that we don't get paid to build software for its own sake.
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?
It's only fair and logical that the redundancy machine has come for the job of the redundancy engineers.
I was wrong about agents.
Hard pivoting into a different career, for the fifth or sixth time in my life, with a plan B of raising chickens. (Not kidding)
Am I extracting labor from the mechanic who fixes my car and gets paid by me to do the job?
...why?
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.
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?
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.
They hope this goes viral and many join.
https://github.com/occupysaas/zeroauthy https://github.com/occupysaas/salescompel
Little attempt at reconciling differing ideas of what shape a replacement intented to be default choice should take.
Thousands marched, the media was happy to dismiss them as loafers and losers, and...nothing happened.
2 weeks of dev time is worth way more than 20$. So people buy to solve their problem faster and with less of a headache than they would themselves.
SWEs in general have been paid significantly higher salaries for decades in part because of the skill level needed and that they are generally working on capital projects (build new thing) vs operational projects (maintain thing built). It's the difference between needing a Landscaper to come in a completely reshape a bit of land for £10k once, and Gardener to come in a mow/prune once a week for £10. Most salaried SWEs don't necessarily see that every project they work on is a new patch of land to be landscaped; those who've contracted do.
SWEs have been effectively paid this "danger money" because of that inherent volatility in projects being shut down, which has been there since the dot com bubble but is now amplified because of the relative size of the tech sector.
The skills barrier which has been eroded in part by the lack of professional standards (anyone who can edit a PHP script can call themselves an SWE vs a Chartered Accountant which has to be certified), and now explicitly because of AI.
In some ways this just looks like "FOSS for Angry Millennials" without the understanding of the further damage that this will do to them and their industry. These are the forces its trying to get revenge for: (a) high inflationary creating risky environments for businesses to navigate, (b) tax changes which have impacted how organisations pay for SWEs, (c) AI offering "efficiencies" in all parts of the value chain, (d) the demand for ever-growing returns by shareholders as we enter the end-state of neoliberalism.
None of that is improved by this movement. Regardless of what you think of them, the original Occupy movement made it impossible for the people responsible for the crash to not be aware of/somewhat put out by those impacted by the crash. This is Just Another Open Source project. The way for those impacted is: (a) keep their skills sharp by helping charity projects that need the volunteer support; (b) get active politically on a local level; (c) use the time to start their own businesses with others.
There is a firmament that is needed on which all tech grows like Linux which is a good thing. This is not good for the Landscapers or the Gardeners, nor does it fix the issues which have led to the layoffs.
I do like the paradox (oxymoron?) of being made redundant with AI, so they’re using AI to render their former companies redundant.
But in the end it pushes for more AI software; I’m not sure who wins.
In the hyper NIH, not-invented-here world we live in now, 3rd party software, if any is to be trusted, is about the trust in the humans, and the humans behind this project are not selling it well by declaring war on their employers. We're talking about replacing million-dollar software deals here.
This is the nature of people. It is a good thing to realize the leopards are bad, even if it takes getting your own face eaten to notice. Look at the positive a little!
One of the keys to a successful revolution is not purging all your allies by means of purity tests.
We can cheer someone on when they strike back at the establishment, regardless of how recently they may have joined the cause.
Yep, that usually happens only _after_ the successful revolution
Still this broader effort looks more like performance art since the people who decide what SaaS to use are on the other side of this devide
Not that I think this particular instance is particularly high-effort, but almost all revolutionary acts appear performative. That's kind of the point?
You don't bring publicity to your cause by keeping your head down and staying quiet (and as they say, any publicity is good publicity).
> We can cheer someone on when they strike back at the establishment, regardless of how recently they may have joined the cause.
I’m with you on that, I understand I may have come across as bitter in my earlier comment.
What worries me still is the push to more AI as a response even while AI is a main driver for jobs being cut, and it taking a more and more central place in both the establishment (expected) and the revolution (unexpected and unwanted).
I, for one, do not welcome our new AI/SI overlords.
Welcome to the Industrial Revolution, comrade Marx! We must seize the means of production
I would say it is even more ironic. Many years before, SaaS companies and IT in general were the ones making people fired. New software reduces the need for manual labour, hence less people are hired and somebody is fired as well. Accounting, marketing, retail managers, taxi drivers - list goes on. Now SW devs joined the club of those receiving their own medicine.
For example I know at least one country (but I suspect many more are just I did not checked) where the IT creates a big enough chunk of GDP and hires a lot of people. Much more than it disrupted initially.
But more than this IT allowed so far for much more people to get a very good job and have a very decent life. Up until the promises of AI the IT industry was an industry that was hiring a lot of people and producing a lot of money in their economies. Not only by sales tax or sales but also by circulating money via paying their employees and thus along with IT a lot of other businesses where created.
dude-with-hand-on-other-dudes-shoulder-meme.jpg
Any other kind of a project - construction, hardware design, media production - has an end. Once it's done people have to switch to another project.
But with software there's an expectation that it's never done, it's always subtly broken, and I can't help but think that this expectation gets baked into methodologies which produce software.
Also these are SAAS products, the kind that have predictable patterns of development, not one off software consultancies, so you're not actually making a good comparison.
Lay-offs only look hypocritical to people who are confusing for-profit companies with cooperatives. FWIW, personally, I like the idea of cooperative, but it seems otherwise rather unpopular.
Regarding predictable patterns, note that managers are incentivized to do busy work rather than report that software is "done". E.g. if you're a manager and you know that you already implemented all reasonable features and only need minor maintenance, would you report that to executives, risking your job? Or would you try (perhaps subconsciously) make some bullshit excuse: "we need such and such features to boost our revenue, also we need to migrate to <new-framework> to increase performance to be competitive, so yeah, we need more people"? It might not even seem an excuse because it's what everyone does -- all managers are like that.
There's a give and take here that your analysis refuses to acknowledge. "Meta" is not a physical entity that can protect its property, it relies on humans engaging in the ruse (for money to be clear, ie a job).
> Regarding predictable patterns, note that managers are incentivized to do busy work rather than report that software is "done".
This is an abject failure of the executive levels then, given that managing that sort of thing is their role. More or less brings us back to the same point of "why do we all have to suffer because the C-suite can't do their jobs?".
"poetic justice" is a common term for what you describe
In the AI age, no one buys software because it's "worth it". You pay a premium because you expect reasonable thought and care about the about the product and support. Sure we can switch over to ICQ or Microsoft Teams or Google chat, which is all essentially free for most corporate customers. But people pay for Slack because it's a known entity, slightly nicer to work with and frankly I just don't want to think about the decision so I pay $8 or whatever per user to not have to think about it.
Users had to pay for saas but the price was justified by spendings of the saas company. Mostly to the dev/testers/support salaries. This is what you have been paying when you were paying for the saas.
Now when the management fires employees and replace them with ai they do this for one reason: greed. Have you noticed any price drops of any saas which fired the team? I haven't.
The AI changes the market on every aspect and Saas will die sooner or later.
https://github.com/peterretief/yggstore
I am using it for hosting at the moment, there needs to be a greater adoption and then the developent will be back in the hands of the developers
It’s been pub chat amongst my friends for months. We’re too much of a bunch of slackers to have actually done anything about it, but it’s been actively discussed.
We didn’t quite couch it as a protest movement either. My suspicion is that doing so rather ruins the idea from a commercial viability perspective (popularity ruins, or at least changes, everything that becomes too popular).
Also, why target multi-tenant? presumably the audience is a single org.
If anything, regulation is the more realistic solution. Requiring licensed CS/CE/STEM engineers (a degree plus a licensing exam, likely one for the US and a separate one for the EU) to sign off either manually written or generated by AI output on software in critical areas like healthcare, finance, insurance, energy, government and infrastructure, or above a certain revenue or valuation. That would keep people with verified skills in demand and improve security. Anyone could still build yet another SaaS, custom apps or games, and teach themselves along the way. They'd just need to hire licensed specialists once they grow or handle sensitive data.
It's far from a perfect solution, but an even stricter system already works in law, medicine and civil engineering. It just moves us from the current Wild West back toward the middle. Getting there would take real consensus, though, and tech workers have historically resisted organizing, since many see themselves as individual high earners who don't need a union. Add lobbying from large corporations, and it's a long shot.
If anything, you got to take this to the streets. Make the discomfort visible and so large it gets known, let it be known that firing workers has consequences.
I guess software engineers are just too privileged they don't know how to fight...
The point here is to keep making a living building software they were already building, and kick their former employees hard in the nutsack whilst doing it.
Which is a legitimate form of protest with a long and storied history.
I'm not gatekeeping forms of protest either. I'm just commenting on the efficacy of this approach. I don't believe it's able to hurt capital at all, no matter how many vibecoded replacements they make.
<< I don't believe it's able to hurt capital at all, no matter how many vibecoded replacements they make.
Maybe, convince me.
The question is: are these actually alternatives? Likely it comes down to how well supported they are. I get being angry after a layoff, but it takes a more dedicated kind of anger to stick with an open source project for long enough that it's actually a threat to the incumbent.
2. People and companies often just use SAAS for convenience. Of course we could host just about everything ourselves, but that's a shit ton of work with variable payoff.
3. Using Github and Discord. LMAO!
...
Anyway, I immediately noticed the opening graphic is... well, bizzarely wrong.
There is a logo of Salesforce. Yes, a big software company, opposing it fits nicely into the agenda.
Then you see a logo of... AWS?
Not even Amazon per se, AWS.
Amazon Web Services.
A cloud computing subsidiary.
A HARDWARE subsidiary.
Not software, which OccupySaas aims to replicate cheaply, hardware.
Hardware.
Tens of billions of worth in hardware.
How does that fill the software liberation agenda?
Then you see logo, er, favicon of Google. Perhaps entirety of Alphabet is targeted, perhaps not, who knows.
But not only Alphabet is a cloud computing giant - again, hardware, not software, hardware - but Google itself is a huge CONSUMER-facing brand. Not business facing. What does that mean? Is the logo of Google Docs not iconic enough?
Then you see the logo with a letter N in a box. What does that mark?
Yeah, I know.
Notion, a groupworking platform.
I checked it and, yeah, annual revenue of Notion does not exceed $1 billion. Even.
https://getlatka.com/companies/notion
For comparision, Salesforce nears almost $44 billion as of now. Notion is not even visible at this scale. Not even a mini-major, but a independent <scratch off>film company</scratch off> software house. It's not even publicly listed (yet).
(Hacker News should really add buttons to apply basic visual formatting options for comments. Trivial to apply. Seriously)
Why Notion was choosed but not SAP? Why not Workday? Why not Shopify? Autodesk, even?
(There is also logo of Microsoft)
The graphic clearly went "to print" with nary a check.
It's not the same commodity. Most stuff has already open source alternatives.
I'm sorry, but if I'd see this when checking your GitHub in an application, it'd be a red flag for me.
> We don't leak, decompile or copy anyone's code. Every project is rebuilt from public documentation and open standards, with AI doing the heavy lifting
Hmm, creative interpretation of things here. Using AI to copy existing products feels a lot like code/license laundering or something. I feel like there should be a name for this sort of thing. I didn't love it when I read about Adobe's (fuck Adobe) stuff getting hard ripped, and I don't love that vibe bros are going to further lower the bar for getting a decent product out without getting immediately copied and I HATE that these guys trying to position themselves as revolutionaries/robin hoods while using stolen IP (AI) to generate clones of existing products.
More and more I feel negative about my future in software.
if i'm only using 20% of the features of a saas service, i don't need a bundle that reimplements 100% of it.