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.
ServiceNow next please. Fuck the “SI” Control Tower
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.
People pays for long term maintenance and support. I’m sympathetic to the mouvement and motivation but it’s not going to change much.
True. But tech companies do out source support.
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.
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.
*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 sourcingI 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🍻
spite software is the best kind of software
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.
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 👍
Lost me at:
armed with AI
This is actually the first instance I can personally get behind AI. Useing big tech to fuck with big tech.
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
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.
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.
Yeah… Totally going to use the vibe coded authentication service. Not
