goal seems to be to create 1-1 API and feature compatibility, which is very different from various open source IdPs
temp123477 5 hours ago [-]
The mistake is thinking the first S is what people pay for when it is the second S.
ozim 2 hours ago [-]
To expand on that, yes bunch of people believe they pay for buttons, text boxes so features and UI.
Completely forgetting, security updates with regression testing , backups, data structuring, performance engineering.
akersten 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe for enterprise box-checking. I'm sure that can be outsourced to some separate liability-shield or narrow consulting service instead. For a lot of companies, the software bit is actually all we need. I hope the current shakeout lays bare the "SaaS" whose only reason to exist as a SaaS is gluttony. ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
The "occupation map" and its current targets are exactly the opposite: services that either have a big support or maintenance component to them.
Especially during the current time of unprecedented pace of security patching, decrying this as "enterprise box-checking" couldn't be be more displaced.
paweladamczuk 1 hours ago [-]
Speaking of ArtCraft, do you know how it's doing? I saw some mixed comments when it was first released. Do you use it? Does the stability approach, say, Photopea?
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
We have about 50 core developers and we're maturing our processes. If you're interested, you can join us in our Discord.
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.
lioeters 18 minutes ago [-]
> We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights.. to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.
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.
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
> ArtCraft is doing a great job illustrating that for one particular company.
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.
bill10 3 hours ago [-]
can't agree more
grohan 5 hours ago [-]
spot on :)
jongjong 4 hours ago [-]
Specifically, they pay for the cronyism aspect of the service. They pay because they're friends with the founder (or the decision-maker expects kickbacks now or in the future or at the very least; they share the same VC and are doing someone a favor), not because they need the features of the software. The features are only there to provide narrative support (I.e. justification for the money being paid). You can see that this is the case when the software gets really bad and there exist free open source solutions, the company has self-hosting capacity, but the company keeps using the expensive, clunky SaaS solution founded by their buddies... Then sometimes they jump ships to their buddy's SaaS company and get a nice fat salary as a reward for having helped to create the parasitic dependency.
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.
ivanmontillam 4 hours ago [-]
Hmmm, no. I mean, yes that happens, but I'm pretty sure you've also paid for software in which you don't have buddies at that company.
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?
jongjong 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah well we're just the plebs and we use whatever big tech forces us to use and whatever they allow us to discover through their discovery platforms and recommendation engines. About your Fastmail example specifically; All non-approved email services are blocked; if you try to set up your own service, all your outbound emails on behalf of your customers are marked as spam by big tech. Seriously, try to setup your own SMTP email service.
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.
photios 2 hours ago [-]
You are right on all accounts. You might even be right these folks are naive and even delusional. That doesn't make it impossible to turn out great though. Let's wait and see.
Richard Stallman must have looked almost as delusional when he started a free compiler and an OS in the 80s.
baubino 6 hours ago [-]
This seems like it’s trying to reinvent the idea of FOSS. There’s already tons of FOSS alternatives to big tech SaaS and there’s lots of tech coops and other venues for tech activism. Why not support one of those ventures or build a platform to help amplify them?
Also odd to advocate for control of tech only to cede the entire project to AI.
ivanmontillam 6 hours ago [-]
Because it feels good to start something rather than joining an existing someone at the exact same mission.
It's all just performative.
epicureanideal 5 hours ago [-]
Perhaps let's brainstorm ways to solve this. How can we incentivize joiners to projects? How can we both appreciate the founders and starters, and the later joiners who are necessary for the project? Perhaps if we encourage our own community (tech) to give serious weight and appreciation to all contributors, that will move things in the right direction.
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?
ivanmontillam 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure the issue is getting credit for contributions, or as you suggest: giving ownership of areas of a project. After all, that's a problem already solved: CLAs for open source. With CLAs in place, developers get credited for their efforts (git blames!), as well as part of the IP of their implemented solution if accepted.
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.
rapnie 48 minutes ago [-]
> After all, that's a problem already solved: CLAs for open source.
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.
> Take for example, the bajillion expenses tracker apps. The most reinvented wheel. Do we need yet another one?
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.
ivanmontillam 4 hours ago [-]
> I'm thinking more about "cathedral-like" projects, some massive open source project that lasts for years
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).
okdood64 5 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Also it's incredible how many working professionals (as evidenced by this "movement") don't understand why companies pay for software to these SaaS companies.
Ironically attaching your company to a movement like this will deter people from using it.
ivanmontillam 5 hours ago [-]
In my opinion, most tech-like professionals miss the point of delegating liabilities.
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.
andsoitis 5 hours ago [-]
> Why not support one of those ventures or build a platform to help amplify them?
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.
wackget 4 hours ago [-]
They are aiming for 100% parity with existing SDKs and APIs. Most FOSS alternatives won't get anywhere near that.
vasco 2 hours ago [-]
They can aim at anything. I'm aiming to be an alchemist.
woutr_be 3 hours ago [-]
In case anyone is interested in existing FOSS alternatives:
Yeah this is a bunch of nerds trying to solve a socio-political problem with technical solutions...
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
So the same as FOSS came to be.
Thus its utter failure at "liberation" part. For freedom is political.
brainless 2 hours ago [-]
I am working toward similar goals but with a different approach. With LLMs, software can become more personal, customized, quirky even. Software will fit the last mile better than ever.
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.
Sammi 51 minutes ago [-]
Someone else taking responsibility for running the service is the value that SaaS offers and what SaaS buyers are looking for. Having it as a desktop app doesn't have what SaaS has.
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.
brainless 20 minutes ago [-]
I doubt this. SaaS was created by enterprises who wanted to ship features into a pipeline they control end to end. The user gets to use it through a UI. Slowly SaaS became good enough and people stopped investing into their own custom workflow.
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.
fishgoesblub 6 hours ago [-]
> Apache-2.0
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.
snvzz 5 hours ago [-]
>Copyleft.
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.
timcobb 4 hours ago [-]
> It can be re-made by AI as easily.
Because that's not actually true yet, and may not be for a while
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
For source coude to source code rewrites (which would be the case here when we talk about license laundering), AI is leagues ahead compared to binary to source code rewrites.
_aavaa_ 5 hours ago [-]
If you’re going to go all the way, make it public domain.
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
If "it can be re-made by AI as easily" how MIT is supposed to help with adoption?
I know who you are.
timcobb 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah why is this Apache-2.0 ??
kkaske 4 hours ago [-]
This is a really nice idea, but most of these types things die as a nice idea unless they reach critical mass. 99% of people (to use the 99% idea from the website) just want to pay a fee to get a product and know that there is good documentation/training material and customer support behind it. Sometimes that "support" comes in the form of consultants around industries that push you into products as a result of using their services.
rsingel 5 hours ago [-]
I feel like this would be better as a federation. Each project on its own. Some shared resources and interconnection.
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 difference here is its just one guy, a coding agent, and a fever dream.
timsuchanek 3 hours ago [-]
Where is "OccupyResponsibility"? The point of SaaS is not anymore the software, but a team of humans still being responsible when something goes wrong.
That’s just a commercial SaaS suite using open as a marketing hook, unless I’m missing something. Many companies start this way and become entrenched.
theturtletalks 3 hours ago [-]
It’s completely open-source and it’s our mission to make sure these are always 1-click deployable to PaaS like Vercel and Railway.
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.
geocar 20 minutes ago [-]
> It’s completely open-source and it’s our mission to make sure these are always 1-click deployable to PaaS like Vercel and Railway.
How do you get paid?
theturtletalks 2 minutes ago [-]
We have cloud hosting too. But users always have the option to self host. Our long term goal is a decentralized, interoperable marketplace powered by this software:
Your “factory” seems to have not gotten the memo that you are openship and not openfront?
Also I have zero clue what I’m looking at here? What is this?
theturtletalks 5 hours ago [-]
Openship is an order management system. I built that first when I used Shopify. Then it was easy to build my own which became Openfront. Think of Openship as a the glue between Openfronts so businesses can buy from other businesses.
Happy to answer more questions. We’re making open source alternatives to Shopify, Toast, GlossGenius, MindBody, Booksy, Cloudbeds, Dutchie, etc.
OccamsMirror 3 hours ago [-]
Another AI fever dream.
theturtletalks 3 hours ago [-]
Eh ok, already have people using these in production. I’m having an AI agent run a full e-commerce business using Openfront and Openship.
maxbond 14 minutes ago [-]
I would be happy to see these companies have their lunch eaten by open source but I don't understand who the audience is for this populist framing. Tech workers by and large wouldn't have supported the Occupy movement. The people sympathetic to Occupy generally don't like the tech industry and especially not AI. It's difficult to imagine serious teams deploying anticapitalist branded software within their enterprise. Who is this project for?
rdiddly 10 minutes ago [-]
I supported Occupy, but it was a losing effort, so the very mention of its name is discouraging.
andruby 52 minutes ago [-]
I love this from a societal point of view.
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.
doginasuit 6 hours ago [-]
This seems inevitable in one form or another. A lot of talented devs are struggling to find employment at the same moment that there is a tool that can guide you through the parts of launching a product that are outside of your expertise. That's just more time to tinker out of curiosity or necessity.
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.
1 hours ago [-]
everfrustrated 6 hours ago [-]
Apache 2.0... so someone can take your code and turn it into saas again!
jenadine 2 hours ago [-]
If they had chosen something like AGPL, they would have had comments saying noone is going to use it.
Can't make everyone happy.
hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
This genuinely feels either misguided or like a false flag psyop that will end in harm to the goals of the common people.
Possibly also a PR stunt
Mike_weinberg 3 hours ago [-]
This entire website screams “Authored by AI”. It is ironic and lazy that the manifesto of a movement nominally for humans would be written by AI.
Does anyone else feel that this discredits it?
kmoser 3 hours ago [-]
No, the FAQ describes why they use AI to write the software. It's just a logical extension that they would also use it to build the website.
grahamnorton39 1 hours ago [-]
Sure, use LLMs to build the website, but put your own words on there! To me it just screams laziness; LLM prose is much worse at getting its point across than normal human writing, and is somewhat painful to read. If you can’t be bothered to spend a little while putting your thoughts to paper (or into a text file to give to $AGENT), what’s the point of doing this at all? Do people have this idea that LLMs produce better prose?
vconnor 2 hours ago [-]
Everything is made with LLMs today. Even sites that claim to be anti-LLM. I guess vibe coders are immune to hypocrisy.
74948494i4 6 hours ago [-]
I wish them success but doubt it will work for the simple fact that you need some semblance of reliable support which generally requires ownership. That is at odds with the spirit of this, at least from first page.
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.
ragequittah 6 hours ago [-]
The more that the 'reliable support' becomes AI agents that make it harder and harder to get to an actual person, the more projects like this that can make good documentation that acts as support (if you point your own AI at it) make perfect sense.
Lots of smaller/medium sized companies where money is definitely an issue are also tethered to way too many SaaS subscriptions.
asdfsa32 6 hours ago [-]
But AI!
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.
gosen 51 minutes ago [-]
it's a bit naive to think that you can make any harm to those corporations just by recreating their software :( they have much more than software (power, service, structure, organisation, contracts, etc.)
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 :)
Terr_ 7 hours ago [-]
An interesting idea, but if it's like Occupy Wall-street, the tricky part will be getting (and keeping) everyone on the same page.
cedws 5 hours ago [-]
It will be hard to keep everyone on the same page because if this gains any traction social media will ratchet up the propaganda and play the divide and conquer strategy. There'll be accusations of people joining movements like this of being communists and that will kick it off. Same strategy being used across the board.
denkmoon 3 hours ago [-]
Dear god, the commies are in our software!!! Imagine if those types had a clue just how much digital infrastructure ran on code written by "communists"
cedws 3 hours ago [-]
Ironically your comment demonstrates exactly what I just said. Political polarisation plays into the hands of the elite, you're just helping to fuel it with this kind of tone.
denkmoon 2 hours ago [-]
I do not feel remotely bad about mocking anyone who is stuck in a red scare, and I am unconvinced this post moves the needle in any measurable way.
deaux 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, due to government infiltration and crackdowns, like with OWS.
supriyo-biswas 5 hours ago [-]
Given how many FOSS alternatives exist, I'd hope that such projects could turn their attention towards the AI models themselves, creating an open-weights model from an existing proprietary model, or somesuch.
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...
ookblah 37 minutes ago [-]
and then, when it gets big enough it becomes it's own saas with the same exact problems thus completing the cycle!
Haven880 3 hours ago [-]
This put a cap on the upper price. Basically it forced the SAAS pricing to dive similar to what Deepseek is doing to OpenAI and Anthropic. Easily 30% of any SAAS are not companies. So over time that portion will not grow and chip away. And further more this encourage other smaller companies to vye for the same enteprise customers forcing the price to dive further. I dont expect the current SAAS to continue much. It willturn more of personalization service in coming decade.
atkrista 43 minutes ago [-]
The irony of hosting this on Github
hmokiguess 6 hours ago [-]
Why start with Auth0 and Salesforce? That feels odd if the target is around mass layoffs. Similarly, I don't get why anyone would even use them today. Auth0 has had better alternatives in a long time, and Salesforce, well, Salesforce is just trash.
80fj0348i 6 hours ago [-]
Also, isn't the sales pitch behind IDPs like Auth0 is that few organizations actually _want_ to self-host an IDP? How is providing yet another self-hostable IDP server going to change that?
ivanmontillam 6 hours ago [-]
And the hubris of attempting to fight well-known self-hostable IDPs like Active Directory.
And the network effects of taking frontally cloud IDPs like Google, or even OpenID…
4 hours ago [-]
lnkdinsuxs 4 hours ago [-]
> Similarly, I don't get why anyone would even use them today. Auth0 has had better alternatives in a long time, and Salesforce, well, Salesforce is just trash
Could it be that Marc Benioff knows a few things that you don't know? If so, any guesses what those could be?
moezd 3 hours ago [-]
I think we can make it sharper by not only 1:1 copying it, but focusing on a specific use case that bugs people. How about a backend-only replica that solves Terraform-specific bugs and makes a 1:1 compatible API that feels like a breeze? Then users can slap their own UI on top and basically own the product.
I really don't understand how you protest SaaS layoffs by providing open source alternatives free of charge?
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.
JasonFPath10 2 hours ago [-]
AI, like all technologies, is neutral and it's how we use it that makes it good or bad. Lately however people are perceiving more of the bad and it could be argued that layoffs are the biggest "use" for AI in recent years.
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.
OccamsMirror 3 hours ago [-]
Revenge. The answer is revenge. That's obviously driving motivation behind this.
akoboldfrying 3 hours ago [-]
I agree. With that said, I don't have a problem with this motivation. With that said, it would however have been even better overall to have made this a credible threat used to keep the original developers in their original jobs. As it stands, it's basically Mutually Assured Destruction after one side already pushed the button.
3 hours ago [-]
misswaterfairy 8 hours ago [-]
Is this Big Tech's 'We demand you use AI! Noooo, not like that! moment?
0c3ca83 6 hours ago [-]
No, this is big tech slobbering at the idea of pivoting to selling AI infrastructure, and eating medium tech's lunch.
If the whole thing wasn't so harebrained, I would suspect it was a marketing campaign from Anthropic.
antonvs 4 hours ago [-]
Let me get this straight, you’re implying that Anthropic’s other marketing campaigns, like “AI will probably hack all our systems and then kill us all” is not harebrained?
0c3ca83 3 hours ago [-]
They seem to believe that one. I suspect extreme harm to human well-being is far more likely.
antonvs 52 minutes ago [-]
I'm skeptical that they really believe it - at least, not the people at the top.
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.
bakugo 6 hours ago [-]
No. Some people want it to be, but it doesn't take a lot of thinking to understand why "we got fired from big tech because of AI, so now we're fighting back by funding said AI out of our own pockets" makes absolutely no sense.
ragequittah 6 hours ago [-]
Anthropic seems to be leaving lots of money on the table because it made enough sense that they got pressured into putting up guardrails against it.
bakugo 6 hours ago [-]
Performative "guardrails" consisting of a single vague and easily bypassed prompt. It hasn't stopped anyone, and likely only serves as future legal defense in case of a lawsuit.
byzantinegene 6 hours ago [-]
exactly, do the people behind this not see the irony of this movement?
8 hours ago [-]
neya 6 hours ago [-]
Most of the organizations that are successful are so because they had a coherent vision for what the product would be and a passion for solving that particular niche's problem. I'm not sure how anger/vengeance rather than a passion for the problem space is going to positively change the customer's perception of the product's long term vision, support and guarantees. Imagine trying to poach a Salesforce client and they ask you why would they need to invest time and money into migrating to your solution and all you got is "haha, fuck salesforce, they fired me".
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.
avaer 6 hours ago [-]
Products get successful by being good, but after a certain threshold people buy a product because "nobody got fired for buying Salesforce". Which is not all that different from buying a product because "haha, fuck salesforce, they fired me".
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?
ivanmontillam 5 hours ago [-]
> Products get successful by being good,…
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.
neya 5 hours ago [-]
> "money talks, so why bother with ideals"
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.
returnInfinity 3 hours ago [-]
this fine, but don't forget to hire the laid of sales and marketing folks. without them, this is going no where.
ivanmontillam 6 hours ago [-]
I think it's great new takes on software comes around, but I hope that anyone that engages in these movements understands two things:
- 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).
Rapzid 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's gonna pay the mortgage, put food on the table, and cover the insurance premiums LOL.
methou 3 hours ago [-]
How is this going to get customers?
dgently7 6 hours ago [-]
no opinion of if this is a good idea or not or the overall statement of the thing... but isn't support a big part of what these saas companies are really providing... its not just salesforce, its salesforce and customer success teams and 24/7 support etc.
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.
weird-eye-issue 5 hours ago [-]
I never use customer support for these types of things unless there is a literal bug or downtime
I don't want to pay for customer support that other incompetent users rely on to function
Sydrik 6 hours ago [-]
You may begin with vengeance but I hope vengeance won't be your permanent fuel. It tends to lead with clouded and personal decisions, emotionally charged responses (like the very website copywriting itself) and... well, I have my fair share of grievances and a significant boost of confidence is to persevere in what is right against the wrong that I felt were done to me... but if I make my grievances my customers and supporters' problem, I am dragging them into my cesspool, spreading the negativity and it simply does not create an environment and spirit of productivity..
0c3ca83 6 hours ago [-]
The irony of using AI for this...
hexapus 6 hours ago [-]
Turnabout is fair play. Setting aside the overall ethical shitshow that AI presents, I don't really have much objection to turning their own tech against them.
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.
komali2 5 hours ago [-]
I've been threading the needle between my AI loving techbro indiehacker friends and my AI hating artist and FOSS geek lefty friends for the last year now and the dogmatism has been interesting. The extreme of it for AI lovers I don't really get in my friend group since I think it manifests mostly in AI psychosis meltdowns by tech CEOs like with the Proton Mail guy, or religious worship by the anyone with one degree of separation or less from anyone on the the AI doom cult temple sex priestess gang bang Sankey diagram.
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.
0c3ca83 4 hours ago [-]
> I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present
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.
komali2 3 hours ago [-]
> but that the downside isn't worth it.
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.
0c3ca83 3 hours ago [-]
Well, we can start by pointing out that every widely available model is either directly funds or bolsters authoritarians of the worst kind.
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.
solyin 4 hours ago [-]
Look up the translated Lula Army Manual for inspiration. They're all in on AI and they won their election!
avaer 6 hours ago [-]
The irony is worn on the sleeve, so it's not really ironic. It might be ironic for the target companies if OccupySaaS works.
manoDev 5 hours ago [-]
This is the kind of thing AI labs will use as ammunition to pass regulations.
asdfsa32 6 hours ago [-]
This is a very interesting mix of tone-deaf, disconnected from reality, AI-hype, and naivety that is just hard to wrap ones head around. where do I start.
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".
xgulfie 5 hours ago [-]
Tech workers are in the 99%, unless perhaps in the C-suite, at which point nobody would call them a "tech worker"
asdfsa32 5 hours ago [-]
At least in the West, where most global SaaS revenue comes from, Tech workers are not 99%. In fact, most of them are well int the top 5-3%. Just look at median salary in your country.
deaux 5 hours ago [-]
The top 3-5% is part of the 99%. Only the top 1% isn't. You're stealth changing it to the top 95%; don't.
asdfsa32 4 hours ago [-]
That is not how it works. 99% is everyone but top 1%. Tech workers are generally in the top 3-5%. So they are not the 99% but rather the top 3-5% and so more aligned and part of the 1% they allude to "rebel against".
nickphx 6 hours ago [-]
indeed. the hype is the strongest when the offering is the weakest.
posting this to a website full of ai bots in the comments and software that gets posted here written with ai
someothherguyy 6 hours ago [-]
these projects don't look very complete
asdfsa32 6 hours ago [-]
Get used to seeing this kind of cheap shots and half-ass projects everywhere. With AI, going from idea to half-ass now cost only 150$ per month and near zero skills.
6 hours ago [-]
brianjking 3 hours ago [-]
In fairness, nor does Salesforce.
tamimio 5 hours ago [-]
Main focus should be making open weight models to go after the root companies that put you in this position to start with, I suggest.
honeybadger1 5 hours ago [-]
The part I find funny is they didn't hire a website designer to make the website, they used AI.
softwaredoug 6 hours ago [-]
SaaSy!
BatchJob 6 hours ago [-]
Most of this stuff should die anyway.
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?
verdverm 5 hours ago [-]
the sirlte copy says all pull request get human eyes, but the 100s of commits and .5M LoC in a few days say otherwise, or that pushing to main is a bypass mechanism
paxy 3 hours ago [-]
Slop
komali2 6 hours ago [-]
Hah, glad I wasn't the only one that had this idea. Been chewing on it ever since malus.sh or whatever that joke clean room reimplementation of FOSS software project was.
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.
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.
Aozora7 4 hours ago [-]
>GIMP already exists
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.
komali2 3 hours ago [-]
I agree with you on UX. In terms of contributing to these projects, most maintainers are still opposed to LLM contributions, perhaps not for bad reasons considering they're interested in the long term maintainability not only of the software, but of a community of contributors knowledgeable enough to maintain it.
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.
Aozora7 29 minutes ago [-]
Photocraft may not be ready as a drop-in Photoshop replacement for professionals yet, and I didn't say it was. I said it was better than GIMP 3 (and all other free image editors, for that matter). I've been using pirated Photoshop for random image edits for most of my life, and Photocraft does exactly what my muscle memory expects Photoshop to do.
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.
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
> however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable 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.
kanbei 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
listoptix 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
minfazhai 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
3 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 08:01:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Completely forgetting, security updates with regression testing , backups, data structuring, performance engineering.
Especially during the current time of unprecedented pace of security patching, decrying this as "enterprise box-checking" couldn't be be more displaced.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Auth0: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/auth0
Salesforce: https://openaltfinder.com/alternatives-to/salesforce
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.
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.
Because that's not actually true yet, and may not be for a while
I know who you are.
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.
https://zebrasunite.coop/
https://openship.org
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.
How do you get paid?
https://marketplace.openship.org/ethos
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.
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.
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.
Can't make everyone happy.
Possibly also a PR stunt
Does anyone else feel that this discredits it?
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.
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 :)
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
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".
https://remade.wiki/
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.
https://genairosity.com/
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.
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.
> 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.