this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2026
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443
OccupySaaS - "They laid us off. We're rebuilding their SaaS" (occupysaas.com)
submitted 1 day ago by new_otters_raft@piefed.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I saw some discussion about this elsewhere. Here is how the project describes itself:

OccupySaaS is a protest movement in code: laid-off developers building clean-room, open-source, drop-in replacements for the SaaS giants. First up: ZeroAuthy (Auth0) and SalesCompel (Salesforce).

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street asked who the economy was really working for. In 2026 we're asking the same question about the cloud. The tools every company runs on are now toll booths — and the people who built them were shown the door.

Two towers occupied.

Identity and CRM: the two subscriptions almost every company pays for and almost nobody loves. ZeroAuthy has shipped its first release candidate, SalesCompel is still early, and both welcome contributors today.

Who's next?

Every category on this board is a monthly invoice somewhere. The movement picks the next target in public — bring a spec, a use case, or a grudge.

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[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 59 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Copying my comment from another thread on this story:

A lot of that AI will presumably be rented from the companies that persuaded your boss to fire you and use their tools instead. So it's an odd kind of protest, that starts by paying those companies more money.

I do like the idea of software engineers collectivizing and prioritizing work on projects that don't have good enough open-source options, particularly where it targets the nastier companies in the SaaS space. But there's nothing new about that work; what's new is that we have a lot of people motivated to take software in a new direction, who miss being able to take pride in the quality of their work, and who may be more receptive to acting collectively than these people have traditionally been. I know whenever I've proposed any kind of collective stance at my workplaces I've been met with blank stares, silence, and developers nervously looking at their feet. Maybe that can change when more people have recent experience of what happens when you don't act together.

If we want to do something new, how about worker-owned cooperatives which actually offer good-quality software and support with ethical terms of use? Build it and sell it to the companies paying for SaaS, and make your software and support deal more attractive than the one they're being gouged for. The support is particularly important when anyone can dash off some software using AI. Make your company worker-owned, nonprofit and cheap, market it professionally, offer good support and maintenance, and make a living doing it.

[–] Zagorath@quokk.au 2 points 2 hours ago

Very hard to disagree with this.

It could be improved significantly if instead of paying Anthropic or OpenAI (or, gods forbid, X), it was done using locally-hosted open-weights AI, instead of putting more money in the pockets of the people causing the problem.

[–] OpenPassageways@lemmy.zip 3 points 14 hours ago

They also still fully control the tools and are hard at work finding ways to update them to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

[–] buzz@piefed.world 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I’m surprised more software hasn’t gone that way (democratic, employee-owned companies).

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 1 points 34 minutes ago

Well, the problem is that anyone with the gumption to make that works could also make a fortune in a for profit company. Very few have ever said “I have enough” and sacrificed their next billion for this ideal. And the ones who have were already a couple billion in and could well afford it.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

One obstacle may be the libertarian, individualistic worldview many developers have been steeped in. But it seems like an industry where workers' cooperatives would be relatively easy to set up, since there are no major infrastructure costs. The hard part would be making a living until you had paying customers, since there would be no investor pumping money in, hoping to make a profit on their investment. I don't really know how you'd get around that, but there must be a way. Maybe bank loans?

[–] SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 3 points 16 hours ago

A co-op can get local contracts that are adjacent to the core product in development. It slows development down but keeps people showing up, and sometimes it helps hone the product.