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.
The sentiment is all very well and good, but I’m pretty confident that we’d get better results if they put their energy into improving the many, many mature open source projects that already exist to do the same things.
Most of them reject low-quality submissions, be them AI or not.
This just won’t work if all you are building is a software but no suppory or people to talk to. Isn’t there already oss replacement for these already?
Can you really call it clean room when you don’t know exactly what the ai was trained on? There’s gotta be some ghidra decomp of these programs in the big providers’ training data.
for real, licensewashing the code through an llm doesn’t make it different code
For any court to find these are not black box implementations would also require them to find that the AI companies are stealing.
Surely there must be some established legal precedent here
I think the idea behind a movement like this is good. This implementation worries me. When the plan is to have the AI do the “heavy lifting” from the get-go, this smells a lot like vibes. Even if we look past the ethics, this seems risky for bedrock systems like IAM. And even then, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. I wish them luck.
I wonder what these devs think of OpenStack
Especially because of scale. “Salesforce” is an incredibly complex group of many software applications with 80,000+ employees and many of their engineers have “unlimited” ai spend. So instead of “we’re rebuilding salesforce” they need to decompose salesforce into its individual elements and see what people need. And even when you have those products decomposed, you need to have swathes of people that understand the business needs that each one fulfills. My title is “Lead Architect: AI” for a medium sized SaaS company and our software has very specialized requirements across a number of verticals. And while salesforce is in no way a direct competitor, I know the sort of things that they’re building and the effort to “vibe code salesforce” is a Herculean task, and all the engineers at my company, many of whom have Ivy League computer science degrees, couldn’t do that in 5 years, if we dropped everything and tried, with unlimited budget for LLM assisted work.
I can’t wait for someone to vibecode Lotus Notes, I’m nostalgic for the griping.
Does everything, but all of it wrongly.
Lmao I’m cracking up at the model tweaking trying to write tests on when something fails specifically because lotus notes also fails. “The spec said it had to be exact! A clean room rebuild!”
I worry that every level has this misunderstanding, that “Salesforce” is a monolithic system that can be remade if only we pass a comprehensive test suite. Salesforce does not have 80k+ developers making a singular monolithic product. They have 80k+ employees servicing the sales demands of a massive number of customers. Excel is a perfectly fine CRM if you only have a handful of customers.
Hope you’re staying sane in the SaaS landscape. I hear a lot of horror stories.
Yeah absolutely, a ton of their software is bespoke maintained versions specific to one customer and the weird business processes they have. Appreciate the note on the SaaS landscape as well, thankfully I’ve fared much better than some of my friends/coworkers from previous companies who have been caught up in the swathes of layoffs, and I am proud of our team/org for having zero layoffs since the ai bubble started.
Even if you somehow do - a lot of people who make the decisions in companies that use sales force won’t be swayed by some open source tool (not to mention it being vibe coded with questionable support). You get them by having a sales team that talks up the product while being charming/inviting them to some event/dinner.
Absolutely true, I didn’t want to even get into the sales side of enterprise software where the decisions made on what a company uses are often made over a round of golf or a night out on the town or something
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.
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.
I’m surprised more software hasn’t gone that way (democratic, employee-owned companies).
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?
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.
Wow, you told AI to build you two slop code bases and a website. This is embarrassing.
This “movement” will last one month max, I am sorry, but this is stupid and will change nothing.
The reason companies use these providers is their support and SLAs. Do you think anyone wants to host salesforce?
I don’t see this gaining much traction, but as a self-hoster I still like this because I can maybe run some of them for personal use.
My team is in a tough spot where management doesn’t want to pay SaaS vendors but also doesn’t want to spend years on projects, so yes we would absolutely consider self hosted versions of auth and CRM.
There’s your business opportunity punching you straight in your face!
This very much depends on the product, the stability and the pricing. If you already have a bunch of infrastructure and engineers, while your provider starts having the stability of GitHub, this option allows customizing for your businesscase without paying through the nose for it while never owning a thing and fixing bugs yourself, without having to rely on a third party. And if the businesses they show in their video are a hint of what they are aiming for, then there are selfhostable variants of AWS and Azure with feature parity on the roadmap.
Honestly, what kind of support are they getting for salesforce? Something like a PoS I can understand maybe, or a booking solution. Most of it can be self hosted, the company doesn’t bring much to the table.
For many companies that are not tech-heavy in their day-to-day (small businesses, small offices, retail, etc), SAAS products like Salesforce, while expensive, are still way cheaper than hiring an in-house IT person or contracting with an IT maintenance provider.
Implementation and customization is a big part of things like Salesforce. Having a group of people who know how to setup these things up properly and quickly, who knows the common pitfalls, can often be cheaper than hiring a bunch of random people to set up something in house
It’s not so much they bring in quality support, more that it let’s them have cover when there are issues.
everything is on fire, vendor is on it is better optics
The idea has some merit, however- one of the first rules of authentication is to not do it yourself, and rely on trusted libraries (or platforms, in the case of Auth0).
Why would any company choose a no-name AI-genned rando software as their auth stack that doesn’t offer any guarantees, or compensation in case of a breach, when you could instead… not do that and have a proper functioning tool with adequate support?
Nice theme song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqOAgItOueU
banger
