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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
Get used to seeing this kind of cheap shots and half-ass projects everywhere. With AI, going from AI to half-ass now cost only 150$ per month and near zero skills.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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 get the internet we want.
109 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 35.8 ms ] threadIf the whole thing wasn't so harebrained, I would suspect it was a marketing campaign from Anthropic.
https://remade.wiki/
(where do I donate tokens for the software factory? Start with the companies with the highest margins, work your way down)
Could it be that Marc Benioff knows a few things that you don't know? If so, any guesses what those could be?
The idea seems noble, but a good market-fit product is more than just code sitting inside a github repository. That's why there have always been open source alternatives to commercial CRMs long before AI even came into the picture but they never took off.
You probably don't intend this, but the argument seems like "money talks, so why bother with ideals". How would you solve enshittification in the current market, if not introducing a bit of anarchy?
Products get succesful by fitting the requirements/wants/desires of paying customers, regardless of quality or even usability.
Same reason JIRA still lives, even when it's our favorite product to hate.
That's definitely not what I'm saying. I'm just saying build a better product and a better company that focuses on its employees. It's not that hard and there are plenty of examples all around. Also, revenge isn't exactly an ideal, it's actually quite the opposite.
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
Also I have zero clue what I’m looking at here? What is this?
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.
I think what AI has surfaced is that how bad most people, even people from tech are in understand what makes SaaS work and what makes software good. It is rarely just churning code.
Lots of smaller/medium sized companies where money is definitely an issue are also tethered to way too many SaaS subscriptions.
First, is tech workers the 99% now? Come on, look at the average salary vs national median anywhere in the world. This is just a stupid take.
Second, this sounds like the idea of "Twitter is just a couple of SQL tables and UI pages" level of "I don't understand the depth of software engineering".
Can't make everyone happy.
- Not every SaaS have their moat at a 100% of the software, e.g.: You could vibecode a Twilio, but good luck establishing contracts with carriers on getting phone numbers in bulk, which is their actual moat.
- Having the movement's foundation on revenge is a fuel that lasts very little. Once the avengers run out of motivation or the source of rage gets resolved (i.e. these developers get hired for higher salaries at companies with better culture), the steam will just dissipate. I know this myself by having walked this walk.
As long as new implementations of the software solves actual friction points of their would-be users, the chances for adoption/switch are higher than just making drop-in replacements. The justification gap to switch needs to be wide enough. I know graphic designers are pretty mad generally at Adobe's predatory licensing model, but is that true of other SaaS vendors?
Identify these friction points, sometimes it's not just clunky UI/UX, sometimes it's complicated billing (much like AnyDesk guys left TeamViewer and adopted a licensing model that actually makes sense). Sometimes it's just really bad tech support; the pandemic days left some vendors exposed at this particular area.
More often than not it's just customers that feel trapped by vendor lock-in, and have no solid alternatives, but by switching they wonder if this alternate vendor will just get greedy and do the same, which feels treacherous to these (rightfully) hurt, paying individuals and companies (particularly SMBs).
Did anyone ever say any of this was "good software"??
Its lowest common denominator crapware. Why rebuild it? Was it really your lifes dream to build that?
Seeing this just feels like this whole thing is just some sort of trick by Big SaaS™ Use a strong copyleft license or go away.
Why even bother with the extra "protection". It can be re-made by AI as easily.
Just go all the way, MIT or BSD. Maximize reusability and adoption.
Because that's not actually true yet, and may not be for a while
I know who you are.
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.
i suppose this could provide that also (dont see that they want to) but then its just back to vendor a vs vendor b and vendor a in this case has a lot of history and inertia with the companies these guys would need to switch.
maybe that wouldnt be a big deal longer term, but near term i think we are probably still in a "nobody gets fired for buying ibm" phase at the moment.
ya you could save a ton on that salesforce contract and sticking it to them might feel great, but the project to migrate and then self support this with your own employees is non-trivial and would be a pretty monumental risk to take. like you might as well just internally vibe code a new solution that is perfectly tailored to your biz vs getting a knock off vibe coded version of a saas thing that you only actually use 20% of.
I don't want to pay for customer support that other incompetent users rely on to function
Also odd to advocate for control of tech only to cede the entire project to AI.
It's all just performative.
Also, the creators of projects can do their part by sharing the praise their projects receive with their contributors.
What other ideas do folks have to encourage joining rather than starting?
Maybe assigning specific "ownership" (responsibility for, overall credit for) of some portion of the project to long time contributors over time?
My argument goes more about the lines of: Some people want to be the starter of a project, disregarding existing, often advanced efforts about the same problem.
Take for example, the bajillion expenses tracker apps. The most reinvented wheel. Do we need yet another one?
To me, it's an ego-driven thing.
Well, small projects being repeated is one thing, but because they're small there's only so much waste there.
I'm thinking more about "cathedral-like" projects, some massive open source project that lasts for years, in which it may be important to emphasize the contributions of, and a particular way of understanding the contributions of the many stonemasons and lesser artisans, as opposed to the leadership of the project and the architects.
Our whole society would benefit I think by having more respect for the "average person that contributes to the common good, even if they're not the leader", and actually praising that as much or more in some cases than the leadership role.
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
I believe the next few years are going to see a lot of new and innovative tech products. Maybe this is how we get the internet we want.