Critic questions movement's efficacy against actual power concentration
8 Nov 2 4:18 AM · 9d ago · 1 comment · 1 source · development 8 of 8
A commenter argues the movement mistakes which actors wield real control, noting that layoffs and infighting among engineers distract from genuine power held by cloud providers and chip manufacturers, and that open-source replacements won't change material economics.
“While tearing down Adobe you've probably paid Nvidia, Anthropic, and Microsoft in the process, while at the same time no amount of Claude will make a dent in any of these behemoth strongholds.”
refactor_masterOccupySaaS Movement organizerLaid-off engineers (collective) Movement participants
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What people said 22 voices · best of 26 · verbatim
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The problem with the idea is that there is no right solution. What they do are free alternatives. Free software is not a new idea. Secondly, even if SaaS companies get all developers back then competitors with less devs may be more agile as they as well have AI tools and without all this people be more lean.If anything, regulation is the more…
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While admirable in vision this is just the masses tearing each other apart, with the feudal lord 1%-ers just looking on.While tearing down Adobe you’ve probably paid Nvidia, Anthropic, and Microsoft in the process, while at the same time no amount of Claude will make a dent in any of these behemoth strongholds. Adobe, evil as they are, aren’t the…
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The technical infrastructure of Bending Spoons is interesting.For people who don't know Bending Spoons, their strategy works as follows:1. Buy SaaS company2. Set up new product team of 15 people in Europe3. Re-implement backend on Bending Spoons technical platform4. Make the original company (100 people?) redundantBut what I find interesting is…
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I think most people don't even think about where software comes from, I am a software engineer and if I find a product that I like and solves a pain for me and does it correctly , my first thought isn't "I could do this mnyself" , I buy it, more so if it is like 15-20 dollars. My time is more precious than spending 2 weeks makins sure whatever…
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To some extent, but for the most part, they're paying to shift responsibility to somebody else.The people who buy software are not the ones who pay the bill. If you hire a contractor to build custom-tailored software:- If it is buggy or lacking, you'll be blamed.- If it gets hacked, you'll be fired.- If it works well and saves the company…
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> It upsets me somewhat that they’re protesting things like lock-in only after being laid offI would say it is even more ironic. Many years before, SaaS companies and IT in general were the ones making people fired. New software reduces the need for manual labour, hence less people are hired and somebody is fired as well. Accounting, marketing…
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For a protest to really do its job you need to hurt capital. I think making replicas of existing infra tech won't hurt capital because businesses won't change their tech just because.If anything, you got to take this to the streets. Make the discomfort visible and so large it gets known, let it be known that firing workers has consequences.I guess…
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I don't understand this expectation to never be laid off.Any other kind of a project - construction, hardware design, media production - has an end. Once it's done people have to switch to another project.But with software there's an expectation that it's never done, it's always subtly broken, and I can't help but think that this expectation gets…
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My first impression when reading the landing page is that this was made by one guy, but on Github, I can see two contributors: one guy and Claude.Why use plural ("us", "Laid-off engineers") when this is just one guy's idea and none of the questions are about a group of people, there does not even seem to be a plan for others to join? Thousands…
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You need to take it a step further and control the so called "cloud" by using this shared self reparing mesh.https://github.com/peterretief/yggstoreI am using it for hosting at the moment, there needs to be a greater adoption and then the developent will be back in the hands of the developers
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i think this is wrong-headed: it seems to be a movement to rebuild open-source bundles based on existing closed-source saas, but AI will precipitate an "unbundling" of existing saas feature sets according to the needs of individuals.if i'm only using 20% of the features of a saas service, i don't need a bundle that reimplements 100% of it.
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I don’t think this is a new idea: along with people building in-house, new competitors arising that can afford to massively undercut on pricing is exactly what SaaS companies have been worried about.It’s been pub chat amongst my friends for months. We’re too much of a bunch of slackers to have actually done anything about it, but it’s been…
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I like what artcraft is doing with adobe, but a 1-to-1 clone of Salesforce is not as compelling. There are so many bad product and technical decisions baked in... Ideally you'd be building something better from the ground up (linear vs jira).Also, why target multi-tenant? presumably the audience is a single org.
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This is silly. Unlike Adobe, the reason these SaaS exist is having someone else to guarantee safety and uptime of non-business related functions. The problem with self hosting is we're now responsible for these software as well. It can for large companies but for most SMEs its simpler to pay and forget
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that exactly no one is going to migrate from (famously bug-ridden) Auth0 to a vibe-coded reimplementation thereof, for the single most security-critical item in their tech stack
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So... If I'm a solo founder that runs a bootstrapped SaaS... which side of the barricade am I on?Am I allowed to make a living, or should I recreate my SaaS and give it away for free so that I can live without income?
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I think it depends on the total cost and the size of the company. A 30 person estate agent probably won't clone a SAAS CRM and create a support team. A company the size of JP Morgan might.
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Man, the "protests don't work" energy is way stronger here than I would have expected! Whatever happened to the spirit of disruption or going a different way?
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yeah it's weird seeing Salesforce on that site, where if you previously worked for Salesforce, you were definitely part of the problem. This is ridiculous.
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So you were ok with all these when you were paid for it, but now that you are laid off suddendly these are not acceptable anymore?
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Oh yes, protest your job being made redundant by AI, by paying AI vendors for the privilege of doing RLHF for them... Great plan!
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Both of these projects are not about the cost or the code. No wonder they go laid off.
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