An interesting idea, but if it's like Occupy Wall-street, the tricky part will be getting (and keeping) everyone on the same page.

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?

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.

Great, fine, but genuinely: what's the end-game here? Presumably to "take from those who took from us". But where's the business model? As a thought experiment let's say Okta and Salesforce (and ever other business in OccupySaas's firing line) go under or are seriously hurt by this move - now thousands more people lose their jobs. What now? I get the anger, but taken to the limit this approach "hastens the end" and doesn't hurt the people Thomas is trying to hurt (just the opposite).

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...

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 actively discussed.

We didn’t quite couch it as a protest movement either. My suspicion is that doing so rather ruins the idea from a commercial viability perspective (popularity ruins, or at least changes, everything that becomes too popular).

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).

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?

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 software I am clonign does the job better.

2 weeks of dev time is worth way more than 20$. So people buy to solve their problem faster and with less of a headache than they would themselves.

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.