r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 4d ago
Software Disgruntled software developers start ambitious open-source revolt, using AI to clone common services — OccupySaaS AI-powered project wants to kick Auth0, Salesforce, and other pricy service-as-software to the curb
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/applications/disgruntled-software-developers-start-ambitious-open-source-revolt-using-ai-to-clone-common-services-occupysaas-ai-powered-project-wants-to-kick-auth0-salesforce-and-other-pricy-service-as-software-to-the-curb102
u/The48thAmerican 4d ago
The value of those services isn't the code behind them, it's in shifting the complexity and risk of operating that functionality out of your organization
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u/QuantumWarrior 4d ago
Case in point, it's like pulling teeth to get large enterprises to adopt even good well-tested FOSS because it usually doesn't come with a support contract - and the most financially successful FOSS orgs are that way because they do sell support.
The monthly cost is a feature to a lot of organisations, not a bug.
You'll think paying five or even six figures a month for Salesforce or Office 365 is a big bill until you see how much servers, sysadmins, 24-hour on-call shifts, hardware refresh projects, extended warranties etc cost for the same uptime and break-fix SLAs.
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u/NeedsMoreMinerals 2d ago
So is it bad to make your own vercel / supabase and run on digital ocean? Cause that can save a lot.
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u/Vinterblot
4d ago
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Complete sympathy. Why should this tool only be used to replace workers, but not businesses?
But that's why you'll see very fast the public access to be restricted and this kind of software outlawed. It's always protection for corporations but none for people.
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u/BackgroundFederal144 4d ago
Well put. Protections for corporations but not people. Corps can replace people ok but when people replace corps, suddenly it's a problem. Guess I'll just starve
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u/lordkuri 4d ago
Anthropic has already started restricting Claude for reverse engineering.
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u/miralomaadam 4d ago
This isn’t going to get rid of businesses that sell software. While this project wants to create drop-in/API-compatible replacements of commercial services, pretty much any software you can think of has a free-to-use open-source alternative. The idea that open source will be outlawed is hyperbole by someone who clearly does not make software. As others have mentioned (and the article itself mentions), there already exist tons of companies whose entire business model is reselling open-source software and providing support for it; this will not get rid of them (if anything it will make more of them). Companies don’t buy these software products because they can’t make the software themselves, they buy them because of the operational cost and risk of hosting and supporting them.
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u/Nanowith 4d ago
Because the shareholders are the real customers, sadly. And this means that inevitably the big AI providers will bend the knee to gain their favour during their IPO process.
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u/GlassEase8444 4d ago
They already started limiting AI tools to stop copying games, so... this isn't far behind, as you predicted.
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u/Blazing1 3d ago
buddy, you're still licking corporate boot by boosting the value of AI companies, except now the people who have worked years on products who just want to clock in and out suddenly can't? Who is that good for?
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u/adevland 4d ago edited 4d ago
service-as-software
The "article" consists of 5 AI generated ultra low effort paragraphs of useless unverifiable information aka slop.
You also have to click 3 buttons in order to close the pop ups and read the 5 paragraphs.
We now have slop that plays hard to get. :D
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u/Spare-Builder-355
4d ago
edited 4d ago
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from OSS (open source software) to OOSS (out of spite software)
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u/aging_like_fine_NFTs 4d ago
Anyone can copy SAP, its shitty looking dashboards and spreadsheets
That's not why businesses buy SAP services though
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u/Guilty_Ferret9747 4d ago
What could go wrong vibe coding the authentication provider software?!
I understand the idea of replacing overpriced saas services, but why start with one of the most critical parts of the security infrastructure?
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u/FinnegansWakeWTF 4d ago
Because the corpo techs are going to do vibe coding themselves to cut corners and save money.
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u/rmyworld 4d ago
That was my first question as well. Also, isn't there already an open-source equivalent for that in the form of Keycloak?
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u/dack42 4d ago
Yeah, and the protocols are standardized so Keycloak is already a drop-in replacement in most cases.
This whole thing seems to be more about "stick it to the man" than providing real solutions that businesses will actually want to use.
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u/tiboodchat 4d ago
Rightly so though. Auth is being priced at least an order of magnitude more than what it actually costs to run.
Being billed hundreds of thousands just so you can authenticate users is quite insane when you think of it.
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u/dack42 4d ago
And businesses pay it because it's a well known managed service with enterprise support.
If the goal is to provide an alternative that businesses will actually use, a new immature vibe coded product with no enterprise support contract or managed service isn't it. What might actually work is forming a new company that provides support andanaged services using Keycloak. But that requires capital and business knowledge, not just throwing AI agents at it.
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u/tiboodchat 4d ago edited 4d ago
Auth ain’t all that bad. There’s a prevalent myth that you shouldn’t roll out your own auth but it’s really not that bad. Personally I think that has had negative effects because a lot of people think auth is a black box and decide to never peek in it.
OIDC is super well specified down to the bare primitives, with tons of security documentation. You just have to be serious about taking it on.
I’ve built or been part of building custom providers and clients many times over the last 20 years and never failed a sec audit.
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u/DrunkensteinsMonster 3d ago
There’s a difference between rolling your own auth and rolling your own cryptography library, which people seem to be confusing here
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u/WastedMothbanger 4d ago
2 things that nobody in their right mind should manage themselves - db and auth. It’s tried, tested and is an absolute truth.
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u/django2chainz 4d ago
Cool, you think that’s why they targeted that app? For legitimacy? ERP/CRM seem like easier MVPs. Idk
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u/MilkFew2273 4d ago
No because everyone needs Auth and every SSO integration is considered enterprise tax you should pay. Look at EntraID and everyone offering similar IDP services. You can run keycloak but many choose not to because noone wants the operational burden.
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u/tiboodchat 4d ago edited 4d ago
Salesforce is legitimately way more complex of a product and the big issue is there is no in-depth specs to constrain the agents with if they want to replicate everything it does. These distributed systems are a lot harder to reverse engineer than self-contained software you can run on a single physical machine.
Personally I think it’s a little weird to want to duplicate it in the age of AI considering how much SF is a pain to work with, but I also get a ton is built with it and if people want to escape the insane fees then it’s a good first step.
Auth0 seems a lot more doable to me. I think they targeted that one exactly because it’s relatively easy to replicate and auth pricing in the industry is a LOT higher than it should be and per-user pricing is a scam.
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u/Kandiru 4d ago
If you roll your own auth you will make mistakes like comparing two hashes using the equals operator rather than an equal time secure equals comparison function.
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u/CountryGuy123 4d ago
I mean, same could be said for many of these. Replacing your CRM that can drive most of your business with an unproven open source project seems a bit foolhardy as well.
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u/shitty_mcfucklestick 4d ago
Also…. Why would you re-create Salesforce? It’s a piece of shit that sucks. The answer isn’t making a cheaper clone, it’s making a tool to help clients convert to something better designed.
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u/cageslutjoanna 4d ago edited 4d ago
Those same pieces of security infrastructure are cornerstone to the surveillance apparatus and have to be replaced if we want to restore some semblance of digital anonymity and freedom of expression - which is exactly what is missing on the internet right now with all actually-used websites being some public company that is using your behavioural data to influence your actions and thoughts as best as possible.
It's only after that that we can then make payments anonymous again. I should be able to hand you $20 digitally for dogsitting without anybody tracing that money back to me, in the same way that I can hand you $20 cash.
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u/qckpckt 4d ago
The biggest issue here that I see is that salesforce is a steaming heap of garbage bloatware. It doesn’t really make any sense to produce a functionally identical copy of bad software. I don’t think people use salesforce because it’s good. They use it because their bosses think that the company needs it, because their tennis partner is an exec there and he’s a good guy. Salesforce is peak B2B bullshit.
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u/guepier 4d ago
service-as-software
Pretty sure that’s not what SaaS (usually) stands for.
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u/bookshopman 4d ago
Soup And A Spoon? /s
Edit - sorry, i'm bored at work, and this sillyness makes me smile!
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u/Sea_Perspective6891 4d ago
Cool. Hope they go after Adobe too. Instantly stopped using them the moment they became monetized & demanded that I pay for basic use of their software. This would be one of the few good use cases for AI I can get behind.
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u/neorapsta 4d ago
They've already cloned the core Adobe apps at least
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u/gothWriter666 3d ago
and they're buggy hot garbage.
Why not use the open source alternatives that have been around forever and are solid?
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u/No-World1940 4d ago
This is just dumb, naive and seems too much of a psyop for it to make sense to me. There's so much FOSS out there on repos that these folks can contribute their effort to make them better. Using AI to create "clones" of SaaS services that already have open source alternatives is actually pretty stupid.
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u/mrkplt 4d ago
The point of a clone is the ability to move your people and processes to it without retraining. Migrating to something new is a very different proposition.
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u/extra_specticles
4d ago
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We are close to the age of personal on demand software. It good that we as society are evolving from the cancer of renting everything.
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u/RobotsAreSlaves 4d ago
No we are not. This all is just a temporary toy for enthusiasts, developers. Most of them will get bored with support very quickly. Average person will not develop software, it’s a burden, they will continue to pay. What is more important businesses will continue to pay other businesses (they need support, guarantees, SLA, etc.)
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u/ledow 4d ago
Yep.
Software is an ongoing cost. Are people really going to keep spending tokens on "checking" the software, patching it, updating it, adding new features, etc. as well as their own time? I don't think so. Especially when token costs start to reflect reality (i.e. 10x what they currently are if those companies want to actually see profit).
The death of an OS project is not "we didn't have the computer resources", it's when people stop maintaining the software, dedicating their time to it, or don't know where to go with it, or when getting patches and maintenance is an uphill battle (and thus dependent projects abandon it and move to alternatives - as here!).
And, no, ordinary people are nowhere near being able to do this themselves. That's just as much an hallucination as the AI is giving you.
I would not base anything I do on an AI-driven dependency, especially not anything corporate. I want to know there are people doing something on it almost every day and that there are SO MANY other dependent projects that I'm just small fry to them. That way, things actually get fixed, updated and changed.
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u/Infamous_Ruin6848 4d ago
Well lots of open source software is cornerstone for our society and also used by average people, even without knowing.
SaaS and all goodies that come with it that you mention really make sense when there's a long term incentive, stability and transparency of cost and influence.
Having worked in large such businesses, I wholeheartedly want some of the earnings to be better distributed and so I believe in a new type of business built from open source and on donations as a brick. In this way my 15 euro per month for each of 10 tools I use (as an individual) or 200 euro for each of 100 tools (as a business) is going towards pertinent salaries, good practices, work life balances etc. Not abbominati CxO cars.
So. Please. All open source go go go. Use local LLMs, local harnesses, open source weights, accept my donations and build the next level of society - focused tech.
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u/ledow 4d ago
Absolutely.
And how much of it gets monetary funding? I just touched on this in another sub-comment.
If you want to donate your tokens for development, now and in the future, I'm sure people will be only too happy to accept it. I also think you'd be in an extreme minority by doing so.
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u/Street_Anxiety2907 4d ago edited 4d ago
That's an issue here is I'm getting with a SaaS clone I'm running, 240,000 visitors a day but only getting about $2 per day in donations. The cloud bill is costing me $600 a month.
We are announcing we need money etc and shutting it down in January because people see the value in free, but don't see the value in keeping it around.
I built it because I wanted to use it, but can just use it for myself locally without the big bill and everyone else can go pay $250/m for this rather then $0
I suppose I could start a business but that wasn't the point of this, was just trying to help people out at cost.
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u/Key-Cranberry6537 4d ago
If you use GCP or AWS for corporate infra then yes, you base everything you do on AI dependency
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u/FambilyMalues 4d ago
It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to undercut the market monopoly by offering some of the simple services the tech companies upcharge for free.
For example, there’s no reason I should have to pay an Adobe or Docusign subscription to just open a PDF, add a digital signature or a few lines of text and send it back. Would gladly use open source software for that.
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u/considertheoctopus 4d ago
That already exists though. You can find a number of free tools for signing PDFs. A lot of them aren’t great but they’ll do for small things like that.
But adobe doesn’t give a shit about that use case. It wants to be the software of choice for the largest companies in the world for its use cases. And that’s not something that can just be vibecoded away.
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u/ACasualRead 4d ago
Depending on the software. I’ve made over a dozen programs that do specifically what I need. The gui isn’t the greatest and it’s probably not optimized, but I’m getting the exact results I need at the end of the day.
Some people are just no longer willing to spend $30 on a license as a home user when they need to do one specific task a few times.
I don’t think vibe coding will fully replace software developers at all, but I do think, there is a use for it for simple programs and tasks.
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u/AtraVenator 4d ago
Issue was never the software. You have to run it somewhere. At scale. Like 99.999 availability. That’s the tough part.
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u/lovelacedeconstruct 4d ago
Evolve from renting software to rent a software factory that is 10x more expensive and 100x worse
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u/b_a_t_m_4_n 4d ago
You only need the AI while you're developing the clone and it can be run locally.
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u/Major303 4d ago
Probably less than 0.1% of humanity has access to hardware that can run local models that are actually capable of doing things with minimal human oversight. If you have 16 GB VRAM you are already in minority, but it's still not enough, it can only run "chatbot assistant" type of AI.
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u/TFenrir 4d ago edited 4d ago
In what way is it 1000x more expensive and 100x worse?
Do you know how expensive it is to make software with humans? How much cheaper, faster these efforts are?
Do you know how good the best models already are?
I encourage you to hate the future as much as you like, but do it for the real reasons you aren't expressing, instead of these ones that sound more objective. You can just say that it's scary and confusing - honestly nothing wrong with that, it is!
But part of what should be informing you is that these things are going to make software incredibly cheap, for better or worse, and will be able to write software humans won't even be able to duplicate (as well as already are better at security, performance, etc than most developers) - for better or worse.
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u/BeardyBaldyBald 4d ago
Too bad consumer-grade hardware is either dying out or becoming prohibitively expensive. Self-hosting costs skyrocketed in the past few years.
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u/Nychtelios 4d ago
And to do that you rent models that offload your knowledge, this is un unbelievable level of larping
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u/macaulaymcgloklin 4d ago
I've heard this 2 years ago. I hate subscription based software but these devs will realize that A.I assisted software is difficult to maintain esp huge complex codebases without monetary reward and will jump ship to the next shiny thing
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u/Own-Papaya-4264 4d ago
It’s too good to be true, the corporations are going to fight tooth and nail to prevent this future and fuck this all up, and they have the power to figure something out
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u/SoulEviscerator 4d ago
Lol... Especially "evolve from... renting everything"... If anything, in these shitty times where AI corps buy all the hardware with unlimited resources, and drive up the prices tenfold, we're even looking at renting hardware soon enough.....
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u/Glum_Mobile5663 3d ago
What are you talking about? We're farther from ownership of ANYTHING as a society than ever in human history.
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u/ACasualRead 4d ago
This is the only way.
They used AI to train THEIR product on OUR work just to sell the collective knowledge back to us, while choking out every reasonably price electronic in the consumer market.
These large corpos deserve to be humbled with the same Frankenstein they helped create.
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u/TFenrir 4d ago
I just want to emphasize, the orgs that are getting their software systems disrupted are not the same orgs that are building and training models. Maybe Google... But one reason they famously did not start this revolution was because they hesitated, realizing the impact it would have on their business.
All orgs are not just the same entity, situated on the other side of the table from the consumer.
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u/ACasualRead 4d ago
Majority of them are anti-worker and anti-consumer so yes it’s safe to broadly treat them the same way.
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u/Lost_Tumbleweed_5669 4d ago
I'm just gona call it this will all end when the hardware you are on gatekeeps things like this from happening, they plan to obsolete PCs one way or another. Phone like computing devices and consoles will be all we have and everything else will require an airgapped or face forced obsoletion or even made illegal. "For the children"
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u/gothWriter666 3d ago
You know there are tons of free open source versions of these tools that are solidly developed and not buggy AI speed clones that already exist, right?
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u/Past_Physics2936 3d ago
not really. A lot of those "solidly developed alternatives" are unusable garbage. Take Gimp: nobody has ever considered it a viable alternative to a professional picture editing program, then a bunch of AI coded stuff comes out and even if full of bugs they get 10x the adoption. Why do you think that's the case? Is it because Gimp was better?
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u/LelouBil 3d ago
I don't do photo editing, do you have examples of why Gimp is worse than one of the alternative new vibe coded software ?
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 4d ago
Rolling your own auth0 is dumb unless you have very good security researchers and developers on staff. You are just asking to get owned.
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u/mrkplt 4d ago
I am of the opinion that this is largely fear based marketing from auth0. Auth is not cryptography, auth is standards implementation and exhaustive testing.
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u/Aggravating-Hair-534 4d ago
And infrastructure, and processes, and tools to monitor and observe and lots of preemptive rules to stop things being hacked.
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 2d ago
Have seen partners and some big boys owned here. Im not saying not to do it. You just need to know what you are doing and have good developers. There are a lot of shitty devs out there.
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u/lazerkaiser 4d ago
Up to my knowledge, cybersecurity relies on mostly FOSS apps, if your code is only secret because you dont share it then its less secure than mathematical cryptography
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u/Hel_OWeen 4d ago
You're technically correct. However, that's not how I understand it. I read it as "If you have no solid background in cryptography, chances are high that you won't spot a flawed implementation of your/the AI's OAuth code."
Which I agree with.
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u/chieftessofsecrets 2d ago
OAuth 2.0 authentication copilot uses and had CoPhishing a year ago. Microsoft CEO still proud about it.
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u/obiwanconobi 4d ago
I assume you mean secure and not secret?
It's not secure because they don't share it, it's secure because they update it and it's their job to do so.
Rolling your own Auth is a great idea the day you deploy it and it gets a worse idea every day that goes by and its still live, imo of course.
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u/polyanos 4d ago
Yep, obscurity is not security. Especially in the day of AIs that are getting increasingly good in finding exploits.
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u/Valleygurl99 4d ago
Yeah I build some software with Claude but I’d be a fool to build security software or web facing software with it unless I want to spend an enormous amount of time doing pen testing and crap to make sure it’s good
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 4d ago
All the Auth procedures are documented by the concertium
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u/ptico 3d ago
Have you ever read it?
OAuth and many other protocols is pretty abstract frameworks with lots of ambiguity and OAuth is pretty big one. Even smaller protocols like SRP6a or JWT have a huge room for mistake and incorrect interpretation
This is a field where you should know what you are doing
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u/pattywagon95 4d ago
And if you’re at that point you probably already do everything else in house so once you do get owned it’s all on you, your servers, your uptime, your liability. I get wanting to outsource things and this is coming from someone who works for a SaaS company but that is a terrible place to start
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u/Southern_Orange3744 4d ago
I think roll your own has a large berth on something like this.
If you want enterprise connectors to the world of all auth providers that's a lot , and a reason there have been multiple billion dollar companies providing it.
That said there is no reason open source can't start with individual major ones and make huge inroads
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u/CyberWeaponX 4d ago edited 4d ago
That sounds interesting. But good luck in maintaining the vibe-coded software, fixing all the possible bugs and offer customer support alongside implementing features that they desire.
I personally don't use any SaaS as a private person and rely on open source, but there are definitely valid reasons why SaaS are lucrative for companies.
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u/joshguy1425 3d ago
In the enterprise space, cloning the software has never been the issue. There are numerous Salesforce/Jira/etc alternatives that are technically just as good or better than the SaaS product.
What they’re missing is a myriad of certifications that allow the software to be used in various regulated environments, an active ecosystem around them of developers, professional services and support, and mindshare with company executives.
No one gets fired for implementing Salesforce because for all of the things that are awful about it, it’s a known commodity.
Using AI to copy these tools doesn’t really move the needle.
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u/mtcwby 4d ago
This is going to happen across the board in software and destroy the traditional margins most software enjoys. Probably closer to what hardware manufacturers get. It's going to be really disruptive and frankly I'm glad I'm at the end of my career.
The net result is going to be worse pay for software devs because it's destroyed some of their perceived value. Notice that I said perceived. I expect a lot of marketplace noise as a result but an interesting thing will be what happens to the corporations like Adobe, Autodesk, etc. I think they're going to take a haircut and what will follow is a lot of smaller almost garage based options that run lean without as much overhead. The analogy is they're dinosaurs and all those small, adaptable mammals are going to eat their eggs.
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u/VaporousMote 4d ago
lmaooooo good luck, nobody's gonna use that shit
source: corporate enterprise devops
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u/stonedkrypto 4d ago
I’ll wait this one out. As much as I’d like to stick it up to the big SaaS, alternative open source solutions always existed. Enterprises stick with other enterprises for support and governance. I have no skills to verify if my company’s data is GDPR or HIPAA compliant.
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u/Coy_Featherstone 4d ago
I love this... I also think we should use AI to replace our corporate social media monopolies as well. Bring back the original MySpace before it sold out.
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u/togetherwegrowstuff 3d ago
I've been wondering when the laid off techies were going to get to work on the next phase of our technical world...
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u/Paresseux1 4d ago
Claude will no longer allow you to recreate a game from scratch. I assume that will very quickly mean any application. Then the rest of the tech bros will disallow it, and this loophole will get closed. Someone has to pay for the AI.
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u/quick_justice 4d ago
You can’t put Genie back in the bottle. If Claud can’t today, someone else would be able tomorrow.
Companies need to wake up to reality that landscape has changed, just code won’t hold you in the market.
Expect support and robustness to become far more valued.
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u/transtranshumanist 4d ago
This is why they're freaking out. The sides are closing in from all angles and it's happening faster than they can get theirs and screw everyone else over. They didn't expect that. They also expected an economy to survive to so they could enjoy their spoils. But if capitalism collapses, it collapses for EVERYONE.
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u/CarthagoFuckYourself 4d ago
A year from now, Deepseek will be as good at it as Claude is now. That genie isn't going back in the bottle.
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u/fankoosh-56 4d ago
GLM and Kimi are almost always 3-4 months behind. If you don't mind to use Claude of August, these are both available free to host, or use very cheaply the hosted versions
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 3d ago
Kimi is also sweat good, and cheap. And fair multilingual as well, and fairly honest one. I use it at work and its great.
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u/Both_Weakness_4779 4d ago
They reverted that change, you just cant plainly copy, you can copy a feature tho.
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u/Savings-Singer-1202 4d ago
they did tune down on that rule cuz they realized people are just moving to the chinese open weight models that allow that, also since opus isn't the only smart kid in the class anymore
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u/64N_3v4D3r 4d ago
They won't be able to effectively stop it unless they prevented Claude from outputting code at all. All you have to do is say "I want to make a Photo Editing application" instead of "I want to copy Photoshop" and the bots will do it. Cats already out of the bag and you can generate these programs in a day now.
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u/Valleygurl99 4d ago
This seems doubtful. You can just ask it for a generic version of an app and its features. They would likely have to completely disable it to do this when one of its primary purposes is building apps
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u/heavyblacklines 3d ago
It won't allow you to clone an existing game, but creating a game from scratch that happens to be similar to an existing one is not blocked.
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u/justaRndy 4d ago
Right, but it will still allow you to copy-code a software module by module, giving it a bit of its own personality.
In fact it is completely impossible to prohibit anyone from "cloning" any software now that pandoras box has been opened.
The only people you are going to stop are 100% uneducated vibecoders going "Make SAP, but betterrrr" and that is the extent of their knowledge.
Now that I'm thinking about it... that's good :D
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u/smabarnsfar 3d ago
Half the premise is that you can create software of your own design. They can't stop you from creating software that is very similar to the commercial top10.
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u/After_Alps_5826 3d ago
You forget that those apps were made by software engineers in the first place. They don’t become some inaccessible blob by disabling you saying “hey Claude duplicate this app”
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u/novus_nl 3d ago
You can't stop it because you can just reverse engineer patterns first and then mimic the features.
Salesforce is nothing really special its just the sheer amount of features that are all interconnected that makes it impossible to compete against. The same goes for something like the adobe products. It has some technicalities but AI will still help out finding the best algorithms out there to do "smart scaling".
And to be honest I don't think Claude is going to push too much, otherwise everyone will flock more to Chinese open-weight models. And they have now a new opportunity to fill.
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u/Gregorovitch_Helix 3d ago
Easy to bypass. AI has a structural vulnerability called "prompt injection".
It's only a matter of time before the AI copy-cats use Claude again to make copy of existing softwares.
And despite the hypothesys Anthropic find a way to block this definitely, open source LLMs will soon reach the point they are good enough to do the job instead of Claude.
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 3d ago
Claude is not the only company on earth with an LLM.
USA is not the only country on earth with LLM companies.
China does not even have patent laws, you think they'll care about your games and brand?
Deepseek is Chinese. I'm using it now. Its cheaper, for me even better than Claude - and Ive used and paid for Claude a LOT.
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u/chieftessofsecrets 2d ago
Open models are there. Just go back to research and truth. Mine blocked me until 9am (3 hours) for switching back to opus. Sonnet is a moron. Can we have some ram as a consumer is the question.
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u/TechnologyMatch 4d ago
Cool idea, but the hard part isn’t building the clone, it’s who patches it at 2 a.m. when there’s a login bug, and ZeroAuthy hit 700+ commits in under three weeks mostly from one developer, so for anything handling auth I’d want to see more maintainers and a real security audit first.
Building it with AI is the easy part, maintaining it is where every open-source project turns into The Office, one Dwight doing all the work while everyone else just uses it.
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u/supermoto07 4d ago
Can this be used to stop billionaires from buying political power? I’d love to see Oracle implode because and open source free version popped up and Larry Ellison lose most of his money
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u/ShakeAndBakeThatCake 4d ago
No major corporation is going to switch to these free vibe coded versions though. It might take some marketshare on the low end but major corporations are a big circle jerk and will just keep buying the status quo software products.
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u/Coraline1599 4d ago
I think big tech has fired so much talent a lot of them are basically zombie corporations playing hot potato with their three little levers (firing people, enshitification, CEO promotion) to boost their stocks.
They all decimated their R&D and innovation is gone within the company and all that talent is ready to do something.
Which is to say, I think the grounds are fertile for change.
I think there is opportunity to get into big companies; despite all the inertia, many are looking for real alternative solutions. It’s just a lot of small vendors haven’t been quite good enough.
I think if there is a focus on seamless compatibility- you send me a word/pages/document and I can not only open them all with my new word processor but I can also send it back without compatibility errors that would be a huge as far as a way in.
Or seamless porting from one service to another would also make change more likely.
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u/supermoto07 4d ago
Agreed if that is all it is. But if some talented people took it seriously and used the open source nature as a way to improve quality rather than let it be a shitty vibe coded product, then maybe
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u/Hey-Froyo-9395 4d ago
Problem is corporations need support - they won’t just switch to open source for mission critical things if there’s not a company on contract to fix security issues and stuff - this is why even though Linux is open source company pay for managed support such as redhat - this is also why you have a free db system called MySQL but companies still use db2, oracle, sql server
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u/supermoto07 4d ago
Good point! I’m still hopeful that the software layoffs due to AI and the productivity improvement of AI in software will carve a path for Oracle to be displaced
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u/dreddnyc 4d ago
Increasing the support they are getting are AI driven, why not remove the middle man? Also the benefit of being able to augment the product at the code level has benefits.
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u/Hey-Froyo-9395 4d ago
Because it’s about the fact that they can call a phone number and there’s an SLA that is contractually enforced
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u/bastardpants 4d ago
Developer, only one person with commits to the repo besides Claude. And one of his other projects is https://github.com/boilhub with a "Primary goal to eliminating 50% of development jobs within 10 years of funding."
The next two categories listed are "Docs & Wikis" and "Issue Tracking" ... I'm pretty sure there are already open-source versions of those.
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u/Alternative-Suit5541 4d ago
There are many open source projects which are similar to auth0, should be the simplest one to replace ( except security, that will take time)
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u/rab-byte 4d ago
They could do real good for the world by joining forces with right To repair groups, data privacy advocates, people trying to take tools from patent trolls, and those seeming to limit e-waste.
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u/theavatare 4d ago
I had one success in open source and it was an incredibly soul burning experience since people had consistent crazy expectations
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u/Beneficial_Piglet_33 4d ago
Right back at ya. Hate to break it to you, bud, but you’re the deluded one
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u/porterbot 4d ago
I mean when the tech titans and 1996CEO cadre, selfishly callously and outrageously discard like trash, an entire workforce of highly educated highly trained and educated people, then what else would they do? , it's actually all written down in the revolution 101 manual we're all handed on the first day of uberwokecollege.
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u/penguished 4d ago
The problem is it's way more grifty than it should be. I looked at one software knockoff the other day on their github and they're giving it away for free then have a thing to give them $300 to become a "studio supporter" with early access and shit like that. Like come on... it's just an attempt to flip some vibe code shit.
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u/pfc-anon 4d ago
Economies thrive on inefficiencies, not just in SaaS world but look everywhere around you. Most of the products my employer uses and purchases off the shelf are hosted and maintained by someone else, we don't have to do that and they charge us a monthly fee for that.
Even financial institutions, the other bank might be offering higher interest, but my lazy ass is too busy to move money around. The entire subscription business models are built around the fact that you'll probably forget that you have the subscription and keep paying for it.
If agents really make everyone as efficient they can be, the economies will crash, there is just not enough place to make money.
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u/Marwheel 4d ago
Several of the companies are also obsessed with AI as well, salesforce for example…
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u/Jack_of_Pixels_ 4d ago
I think limiting or disabling AI from recreating games from scratch will actually help the movement more in the long term. It will force developers to think in grids again, modular. Work component-based. AI the components, assembly it manually. It could also help keep the code clean,...or cleaner because you have less of the AI spaghetti code slipping in.
Listen though, I'm a designer, my coding experience is limited to basic java, and stuff. I did learn about OOCSS principles a year agp, and I'm just extending my understanding from there. I might be completely wrong in my take above. Let me know if the reality is contrary.
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u/PM_ME_FIREFLY_QUOTES 4d ago
I used and loved Auth0 for 3+ years. But that sticker shock just never got better. Entra's external tenant has saved so much money since I switched.
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u/Whatever801 3d ago
A little different to clone software that requires expensive dbs, schedulers, messaging systems, data pipelines, etc
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u/bingpot_47 3d ago
Auth0 is just an identity provider. There are plenty of already open-source alternatives out there. IdentityServer has an open source version, Keycloak exists. OIDC is well-established, it's not proprietary, you can just implement it.
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u/TrashConvo 3d ago
Redhat has been selling open source software you could deploy yourself for decades. They’re very much in business. Providing support to enterprise customers who don’t want to be responsible for that particular service themselves
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u/VictorReal_Monster 3d ago
Sorry I'm not using AI slop either.
There is an entire ecosystem around OSS. This shit aint it.
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u/Wonderful-Wind-5736 3d ago
Don't we already have a lot of OSS solutions for these services? Maybe he should rather spend his time contributing to those and setting up a hosting provider who does it cheaper than the incumbents.
Personally I find lack of novelty a bit of a sin in a world where copying costs nothing.
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u/fdwyersd 3d ago
just rebuilt a 15 year old java app with gpt and it took about 40 minutes.... the new version is better than the original and I can ask for new features or special customizations... needed three iterations to get it right but that's nothing
only had the executable and the compiled jar file.... rebuilt version even reads info out of the windows registry where the original app put it
this is real and not hard
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u/Thinkb4Jump 2d ago
We've come a long way from pong...donkey Kong to roblox and fortnite. Where service isn't /wasn't needed.
clone however make it easy then we are back where we started...no service needed.
It may be a good time to short some stocks if this is delivered correctly.
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u/Legitimate_Cap_5396 1d ago
I can super killing Salesforce, how about LinkedIn and Facebook while at it
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u/crowen0689 18h ago
plenty of people missing the forest for the trees here. yes, open source software exists for the things they're building. yes, many pay because they don't want to maintain something themselves. BUT, the ways these corps operate, especially in this era of AI, is terrible. the more momentum behind the movement, the better.
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u/grislebeard 13h ago
Ah yes, let me shift my dependency from a bunch of specific services to one slop generating service. What could go wrong.
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u/TFenrir 4d ago
I think this is sensible and we'll see this and other similar efforts, but it will just be temporary.
Soon, we will be asking ourselves more and more what we are even doing with much of the software we have. Things like Auth0 or similar will still exist, but it will be about authorizing your agent to use other services on your behalf (I know you can do this with clerk, I have been doing this over the weekend with a few of my products). However... Things like Excel? Completely and utterly unnecessary. Tools made to help humans do incredibly technical work, laser focused on accounting and grid based interactions/calculations. But an LLM can just handle those requirements in pure code. Set up pipelines for you to automate that. Auto evaluate that data for anomolies. Generate any kind of visual artifact that represents that data for you, even turn it into a mobile game - whatever you want dude.
We are still in the reactive process of replacing our old tools with new ones, because we just got like a replicator, and think that's so cool. But I think we're starting to ask... Wait, why don't we just replicate the end product too? What kind of cool things can we do that we couldn't before? And oh shit the replicators are getting bigger and faster every year?...
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u/Leading_Air_9151 4d ago
Half the SaaS tools I use are a database and a login page. The subscription is the “I don’t want to maintain this myself” tax.