OccupySaaS is protest movement written in code.
Story is simple. Many engineers got laid off in tech. But the SaaS platforms they built keep growing and keep charging per seat. So the same industry rent our own work back to us. This project is answer to that. Laid off engineers use AI and public documentation to rebuild those platforms as free open source drop-in replacements. One seat at a time.
Method is clean room. Public docs only, open standards, public SDK behaviour. No leaked code, no decompile, no confidential info from former employer. AI help with build, humans write spec and review every change. Compatible is proven by running vendors own public SDKs against the server. If your existing code dont work unchanged, it is not done.
Two early releases: ZeroAuthy ( Auth0 compatible identity server) and SalesCompel( Salesforce compatible CRM)
They are early, not production ready yet. But the goal is the point.
Why?
they brag about reimplementing software from companies they were laid off from with llms. llms are trained on shittons of source code both open and proprietary, which they are known to be able to regurgitate verbatim. also, if you’ve worked with a proprietary codebase at all, you can not be let even close to a reimplementation or it’s legally not clean-room, no matter how much you pinkie promise to not use any of what you learned at your former workplace.
If the copyright holders bring action and win it would completely undermine LLMs use in any industry. 🥲
oh nooooo whatever would we dooooo
there are only so many ways you can write certain functions, and the most tedious part of generic application programming is configuration, where mostly there is no room for improvement; either the code is verbose or only decipherable by an established code breaker. hence modern SE has evolved certain patterns which you will find common across a variety of codebases.
not ones that involve pasting the gpl into files.
That is incorrect though. The idea behind clean room is in the name: if you take even the same idea, write a spec, and SOMEONE ELSE does a different implementation, you’re fine. The someone else here is AI. And no, AI output is not patentable nor IP infringement, unless there is a case I missed something. Adobe is extremely litigious, so they haven’t made a move yet. They have no case.
companies have been sued over using the same names for functions. this is absolutely not clean room.