I saw some discussion about this elsewhere. Here is how the project describes itself:
OccupySaaS is a protest movement in code: laid-off developers building clean-room, open-source, drop-in replacements for the SaaS giants. First up: ZeroAuthy (Auth0) and SalesCompel (Salesforce).
In 2011, Occupy Wall Street asked who the economy was really working for. In 2026 we’re asking the same question about the cloud. The tools every company runs on are now toll booths — and the people who built them were shown the door.
Two towers occupied.
Identity and CRM: the two subscriptions almost every company pays for and almost nobody loves. ZeroAuthy has shipped its first release candidate, SalesCompel is still early, and both welcome contributors today.
Who’s next?
Every category on this board is a monthly invoice somewhere. The movement picks the next target in public — bring a spec, a use case, or a grudge.
One obstacle may be the libertarian, individualistic worldview many developers have been steeped in. But it seems like an industry where workers’ cooperatives would be relatively easy to set up, since there are no major infrastructure costs. The hard part would be making a living until you had paying customers, since there would be no investor pumping money in, hoping to make a profit on their investment. I don’t really know how you’d get around that, but there must be a way. Maybe bank loans?