OccupySaaS: Engineers Build Open-Source Cloud Alternatives

OccupySaaS is a code-based protest movement led by laid-off engineers who compare the current state of cloud tools to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. The group claims that a million engineers were let go while platforms continued to grow, arguing that proprietary APIs and surprise price hikes keep customers captive. They describe the tools companies rely on as toll booths.

Projects within the movement are rebuilt from public documentation and open standards without leaking or copying code. To maintain a clean room policy, spec writers and builders remain separated. AI agents implement code from the spec alone under human review at every merge. A compatibility laboratory runs vendors' public client SDKs against OccupySaaS servers to prove compatibility. Contributors are required to never use confidential knowledge from a former employer.

Go was chosen for the first projects because it allows a one-file, container-friendly drop-in replacement. ZeroAuthy is an early project providing a self-hostable identity server compatible with Auth0. All projects are released under the Apache-2.0 license at no cost and are self-hostable with no telemetry.