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Comment by ranyume | Hacker News Reader

For a protest to really do its job you need to hurt capital. I think making replicas of existing infra tech won't hurt capital because businesses won't change their tech just because (edit: plus, if they really do make use of these replacements... they're protesting by making sure companies make more money?).

If anything, you got to take this to the streets. Make the discomfort visible and so large it gets known, let it be known that firing workers has consequences.

I guess software engineers are just too privileged they don't know how to fight...

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Oh man, you assume all weak points are the same and work the same way. You are not exactly wrong, because the proposed approach is incomplete, but you are not exactly helping saying this.

I think it’s deeper than that. I think a lot of comments on here are completely missing the point: talking about OSS and protest on the street and gatekeeping what a real protest is.

The point here is to keep making a living building software they were already building, and kick their former employees hard in the nutsack whilst doing it.

Which is a legitimate form of protest with a long and storied history.

I think I agree. Protest is a protest is a protest. I suspect that people have this idea of what a protest should be as opposed to what it is supposed to accomplish. Depending on which SAAS projects are targetted, it may well work well enough.

Salesforce isn't just the (shitty) SaaS -- it's an entire ecosystem. This project might peel off some marginal companies via lack of licensing plus a lower cost mom&pop consulting firm. I doubt they're going to get a whale like AWS unless someone with money and a grudge against Benioff is willing to back it.

So your argument is to do nothing or you saying doing this amounts to nothing?

You could explain exactly why I'm wrong.

I'm not gatekeeping forms of protest either. I'm just commenting on the efficacy of this approach. I don't believe it's able to hurt capital at all, no matter how many vibecoded replacements they make.

How about instead you try to tell me why you think you are right. I know what I think already and you know my objection ( it is an incomplete solution: it is not an either or choice ).

<< I don't believe it's able to hurt capital at all, no matter how many vibecoded replacements they make.

Maybe, convince me.

The way to hurt capital is not to stand in a street with a sign, it's through sabotage. If some capitalist's business model relies on a scarcity of alternatives, then providing alternatives is indeed sabotage of that business model.

The question is: are these actually alternatives? Likely it comes down to how well supported they are. I get being angry after a layoff, but it takes a more dedicated kind of anger to stick with an open source project for long enough that it's actually a threat to the incumbent.

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