One of our fellow writers and respected Serious Scrum editorial member Paweł Huryn had his Medium article blocked through a DMCA claim by Scaled Agile, Inc's "commercial council". Fortunately, Medium restored it.

Here is what Paweł posted on LinkedIn:

"Agile — SAFe 1:0 🥳 A few weeks ago, Scaled Agile blocked my article. Today it was restored by Medium. Conclusions? You cannot censor critical opinions just because you don't like them!" — Paweł Huryn

Now, this irony won't be lost on you if you know Scaled Agile Inc 'borrowed' a tremendous amount of content from a wide range of agile and lean frameworks and patterns and compiled it into its monstrously heavyweight Frankenstein framework: SAFe.

Scaled Agile Inc is claiming copyright over the content they copied from others, including, but not limited to, the Agile Manifesto, the Scrum Guide, Lean UX, XP, DevOps, etc. Scaled Agile is ripping content from all over and calling it theirs.

Here are some examples that made me chuckle, sigh and cringe in one breath:

"The Product Owner ensures that attendees are prepared to discuss the most critical team backlog item and how they map to the iteration goals and PI Objectives. © Scaled Agile, Inc. [emphasis added]

"The Product Owner ensures that attendees are prepared to discuss the most important Product Backlog items and how they map to the Product Goal." — The Scrum Guide (under Share-Alike license of Creative Commons) [emphasis added]

In many similar instances, Scaled Agile adapts the Scrum Guide content in modified form without attribution and even adds a copyright claim of their own. Copying such a line from its website will notify you to include a copyright notice with a link to its legal FAQ and commercial training offering.

Here is another example:

"the team discusses what went well, what problems it encountered, and how those problems were (or were not) solved. the team identifies the most helpful changes to improve" © Scaled Agile, Inc. [emphasis added]

"the scrum team discusses what went well during the sprint, what problems it encountered, and how those problems were (or were not) solved. The scrum team identifies the most helpful changes to improve" — The Scrum Guide (under Share-Alike license of Creative Commons) [emphasis added]

Or how about:

"the team plans the work necessary to create an increment of value that meets the definition of done" © Scaled Agile, Inc. [emphasis added]

"the developers plan the work necessary to create an increment that meets the definition of done". — The Scrum Guide (under Share-Alike license of Creative Commons) [emphasis added]

Now I could go on and on with these comparisons, but that would keep you scrolling down to the very abyss SAFe emerged from.

What bugs me most is how Scaled Agile Inc is diminishing Scrum and disempowering its accountabilities. Scaled Agile redesigned Scrum to be a prescribed process detailing how a team is to operate within SAFe rather than a framework that empowers people to self-manage their processes. It robs ownership from the Product Owner and self-management from Developers.

It gets even more ridiculous as Scaled Agile Inc makes copyright claims when quoting others. For example:

"A Scrum Master is like an orchestra conductor, guiding a group of individuals to create something that no one of them could create alone. — Mike Cohn" © Scaled Agile, Inc. — Include this copyright notice with the copied content.

Now, let's take a look at Lean UX. Its author Jeff Gothelf wrote:

"Ever since the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe for short) adopted Lean UX in version 4.5 I've received a steady stream of inbound questions about how, exactly, these two methods are supposed to work well together. The short answer is, I have no idea. The slightly longer answer is that all the principles we've built into Lean UX don't seem to exist in SAFe. […] Frankly, I don't have any good answers for them either since moving off the framework is heresy in most cases." — Jeff Gothelf

Both the creators of Scrum, XP, and LeanUX have strongly voiced their concerns and critiqued how Scaled Agile Inc shamelessly rips its content and, in the process of doing so, is tearing out its very souls. SAFe twists Lean UX, Scrum, and XP into a weak strawman. Now Scaled Agile inc is clawing at its disgruntled practitioners, censoring them and attacking them for the very thing to which it owes its very existence: referring to content made by others.

TLDR: SAFe is shamelessly ripping stuff others have graciously published openly, for example, under share-alike creative commons, while they claim the copied content as their own. Now, they are going after its disillusioned practitioners with copyright claims — and (righteously) failing at that.

SAFe delenda est.

• Ken Schwaber: "A core premise of agile is that the people doing the work are the people who can best figure out how to do it. The job of management is to do anything to help them do so, not suffocate them with SAFe."
• Jeff Sutherland: "While frameworks like SAFe might be a starting place for companies who do not understand Agile, they are inconsistent with the Scrum guide and codify disfunction that can cripple teams for years."
• Ron Jeffries: "I don't like it. SAFe isn't really Agile in its heart. […] SAFe will be installed in a fashion that won't just fail to support Agile, but that will suppress it."
• Ron Jeffries quoting Kent Beck: "Kent Beck said over a decade ago. 'I would like the world to be safe for developers.' safe, not SAFe."
• Arie van Bennekum: "I recently heard that a government organization proudly reported implementing SAFe without making any changes to the organization."
• Mike Beedle: "S_Fe is not Agile. When we wrote the Agile Manifesto we said 'people and interactions', 'working software', 'customer collaboration' and 'responding to change' were important; however, S_Fe does not put these things first, and violates the values of the Agile Manifesto."
• Alistair Cockburn: "Wow. just heard, 'our exec hates agile, so he will install SAFe' eeek!!".
• Ward Cunningham: "my ideas get plugged into bigger frameworks and to me it looks diluted…"
• Steve Denning: "SAFe destroys the very essence of Agile. it gives the management a mandate to call themselves agile and keep doing what they have always done. SAFe is the epitome of 'fake Agile'."
• Martin Fowler: "SAFe — Shitty Agile For Enterprises, as my friend calls it"
• Bob Galen: "And as I looked at it closer, it finally dawned on me that SAFe was no longer safe. It was no longer supporting the essence of the agile manifesto. That it had clearly crossed the chasm from agile-focused framework to agile-buzzword and revenue generation vehicle."
• James Grenning: "As an engineer, I want to know what problem SAFe is supposed to solve. […] This means people adopting SAFe can't just be adopting SAFe because they want to scale agile. That's not a reason."
• Andrew (Andy) Hunt: "SAFe is auto-ironic" and "I have friends who have made great careers thanks to SAFe — going in afterwards and cleaning up disastrous, failed adoptions."
• John Kern: "The biggest challenge is what I call 'agile in name only'. That is the usage of a process or a framework, but not really understanding that a tool or a process alone, while it may be necessary, may not be sufficient."
• Brian Marick: "SAFe problematic prescriptive nature with *the* set of rules to follow, fret about and enforce".
• Chris Matts: "SAFe is the Trojan Horse."
• Maarten Dalmijn: "Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): when you don't have the guts to do Scrum"
• (Uncle) Robert C. Martin: "Agile was never intended for this".
• Willem-Jan Ageling: "Empiricism is under pressure with SAFe".
• Dave Thomas: "Now look at the consultants and vendors who say they'll get you started with "Agile." […] My guess is that you'll find them process and tool heavy, with many suggested work products (consultant-speak for documents to keep managers happy) and considerably more planning […]. If you see this too, then it's more evidence of the corruption and devaluation of the word "agile."
• Lyssa Adkins: "When I hear senior management say things like, "Scrum didn't work, so now we're trying SAFe" I get a chill up my spine."
• Stefan Wolpers: "The nine most terrifying words for agile practitioners: 'I practice SAFe®, and I am here to help.'"
• Allen Holub: "SAFe violates basic agile principles: it's not simple, it's not flexible, it elevates process over people, it relies on plans, it discourages self organization and autonomy. It would be fine if they called it SFe"
• John Cutler: "SAFe is an easy target. It's like laughing at sunburnt package tourists on the beach."
• Marty Cagan: "I would not want to work in a company using a process like this. I can't imagine any of the strong tech product companies I know choosing to move to SAFe, and if for some reason they did, I'm pretty certain their top talent would leave."
• Jeff Gothelf: "Continuous learning and improvement, customer centricity, humility, cross-functional collaboration, evidence-based decision making, experimentation, design and course correction — to name a few — are visibly absent from the SAFe conversation. Instead, organizations adopting this way of working focus on rigid team structures, strict rituals and events and an uneven distribution of behavior change requirements depending on how high up one sits in the organization."