FUTO's Don't Be Evil Conference
That ship sailed long ago.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Right to Repair
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Whether it be electronics, automobiles or medical equipment, the manufacturers should not be able to horde “oem” parts, render your stuff useless if you repair it with aftermarket parts, or hide schematics of their products.
Summary video by Marques Brownlee
Great channel covering and advocating right to repair, Lewis Rossman
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its because the vocal minority are zealots who dont like the fact they released their apps with a open licence which doesnt abide by the "open source" rules.
From what I understand they just dont like the fact that corpos are taking advantage of the hard work of others and also hope for some kind of financial compensation:
Heh. I have mixed feelings myself.
The bad:
I don't really like their license. It somehow means that the forks are never on equal footing with the original, until all original code has been replaced. If OpenOffice.org had been under that license Oracle would have been successful at killing it, and we wouldn't have LibreOffice. Yeah, that sucks.
They mostly stay out of politics, but what little I hear from them reeks of a brand of libertarianism that really isn't my cup of tea.
The good:
Their software, from what I have see so far, I awesome. Their keyboard is great, Immich is great. Grayjay is... Pretty good. I have no use for Zulip but I expect that's also great.
And to me theu really sound like they are trying to do good work, and their heart is mostly in the right place. I believe we need to be tolerant enough to be able to live with people who have slightly different politics from us. In the end it's not like I had zero exceptions on the politics of RMS or ESR.
Immich is great
I thought immich is just getting some funding from FUTO only to find out now that the project has joined FUTO. But immich is still AGPL so that is good.
Whatever "has joined futo" even means.
In the end the devs got hired for a few years to do full-time what used to be their passion project.
The good:
Their software, from what I have see so far, I awesome. Their keyboard is great, Immich is great. Grayjay is… Pretty good.
I'm on the same page. I really hate the "politics" of all this, but there's enough good being done by their org, and the apps they put out, that I'm tolerant. Even though I have paid for a license for Futo keyboard, I'd be happy to support other projects that suit my needs.
Futo is trying to build a sustainable future for open-source, so I'm not surprised that there are disagreements with how they approach certain licensing models. My hope is that they can find the magic sauce that allows all open-source projects to remain viable in the long-term (while compensating developers in a way that doesn't mirror the enshittifcation we see in commercial software).
I mean FUTO specifically. It's not about what license they're using per se. It's about them:
- Co-opting the term Open Source. (By the time their apology came, it was far to little too late.)
- ...specifically in an effort to sabotage the whole OSS movement by diluting the term. (Especially in the wake of big asshole companies like Meta doing the same.)
- Talking smack about OSS and further pushing their anti-Open-Source agenda in their supposed "apology" to the people they pissed off for having co-opted the term.
- All while acting extremely sanctimonious about how they're revolutionizing consumer rights in tech or whatever.
- ...with a supposedly better license that's "Open Source plus pay nag screens". Congratulations, you've solved enshittification. (/s)
FUTO Is a for-profit company. If they'd started out saying "yeah, our stuff isn't Open Source, but it is shared-source and we don't think we can really survive as a company without nag screens", I wouldn't be pissed at them. I still more likely than not wouldn't use their software, but I wouldn't be calling them "evil". But as it is, I'm convinced FUTO is just an asshole company trying to use consumer rights hype and formerly the stolen "Open Source" label to increase their bottom line without even the slightest care about consumer rights in tech. Much like Apple's famous 1984 Superbowl ad.
As for Rossmann himself, I don't so much blame him. The work he's done in increasing awareness of right-to-repair was (when I last followed him at all) awesome. I don't know but what he got swept up in FUTO's rhetoric before he really knew what terms like "Open Source" meant. I just hope he eventually severs his connection with FUTO and makes some public statements about what a clusterfuck FUTO committed with their whole antagonism-to-the-OSS-community thing. (Actually, I don't know if he's still so much involved with FUTO. Again, I haven't been following him just because of how disgusted I am with FUTO and his connection thereto.)
Edit: Oh, also while I'm at it, it's very shitty of them, as a fully for profit company to mislead folks into thinking they're not-for-profit by using the ".org" top-level-domain for their domain.
He's a great speaker. He was interviewed in Gamer's Nexus' latest video and I like his take on tariffs.