What's up with FUTO?

They're openly disdainful of all things Open Source and OSI, and their software is not Open Source.

They're a fully for-profit company using consumer rights kind of rhetoric to manipulate people in service to FUTO's own pocketbook. Don't fall for their use of the .org tld or promises to "never abuse customers".

I've written many times about what assholes FUTO is. I'm fully convinced they're way more part of the problem than part of the solution and they're not to be trusted.

They've soured me on Rossman. Back when he was doing coverage of things like the court cases around right to repair and tractors and stuff, I watched a few videos of his and thought he was awesome. And then he got involved with FUTO and started billing Grayjay as "Open Source" and I've gotten sufficiently disillusioned with FUTO that I haven't followed Rossman at all. I've got coworkers changing their avatars to Clippy and shit, and I believe their hearts are in the right place, but I can't in good conscience really get behind anything or anyone associated with FUTO.

Edit: Oh. I honesty didn't even see this OP was a link to an article. Lol. Now I'm very interested to go read that article.

Edit 2: Shite. I've now read the article. I knew FUTO was assholes in a lot of different ways, but now I know how deeply, completely irredeemable they really are.

Why does every mobile keyboard developer have some controversial shit? I just want to text in peace.

Anything on HeliBoard too?
- The only thing I dislike of heliboard is their swipe function requires Google binaries. Most FOSS keyboards either lack some feature I use or are immersed in wild controversies.
- heliboard seems cool so far
Does FlorisBoard have controversial shit too?
- No, but they are forever beta. They still lack a ton of features I use.
fossify keyboard? extremely basic, but works
May I recommend Thumbkey its awesome and a bit different from other keyboards. Its concept is interesting ✨
- It looks neat but what an absolutely stupid take from a keyboard author
  Because it trusts you to write what you meant to write.
  Butch if I didn't let it correct me I'd have to actually mook st the keyboard and who the fuck wants to do thatm.
  Phones are tiny and humans are clumsy. I absolutely never mean what I type, as you can see above.
Just use Gboard and block any google telemetry
- Good luck with that on anything that has a locked boot loader or stock OS.
- I know both are kinda terrible but isn't a facist-developed GPL software better than Google software
- Blocking internet access doesn't magically turn proprietary software into free software.
For the sadist in you there's always https://f-droid.org/packages/se.nullable.flickboard
quite a bunch of computer stem people are also fascists.

Wolf also was spouting about how great Trump is and how "woke" shit is ruining society or whatever in January IIRC. I briefly trawled through their social media when I was investigating their keyboard, Grayjay, and Immich and promptly decided to never, ever give them money.

Note that their keyboard doesn't require network (at least as of now), so if you don't give them money or promote it to other people, they don't really benefit.

EDIT: Also, there are claims Rossman has a Kiwi Farms account and is at least somewhat active there. I haven't investigated those very thoroughly though.

Yep https://kiwifarms.st/members/larossmann.132201/
- Interestingly, according to one of his recent-ish comments, he left FUTO in February.
- JFC can there be nothing pure in this world?
- In the last thread he posted in they're already talking about the author/article in the OP.
  Internet drama truly is a flat circle.
what's kiwifarms and why is it relevant?

I've always had a weird feeling about FUTO, but I thought them giving money to open source projects can't be that bad. Now I hope they don't fuck up Immich.

Luckily thanks to their licensing model they basically cannot. Immich has according to github as of now 1606 contributors. Changing the license so that there could even be a proprietary fork would require basically the ok by every contributor (that made a relevant code contribution)
- And even if they did somehow manage to get permission to switch the license, all previous versions would still be open in perpetuity so a fork would come easily. Immich source isn't only open, and not only GPL.. but AGPL-3.0 which is as copyleft as you can get.
FUTO has always been sus, but privacy redditors gave them a pass because of Rossmann's involvement.

Son of a BITCH! I'm so fucking tired of this... Everywhere you look you gotta examine EVERYTHING about a company/group because they might be fascists now...I love Grayjay, it was working so great and I loved the proclaimed mission...I was even trying to get FCast to work since I lost casting ability when I moved to Linux...

I'm just gonna take a break over here for a bit.

I'm with you. It's so goddamn hard not to be black pilled these days. Everyone is either greedy and looking to take you for all you are worth, a misogynist, a rapist, a fascist, or some combination of all 4 and some other horrible 5th and 6th thing that I can't think of right now. Lies and disinformation are so prevalent and there are so few consequences that it feels like nothing is what it seems.
If you care about some random issue "A", there is an entire industry ready to take your money in exchange for the lie that your contribution or patronage is helping "A" when it's just lining someone's pockets.
Want to make sure you can buy a thing that isn't made with child slave labor? I hope you did your research because of the 8 companies "certified" as child-slave-labor free, 3 still use child-slave-labor and just paid for certification, 3 use a supplier that uses it, 1 only uses it part time, and one is legitimately what it claims to be... oh no, wait, they were just bought out by a pro-child-slave-labor corp... I hate everything.

FUTO is also involved with Immich 🫤

They just bragged with v2 release how they "survived the controversial move to join FUTO" ...
I love Immich & use it a lot :(.
- Try Ente Photos, I like it more.
- I'm still disappointed that you can't interact with tags at all on the mobile app.
I trust Immich and the AGPL more than this blogger.

EDIT: Apparently louis left futo some number of months ago, thank you to another user for letting me know in a reply below

This is informative, and unfortunate.

I will be honest, I don't really expect louis will wade into this issue at all, since he seems to be very uncomfortable with any of the "political" or partisan aspects of the issues he covers.

I can empathize with why one might be that way, but I hope I'm wrong, it would be rather disappointing.

Maybe it's time for me to open some feature requests on the helicopter repo for futo keyboard features I'd really miss if I left it behind... It'd be good for both projects to be feature rich and competitive anyway

He's not uncomfortable with it - He hates the cognitive dissonance of being a capitalist and hating the results of it
- I'm gonna be really honest, to me that feels like it strays really far into reading people's minds and headcannoning what's going on on them. But perhaps you've seen more from him than I have, and you're basing that assessment on greater familiarity.
  I do think it's worth being mindful about how much we assume we know the inner workings of random people through a screen, though.
On the upside, Louis left FUTO last February
- Wait, he did? I had no idea
  Is that what "fulu" has been about?
  I wish my comment included that context for all the people who saw it but I was completely unaware

Maybe Louis Rossman will see this and beat FUTO back into shape? Maybe? Please? I just want one good outcome here!!

He’s literally in it.
- He's literally not.
Doubtful, unfortunately. FUTO seems like the sort of narcissistic assholes who won't be swayed in any way, shape, or form

FUTO is more or less openly fascists

I had no idea. Now I have to find a new keyboard...
- Heliboard
How so? I'm not doubting, I just didn't see any of that evidence in the article.
- Have you read the same article?
  The founder hosted a debate with an open fascist then gave him a platform on the FUTO YouTube channel.

WHY. GODDAMN WHY is it lately that any organization behind products i like turn out to be extreme assholes? we're on a streak atm i feel like

capitalism and the profit motive, probably.
Libertarians like privacy too and are right wingers.

Aw man I knew there was something wrong here. I gave them money for the keyboard and the voice talk and immich bcz I was a Rossman fan. They played him and me. Fuck these fascists.

FFS, so what's a keyboard that isn't shitty and invasive?

Heliboard seems decent, though I don't know anything about the developers.

Gross. Fuck FUTO.

I've always been an outspoken skeptic of FUTO (check post history) and their bizarre campaign against free software, but I didn't know they were this bad. Yikes

God fucking damnit. I just like the on device speech-to-text functionality. Anyone have any recs for another service that does the same thing.

There is Whisper IME.
I've used Whisper and Sayboard, and they're both good. Sayboard is faster, but Whisper can handle punctuation.
IIRC they all kind of suck. There's Transcribro or whatever, but I don't think it supports many languages (maybe only English?). I used to just use Google's and then revoked network access.
- I found that Gboard refuses to work when internet access is not available, even though I previously had offline only voice to text.
I assume you'll be looking for awhile and once you find the right one, it'll get bought by other fascists

Oh god dammit man.

Great article.

I'm going to stop using good free software because I read a blog post by a sketchy guy saying the guys that wrote the software are sketchy. 🙄

No material harm is described in the post. This is a drama blog.

"good" is subjective but FUTO's software is non-free. Their attempts to openwash their proprietary license is enough of a red flag.
- It's not a FOSS liscence, but saying it's proprietary is also disingenuous, it's source available.
- That's fair. Only "free as in beer "
Believe what you want, but Drew DeVault has more of a reputation than FUTO.

Sorry but this person is treating grapheneos' attacks on other groups as legitimate which throws the entire article into question. If they are happy to provide a platform for graphene's founder's paranoid conspiracies I can't trust the content.

Seems clear there's some questionable shit going on, but the only evidence presented is two YouTube videos which isn't actually a lot. I wouldn't be surprised based on this to hear there are deeper links, but this article is written by someone who thinks tweets and YouTube comments are evidence.

grapheneos' attacks on other groups
Where Attack? The worst Graphene ever did was say that they don't support certain Phones like FP because they are not updating their OS to their liking
Are you gonna go to Qubes OS next and complain that they are attacking laptop manufacturers (don't officially support Laptops because they don't have an open source UEFI)?
- They also had a culture of accusing anyone who complained about issues or asked questions about why things were done a certain way of being a shill for Calyx, and of there being a coordinated effort by Calyx and others to discredit them. I'm a GOS user, but the lead developer is without a doubt pretty paranoid at least.
  Regardless, these accusations against FUTO are pretty concerning.
- Wow you're very uninformed. May want to read up first.

Shit I really liked them. Their keyboard is incredible and Grayjay is hard to replace on desktop. But I'll get started on replacing them. Any ideas on a good keyboard that's open-source? Not anysoftkeyboard or mantis. Tried them.

Replaced their keyboard with heliboard and went back to newpipe. Sucks. Fucking fascist.
- Freetube is also good on desktop
- Yeah, HeliBoard or FlorisBoard would've been my recommendation. They're very similar, though (and presumably share most code between themselves).

There we go, farawell grayjay then!

Yarvin has proclaimed that black people are genetically predisposed to a lower IQ than white people

The second part of that is true, because the IQ test is unreliable. That's why its banned in California schools for POC

That statement only has one part. Could you clarify what you mean here? I'm not sure I understand.
- I think it's that the statement in question was proclaimed is the "first part". Or maybe the genetic predisposition is. Unclear.
- The first part says people with more melanin in their skin are inferior. This is false.
  The second part says people with more melanin in their skin score lower on IQ tests. This is true (because IQ tests are terrible, and its creator said so too)

Wait is Louis still attached to the project? I thought he left to focus on a new company.

Multiple people have said that, yeah. But they also said that he did not particularly distance himself from the project, which is definitely something I would do, if I found out about this kind of backing.
- I'm guessing Rossmann has problematic political beliefs that he, fortunately, doesn't talk much about publicly. It looks like he was a Destiny fan.

Ugh, now I feel gross. Time to find a new YouTube app.

I'll take a look at the interviews later tonight.

A few minor items stuck out as a bit disingenuous to me:

The donation page that FUTO used includes this explanation: “This offer is for individuals, and may be available to small organizations on request. Commercial entities wishing to be listed as sponsors should inquire by email.” It’s pretty clear that there are special instructions for institutional donors who wish to receive musl’s endorsement as thanks for their contribution.

It DOES say that, but literally only for the "monthly contribution > 150 section. For a one time grant of 1000 dollars, it doesn't appear to say anything.

FUTO appears to list efforts it has donated to (and use their name/logo), under the title, "Our sponsored grant programs". Which to me seems more of a semantic argument of whether they can say they've donated to something or not.

The inclusion of a logo without permission is a good critique, nonetheless. Likewise, if they are lying about donating to some of these projects, that is a problem.

The author makes a point of complaining about a video posted to odysee. There are not many great options for posting videos outside of Youtube. That FUTO would post videos to multiple other youtube alternatives, including odysee and peertube does not seem like a surprise to me. Not saying anything about the video though, until I've sat and watched.

So, I'll start by saying that I think FUTO may have changed their messaging on their website TODAY Regarding this. They now have three split sections,
what they develop/fund
"sponsored grants" (logos used)
"donations, ~60K" (logos not used)
That seems more sensible if they have small donations to OSS efforts or individuals who maintain them. It would be excellent for every group listed to review if they or any developer received donations from FUTO and publically decry falsity (as the 3 in the article mentioned)
Videos:
I don't know Yarvin, don't know shit about him. But wikipedia entry on him is not heartwarming. It does seem an odd choice to have the two videos posted by FUTO. The one is fairly mundane, but the interview with Rossman is just strange as hell in general, and disconcerting. rossman mostly just seems uncomfortable as heck. And Yarvin seems like an insufferable know it all who wants to explain everything and not give anybody the chance to complete their thought.
So I'd say endorsing this video is a dark side to FUTO. It should have been easy to stay mostly apolitical and focus on ownership and software. Not conversations about the efficacy of monarchy.
FUTO manifesto/open source:
I can at least palate that a group could think that open source is not working. There are successes and failures. Linux is a great success. Android is becoming less so as it is dominated more by vendors & Google. Talent, resources, time is continually sunk into would-be inferior software at companies. Those softwares that have closed source, harvest our data, and ultimately don't have our interests in mind - are often more polished, and attractive to the majority of users out there. One or two people primarily heading an open source repo can often make an awesome competitive software, but perhaps not as polished and with the threat of losing time to maintain it, archive the repo, etc. In that regard, offering optional licenses to pay base wages to attract talent while still letting you verify the code you execute - could still be appealing if successful.
I believe in FOSS, and will embrace & use it til I die, but I'm willing to entertain they have a difference in opinion on what will most advance our interests.

Giving tens of thousands of dollars to great orgs that have real free software licenses and ask for nothing in return? I'm glad we have futo.

I've heard it said they forced Freenet to stop focusing on anonymization, which caused a fork and name change of the original Freenet to Hyphanet.
- Link or didn't happen
Yeah I don't understand why everyone is gate keeping open source all the sudden, there is a line to be drawn between openly changeable and open to being understood, the understanding part is all I want from things because then I can tell if its actually bad or not and that is the part we mostly care about.
Its ok to not like futo because you don't agree with some of their peoples politics but that's an entirely different thing.

Wait so FUTO is authored by the guy who started all this clippy movement (Louis Rossmann)?

No, he was just a talking head that they hired a while ago. According to some in this thread he's no longer with them today, but I don't have a source for that.
- Ohh good to know
- I believe he published a video about why he left FUTO (it always appear when I open grayjay, yet never clicked it lol)

I always thought they seemed shady

Somehow all Video recommandations in GrayJay are from (extreme) right wing channels.

In fairness, this is an issue with YouTube itself. It seems to take any opportunity it can to push you down a right-wing pipeline.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-of-youtube-comments-shows-how-its-turning-people-onto-the-alt-right/