Apparently in the past day, they’ve removed all the logos from the Microgrants projects and clarified that the grants are unsolicited
I think Louis Rossmann’s heart is in the right place, his work for right for repair is genuine, his disdain for New York’s intolerable bureaucracy is completely understandable and justified, but it is leading him in bad directions and has been ever since he linked up with FUTO. Never trust a billionaire and never let them delude you into thinking they care about you or anyone. He is being used for his reputation and his audience and when they are done consuming those things for the billionaire’s cause’s benefit he will be left with neither one and the billionaire will move on without slowing down or shedding a tear.
What else do you expect him to do that will make an ACTUAL change? You HAVE to make some concessions when collaborating with large entities, and I think we are lucky that Louis can stay true to all of his beliefs with a large backing like FUTO, even if they aren’t perfect.
I feel like I’ve seen stories like this before, how a popular YouTuber, or advocate isn’t “perfect”. People in the comments provide a “perfect” alternative, they are usually super niche and super underground. Certainly someone that hasn’t yet had the chance to come under the same amount of scrutiny.
We need to be a little compromising to avoid cannibalizing our movement to achieve “purity” of our ideals, while corps continue to take ground. My two cents. Stop the bleeding first, before you worry about scars.
He’s always been more than a little petite bourgeoisie. Among all his spats with the city of New York, I’m sure you can find something where he was at fault, but we generally only get his side of things. Still, I think he’s been mostly a good advocate. FUTO is not the right place to do that.
While I can’t say I agree with everything Rossmann, the guy seems very genuine, regardless of where I think he may be wrong or right. Also, I’ve seen him pedal back and retract plenty of times when he is shown (with evidence) that he was wrong.
Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?
As for Futo, yeah, I’m pretty sure that billionaire that owns it is just using Rossmann for his following. But who knows, maybe Rossmann is also taking advantage of him to advance what we all want to see as well.
Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?
Well, there’s Corey Doctorow, of course. He literally wrote the book on Enshittification.
There are definitely more “behind the scenes” folks doing a lot for that particular cause who don’t so much have a following of anywhere near the same size, but nonetheless do fight enshittification in big ways. Bradley Kuhn comes to mind.
eli5?
This is all in reference to this article.
FUTO is an organization that talks a lot of rhetoric about being some bastion of consumer rights in tech, but they’re doing a lot of shitty, shady, and downright evil things. Among them, FUTO has been in the practice of making small grants to FOSS projects (like ffmpeg and musl) and then plastering the FOSS project’s name and logo all over the FUTO site in a way that makes it seem as if FUTO is endorsed by said FOSS projects when that’s not the case at all.
(All this after doing everything in their power with their rhetoric to try to discredit and degrade the entire FOSS community. They wrote an “apology”, but even in the apology, they express their “disdain for OSI approved licenses”. Mind you,
none of FUTO’s projects are Open Sourcemost of their projects are proprietary.)After that article came out just a couple of days ago, apparently they redid their site, I’d have to guess in an effort to address the concern that the way FUTO presented their grant program before implied endorsement by a lot of FOSS projects that didn’t endorse them in any way. I don’t think they’ve done enough, and there are tons of other reasons to think FUTO is evil assholes using consumer rights rhetoric to manipulate people in service to its (fully for-profit) bottom line.
Other concerns in the article include FUTO’s connection to explicit/proud fascists and using their platform to (even coercing Louis Rossmann into) spread fascist propaganda.
I’ve clicked through the links and the most ‘evil’ thing they did seems to be using a non-mainstream open source licence? Evil is getting contracted by Israel. Prohibiting other companies from profiting off your work isn’t evil.
Edit: And they hosted an interview with Curtis Yarvin. That’s bad, but still doesn’t warrant calling them evil.
The founder of the organization being buddies with a neonazi isn’t evil in your book?
Are they friends? If they are friends sure, they’re evil. Although if that were the case I think the person calling them evil (and the linked blog) would have included that front and center rather than the definition of open source stuff.
Honestly getting tired of the purity tests. The alternatives are horrific. Google. Apple. Meta. So please find me the FOSS project that is perfectly free of sin which I’m allowed to support.
At this point it begins to feel as though this DDV is only here to write takedown pieces on projects not deemed pure enough for the cause.
FUTO hosted an interview once with a POS guy. Oh, the horror. Please help me understand what that has to do with the existence of a keyboard that isn’t spyware. Yeah no. I’ll keep supporting the working alternatives, you have fun using absolutely nothing because “What if one of the devs wasn’t a good person??!”
Oh don’t worry, it’s only lightly nazi affiliated. Weird that isn’t a deal breaker for you. Well not really weird these days, but it sure says a lot about you.
Yep you’re right, I’m a Nazi because I use a keyboard developed by a foundation funded by a guy who hosted someone for an interview who is a bad person with bad ideas.
Doesn’t matter who I vote for. Doesn’t matter what I advocate for. The work I do to organize in my community doesn’t matter. All of that is invalidated because of the keyboard I use. I’m a secret Nazi! And I’d have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling Edible Funk.
You’re the hero we all need here on the Left.
Stand for nothing, fall for everything.
Stand for everything, achieve nothing.
I absolutely agree with your statement. Hell, even the GNU project (RMS mostly) had their own scandal a while ago, so if you really insist on being pedantic about this matter feel free on removing practically every piece of open source software from your systems.
Shall I assume you are still a big reiserfs user then?
Why not try someone a bit more relevant than Hans Reiser, there’s plenty to choose from. Like Eric Raymond whose work, at least indirectly, influences more or less everyone using a computer on a daily basis.
Yeah, the keyboard is source available, that’s good enough for me.
Everyone acting like they’ve never heard of “Free as in Freedom not as in Free Beer”
They give you the source. They let you modify it and use it, just don’t make billions off someone else’s freely available work.
How that translates to “most of their stuff is proprietary” and the one smartass that thinks it’s a good argument to say “ffmpeg doesn’t mind their code being used in YouTube, why should you?”
Until we collapse capitalism the billionaires will take our hard work and make billions off of it until they force kill our projects and replace them with proprietary closed source shit. A license that prohibits corporations from making profit off our work is A-OK.
You say the open source line, and then apply it to a project that doesn’t value those values.
Free as in freedom comes without restrictions like commercial use.
If that low bar of source avaialble (last I checked you have to request the source). That’s fine.
But for a lot of FOSS people its not because it means you can never learn from the code, and apply it in your paying job. Or in your own project that suddenly gets big. Then suddenly someone is knocking demanding money.
Its about the community as much about the code.
last I checked you have to request the source)
So you haven’t checked… Good to know you don’t know what you’re making a strong statement about.
Then suddenly someone is knocking demanding money.
No, they don’t come knocking, because you wouldn’t be using the code in your commercial product in the first place, regardless of how small it is.
Donations are not the same thing as paid licenses, and FUTO’s license is bad because it prevents you from funding your fork. But funding doesn’t mean exploitation for profit, which is what corporations like Google do with copyleft code.
Its about the community as much about the code.
Right, community != business.
I want my code to be freely used by all in the community, and I explicitly do not want a corporation to exploit my work for their profit. That’s antithetical to the concept of community.
I’m a fan of the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. In an ideal world, the GPL would be sufficient, but we don’t live in an ideal world, we live in an exploitative capitalist run world and they will do everything they can to profit off the labor of and destroy the community that develops open source software.
Fund the development of the code you spin with donations and foundations and whatever you want, but don’t charge for and make profit off others’ labor.
I don’t get you people. The founder of FUTO literally platforming a fascist is beyond just purity test level of bad.
I can call Eron out for being a supporter of fascists, while using FUTO keyboard because it doesn’t spy on me, that’s perfectly fine. I don’t get why using their keyboard means you have to defend the horrible position held by the people behind it. Sounds like cognitive dissonance.
They weren’t even grants. They just donated money and said “look we’re sponsoring them!”, implying a relationship. As mentioned in that article, musl and ffmpeg (and probably everyone) didn’t even know FUTO was doing this.
look we’re sponsoring them
spon·sor
verb
- provide funds for (a project or activity or the person carrying it out).
My disapproval of FUTO notwithstanding, that is the dictionary definition.
I never looked at those “we sponsor/donated to” sections on organization pages as implying a relationship of reciprocal approval. Are idiots online thinking that?
Anyone should be able to assert “X gave Y money” when that’s true. Taking money from people we disagree with shouldn’t be a problem: less money for them, more for us. Do we want them to spend on shit we definitely disapprove of?
By that dictionary definition, yes, but there’s a connotation of scale and a relationship. For example, your local arts events are often sponsored by local businesses and philanthropists, but if you or I donate $10 I wouldn’t call that a sponsorship.
your local arts events are often sponsored by local businesses and philanthropists
Do you or they necessarily approve of those businesses? Is that implied?
but if you or I donate $10 I wouldn’t call that a sponsorship
Then are people getting carried away with their imaginations? When I see a “we sponsor” section with logos/names, I don’t assume a substantial amount: could be token for all I know. Quibbling over that when it’s true feels like arguing over inconsequential merit badges.
Donation recipients should be able to take money from donors who should be able to declare that truth.
Immich it licensed under AGPL 3 and the code is open - isn’t that FOSS?
I know some of their apps are licensed under a semi-open license of their own creation and that’s been touchy to say the least. But is it true to say that none of their apps are FOSS?
Ah. My mistake. I’ll edit my comment.
Edit: According to another comment in this post, FUTO “took over” Immich. Seems like maybe Immich was AGPLv3 before FUTO got hold of it. Still qualifies as “one of FUTO’s projects”, and your point is still well made, but it does still add a bit of context, and honestly I have to wonder whether future versions of Immich will remain FOSS.
They actually reliscenced from mit (or some permissive liscence) to AGPLv3 right before getting “taken over” by FUTO (futo now pays the immich devs to work full time on the project)
I’ll be honest- never even heard of futo outside the context of immich (and I don’t even run it.) Interesting to hear they have anything besides that.
Thanks for posting this. Just uninstalled Futo keyboard and its neighboring speech to text app. Gotta hunt around for a replacement on both, tho I’ve been using Heliboard, which is okay. Still really bad at swipe predictions.
If you are comfortable using F-Droid or Obtainium I found HeliBoard to be a good keyboard replacement: https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard
Sadly anything not going through the Google Play store is currently under attack: https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Hah! That’s why I said I was using Heliboard :P As noted, not the greatest text prediction. e.g. I’ll type “in” specifically starting over the I, and it still types “on”, and it also doesn’t like shorthand wording, like “gonna” which every time gets replaced with “Gibbs”
Still better than the Google keyboard with its billion all-seeing eyes on you.
🤦♂️ Sometimes I wonder who those people are who immediately jump to conclusions because they can’t be bothered to read a simple paragraph of text. Me. The answer is - it’s me!
Hopefully something good still came out of it. Maybe as someone else recommended adding your frequently used words to your dictionary will help with word sugggestions.
Hah, well if you posted at the time you did and you’re in my timezone (EST), I can see glancing over it being an ish :P
Can’t you just put the shorthand words you want in a personal dictionary? That worked for me. Able to type words not in the default dictionary without autocorrecting.
I suppose I could have, but I’m still somewhat babystepping in Heliboard. I think if I give it a bit more time, it’ll click better. I guess I was just so used to the seemingly solid prediction options for Google Keyboard way back. But having less of my info passing over to them, the better.
I just switched to Heliboard. I like it, but I wish it had swiping.
It does, if you are willing to use the google binaries. It’s on their github page.
Oh damn, guess I should’ve like, read the documentation or something. Thanks!
The voice recognition is honestly the best I’ve ever used. It’ll be a shame to give it up.
If I decide to switch keyboards, I’m certain I would go back to HeliBoard.
There’s been a real explosion of open source voice recognition over the past few months, and I haven’t tested a lot. Whisper+ looks like a promising one. Before using Futo, I used Sayboard, which I was pretty happy with.
Careful, I heard one of the Heliboard devs kicked a puppy once. How dare you support such Evil software?!
/s because sadly that’s needed
Their voice recognition is just OpenAI Whisper. Transcribro uses the exact same thing. It’s just not built into a handy key on the keyboard.
I was really loving Futo keyboard, but when companies are tied to any atrocities, or in this case, plain general evil, it’s really tough to stick with. I jumped very briefly over to Sayboard before your post (saw it on F-Droid), but I’m hoping Whisper+ works better, as I think I’ll simultaneously be using it for my upcoming HA voice assistant project.
Transcribro is another that looks promising.
They secretly funded projects without letting the recipients know it was them funding and then added their names and logos to their site without permission. When someone spoke out against this, they harassed them. This is in addition to a lot of behavior supporting fascists.
what facist projects?
The article I linked in another comment explains more, but Eron Wolf, founder of FUTO, kindof pressured or hoodwinked Louis Rossmann into publicly interviewing Curtis Yarvin who happily refers to himself as a “reactionary fascist” and publicly states that black people are inherently suitable for enslavement.
I don’t know that it’s so much that they support “fascist projects” as much as they go out of their way to be a platform for spreading fascist propaganda, and particularly promoting the fascist Curtis Yarvin.
That is not supporting fascist projects even if its a mistake
Even the very mention of Yarvin should have your skin crawling.
He didn’t say “supporting fascist projects” he said “supporting fascists”
That is not supporting fascist projects
Literally what I just said in the comment you responded to.
Such a bummer that they took over Immich
Immich is fine… full FOSS and alive. I just dont get you people.
What keeps them from changing the Immich license from AGPL to FUTO?
Copyright.
AGPL says that the original author of any chunk of code owns the copyright to it.
Meaning to change the license you have to get every copyright holder (read every developer who has contributed code) to agree to the license change and give over the copy right.
Edit: to be clear, I don’t like FUTO either. As a visible minority, I know libertarians are not my friends. But a copyright rug pull is hard to do in immich.
From what I’m seeing, you’re right. If there was a contributor assignment policy (some official policy associated with Immich saying that by submitting a PR, you agree to assign copyright on your code changes go the Immich project), FUTO could change the license on future versions as they wished. But it doesn’t look like there’s any contributor assignment or contributor license agreement on Immich.
To be pedantic, Immich did change from MIT to AGPLv3 a while ago. FUTO could technically scrap the current version, grab the last MIT version of the code, relicense it under their “source-first” license (or any other license they like, pretty much), and declare “this is now the official development version of Immich from which new releases will come.” That would be drastic even for FUTO, though (I don’t think that’s likely any time soon), and the community could then fork the latest AGPLv3 version with a different name and carry on with development.
FUTO could technically scrap the current version, grab the last MIT version of the code, relicense it under their “source-first” license (or any other license they like, pretty much), and declare “this is now the official development version of Immich from which new releases will come.”
If they pulled that off, a community spinoff from that same version would become the new immich killer. Not the first time it’s happened, and the current maintainers aren’t the only ones capable of maintaining it.
Once you go copy left, you need everyone’s consent to change the license.
The MIT license is the creator owns the copyright, and any changes you contribute are licesned under the sam MIT as the project.
So to go from MIt -> anything only requires the consent of the project onwer.
Any copy left (like AGPL) license -> anything requires every contributors consent.
It is possible, but practically infeasible at scale.
I’d have to read more about AGPL, but IIRC GPLv2 says you must license any derived code as the same license.
IANAL, just someone whose looked into this before.
As far as I’m aware, contributor license agreements can include a clause stating that you agree to hand over copyright on submission of code. If every contributor has signed the CLA, there is only only one copyright holder, making relicensing easy.
However, successfully using this to relicense to something less open is extremely rare, and this isn’t a concern anyway as they don’t have a CLA.
Yes, however those aren’t “copy left” licenses like AGPL whose defining feature is the owner not holding copyright
What did they do to immich?!
Funded a team of devs to work on it full time.
Also made it shareware.
Pls explain. I cannot see how it is shareware with an AGPL licence behind it and full code published. Or is it just fud ?
Sorry, that’s what I grew up calling paid software that was free to use in practice. That effectively how Immich is presented now. There is a button to buy a license which changes to an (optional) supporter badge once purchased.
For the record, I am very happy with the software and paid for a license. I can see why people are bothered with Futo’s language but I personally can’t complain with how they’ve handled the project itself.
fud, it’s “shareware” in the sense that there’s a dismissable popup that asks you to pretty please pay 100$, but it’s AGPLv3 and no features are locked behind the paywall.
Huh. So anyone could maintain a fork or patchset and distribute builds that were feature-for-feature identical to Immich but with no nag screens. Just an interesting thought.
You can already do this with their custom css. I did it for about 5 minutes and then realized paying $99 was the right thing to do. It’s a reasonable ask on their part.
So we need to make a patch then. Not great but fine.
deleted by creator
So immch is dead before it even matured enough to be reliable? Sad.
Still struggling to understand what makes it “dead.”
It’s a big disappointment because the facial recognition is great, meaning that they could be doing bad things behind the scene. They could have a backdoor so their buddies could check to see if you’re Hispanic or non-white. That’s just one thing. Could is not is. But its enough to make me stop and think of uninstalling.
It’s still open source, not sure where this is coming from
It’s coming from technical ignorance. There’s little wrong with FUTOs license, here are the limitations:
First the good:
You may use or modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, all without any anticipated commercial application. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
Yes, good, I don’t want Google using my code to make billions.
And the not so good:
Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others. You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the Licensor in the software. Any use of the Licensor’s trademarks is subject to applicable law.
Bad. If I forked and majorly modified the code by significant contribution, I don’t see why my release should have a “donate” link to the original producer and not for my efforts the donor is actually using. This is the same problem the first limitation seeks to address, but from a different angle; namely: monetizing “intellectual property” instead of work.
Copyleft is cool because it means freedom, but everyone in here fighting because code first prevents them from potentially monetizing the projects they like is completely missing the point of copyleft.
If you ask them to articulate their concern, I haven’t heard one that isn’t on the lines of “I want to be able to use this code in my paid product”…
As others have said, you’re changing the topic talking about FUTO’s license in a response to a comment about the AGPL.
But to continue your thread:
If you ask them to articulate their concern, I haven’t heard one that isn’t on the lines of “I want to be able to use this code in my paid product”…
I specifically want anyone to be allowed to use any and all FOSS software I write (and I do write and publish some) commercially, so long as they abide by the terms of the license I choose. (Typically the AGPLv3.)
If, for instance, a mainstream commercial consumer electronics device incorporated my code into the firmware and because my code is under the AGPLv3, end users had the legal right to demand the means to modify the behavior of their devices to better suit them, I’d be thrilled.
Plus, if a company with an IT department is distributing a modified version of my code, that might well include some improvements generally useful for all/most/many users of my project. And if my projects is under the AGPLv3, I can demand a copy of the source code of their modified version and incorporate any improvements back upstream into my project so all users of my FOSS project can benefit from it.
Commercial redistribution is more of a feature than you think. I think you’re missing the point of copyleft.
Immich uses AGPL-3.0 license, so nothing you said is applicable
I said nothing about immich, the commenter you replied to seems to think because immich is under futo it’ll somehow start collecting your data. If immich was using the futo license, literally nothing will change about how we use it… People are freaking out and inventing ridiculous scenarios and they don’t understand what they’re objecting to (FUTO’s license).
A backdoor in what, exactly?? Please do some research into the programs you’re running so you can base your opinions on that knowledge rather than vibes.
