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
.orgtld 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.
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.
Interestingly, according to one of his recent-ish comments, he left FUTO in February.
Yeah, not sure how much he’s distancing himself from FUTO related things though. He brought up grayjay recently, but only specifically to talk about the devs comments on recent Texas app store legislation. Kind of a wash.
Given he is playing politician now, I don’t think he’s going to make a public statement about it. Not only would it hurt his influence but it would probably stall out any ongoing negotiations regarding right to repair. Shit sucks in general.
JFC can there be nothing pure in this world?
Holy shit wow
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?
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.
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.
Maybe Louis Rossman will see this and beat FUTO back into shape? Maybe? Please? I just want one good outcome here!!
Doubtful, unfortunately. FUTO seems like the sort of narcissistic assholes who won’t be swayed in any way, shape, or form
He’s literally in it.
He’s literally not.
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.
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.
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
“FULU” is a consumer rights organization iirc. The name sounds like a spinoff or sister organization to FUTO, but I don’t think there’s an official relationship.
FFS, so what’s a keyboard that isn’t shitty and invasive?
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
Oh god dammit man.
Having good things is illegal under the Geneva convention
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).
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.
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.
With the voice model already downloaded? That sucks, but honestly kind of expected with everything Google’s been doing lately.
Yep, it was my daily driver until one day voice to text stopped working. Restored internet access to it and lo-and-behold, voice to text is back. Tried redownooading the model, etc and had no success in getting it working with internet disabled.
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.
