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.
Why does every mobile keyboard developer have some controversial shit? I just want to text in peace.
Does FlorisBoard have controversial shit too?
No, but they are forever beta. They still lack a ton of features I use.
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.
And the implementation is nowhere as good as gboard.
Futo’s keyboard isn’t much better for slide to type. I find myself switching keyboards back to gboard when I’m not using voice to text or two thumbs.
I mean, I can’t complain about HeliBoard’s swiping feature, especially considering the alternatives.
deleted by creator
fossify keyboard? extremely basic, but works
deleted by creator
May I recommend Thumbkey its awesome and a bit different from other keyboards. Its concept is interesting ✨
Just use Gboard and block any google telemetry
Good luck with that on anything that has a locked boot loader or stock OS.
Just use wireguard and block all connections that aren’t going over VPN. Ezpz
Also if you’re on a stock device then you’re already feeding them plenty of data
Using a VPN does absolutely nothing to protect from their apps scraping up and phoning home telemetry.
It’s still YOUR phone. It’s still YOUR GPS location. It’s still YOUR data connection. A VPN is not a catch-all solution to privacy.
VPN to your box somewhere else with proper filtering.
I figured that was obvious
That’s literally not how VPNs work nor are you aware of what you’re talking about.
You literally don’t know what you are talking about.
You’re like a computer novice that is only aware of commercialized VPN products thinking you know what you’re talking about but unaware that the commercialized products are open source things that anyone can run, and you’re only paying for the company to run them on their boxes.
Blocking internet access doesn’t magically turn proprietary software into free software.
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.
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.
FUTO has always been sus, but privacy redditors gave them a pass because of Rossmann’s involvement.
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.
Thank God! That’s a relief. I thought I was going to have to redo my entire photo library hosting stuff.
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.
JFC can there be nothing pure in this world?
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.
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 :(.
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
Libertarians like privacy too and are right wingers.
deleted by creator
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).
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.
Believe what you want, but Drew DeVault has more of a reputation than FUTO.
“good” is subjective but FUTO’s software is non-free. Their attempts to openwash their proprietary license is enough of a red flag.
That’s fair. Only "free as in beer "
It’s not a FOSS liscence, but saying it’s proprietary is also disingenuous, it’s source available.
Source availability is necessary but not sufficient for 2 of the 4 freedoms.
From a communication viewpoint, that is fair, but to my knowledge (from being a professional software developer), effectively any license that is not ‘open-source’ or ‘free’ is by definition proprietary.
Because those two terms describe licensing standards (the only established ones that I know of). Whereas I believe, “proprietary license” uses this meaning of proprietary:
Nonstandard and controlled by one particular organization.
So, they wrote that license themselves is the point. What it says in there is secondary in meaning.
This is so highly relevant because in legal disputes, there is certain license compatibilities which are known to be possible.
You can take a library licensed under the MIT license and use it in a project that uses the Apache-2.0 license and you’re perfectly fine. This is the foundation of why the open-source ecosystem exists at all.But you cannot take the source code from FUTO and use it in a differently licensed project, because no legal precedents exist to support this. (I believe, the FUTO license also actively prohibits this in some way, but that’s beside the point.)
This has massive implications. Like, yeah, you can look at the code, but it is useless. If FUTO closes shop or enshittifies, you cannot fork their projects.
And because you cannot legally re-use their source code in other projects, likely no one looks at it in depth either.
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.
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
There we go, farawell grayjay then!
FUTO is more or less openly fascists
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.Do words mean anything anymore? That is an argument for them being fascists. But how are they “openly” fascist? Where is their statement, where they openly state “we are fascists”?
Because they might be, but I don’t think they ever openly said so.
Yeah, because thieves go around making public statements of “we are thieves!”
Exactly my point, and yet the commenter claims FUTO do that, even though they obviously aren’t, because who would.
But if your roommate says he isn’t a thief, however he always hangs around with the local gang and continuously brings used stuff that he has no way of legally acquiring since he doesn’t even have a job. I don’t know man, you have to start asking questions.
Mike is not a nazi, he just goes to the nazi bar because he likes the beer.
says he isn’t a thief
Well that’s the entire issue, isn’t it? If he says he isn’t a thief, then he’s a thief who clearly isn’t open about it. Just like Mike isn’t openly a nazi, he’s just a nazi who’s lying about not being one.
I had no idea. Now I have to find a new keyboard…
Heliboard
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
On the upside, Louis left FUTO last February
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.
