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.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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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.
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 Source~~ most 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.
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??!"
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?
Yeah, the keyboard is source available, that's good enough for me.
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.
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?
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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.
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Such a bummer that they took over Immich
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.
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