Are the statements made in the blog correct?
This article again. Drew Devault is a shitstirrer that lives from drama. Painting Louis Rossmann as a nazi, white supremacist, or monarchy supporter is just misinformation and I’d go as far to say that it’s slander. He has thousands of videos trying to hold the state accountable, is nearly rabidly pro-privacy and pro consumer rights, and rails on and on about how shitty big tech companies are that have their way with their consumers.
I happen to agree with FUTO: the opensource licenses are not that great. Open source developers should get paid and if that means the definition of opensource has to evolve, so be it.
We should stop treating the opensource definition like gospel and quoting it as if it were a religious text. We should think for ourselves, not let our thoughts be dictated to us and then just go “this person said it, so they are right”.
FUTO funds great software. If that came out of the pocket of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, I’d be happy ad it means less money going to whatever evil main endeavors they have. If a monarchist spends his fortune on opensource instead of raising a monarchy, fucking good. Don’t stop him. Demand he spends more.
It is worth noting, according to Louis Rossmann, he stopped working for FUTO in early 2025 (“almost a year ago”). Here is his response to this article. Posting for information not because I agree with him. I still think Eron Wolf-in-sheeps-clothing is a shady character.
Also YSK LadyBird’s lead developer (who are sponsored by FUTO) is a thinly veiled white supremacist.
And even worse : He willingly chose to code in C++ ! Pure insanity.
I can forgive him being a white supremacist but using c++? Thats just pure malice.
You can forgive white supremacy?? O.o
GodDAMMIT, I gave them money for greyjay. And I watch some of Rossman’s stuff on YouTube.
Why can’t we just have nice things? What the fuck is wrong with people? Did the entire fucking country go crazy because they couldn’t handle a black president?
This isn’t very surprising to me and I’m not too mad about it tbh. My impression is that Rossman is passionate about open-source and right-to-repair, and after connecting with Eron, he was offered his dream job that would allow him to get paid to work on his passion in Austin with Eron. Eron is very wealthy which provides the funding but also comes with sketchy friends. Eron exploits Rossman’s authenticity and puts him in a tough spot.
Gave them money as in a donation or paying for the app? Haven’t used Grayjay, but I’ve payed for Immich and FUTO keyboard at least. They were pretty clear on the apps that it costs money and not just a donation.
Regardless of if you like a company or not, I don’t think you should steal from them. Either pay for the software because you think it’s good software or move to another app.
Just my 2¢.
I did the same thing with grayjay. I paid for it cause I wanted to support them… Then all this stuff came out and I’m pretty sure I said the exact same thing as you… Fucking hell…I hate it.
I started to try out Morphe but it’s not really the same as Grayjay.
I too regret buying a license for Grayjay now.
It seems there’s just plain nothing good or innocent ever anymore. When you - rarely - find people or projects that seem worth supporting, they turn out to be tainted in some way or other and give you nausea.
Even friggin’ Noam Chomsky, whom I held in high regard for decades, turned out to be one of Epstein’s pals.
More info about Chomsky please.
There isn’t any public evidence that Chomsky participated in the sexual acts. It was purely professional, intellectual, social, and technical interactions. Also no one is accusing him.
Generally it’s people jumping to conclusions because of simple interactions, but they can be unrelated to Epstein’s ring.
He was laughing with steve bannon isnt that bad enough?
And then we wonder why more people are becoming cynical.
My understanding is that rossman actually isnt involved anymore, but I haven’t followed things very closely. Someone brought up him no longer being involved last time folks were discussing issues with futo here on lemmy.
I switched back to heliboard because of the issues 🤷🏻♂️
Just use Tubular.
These guys? The ones collecting your data across multiple platforms and selling it?
Thanks…I had problems with Newpipe (what? It’s a mystery, I can’t remember). I’ll give this a shot.
In my opinion it is really hard to establish business processes that get the blessing of every open-source community member there is. Criticizing what is made is easy, implementing everything perfectly isn’t. I like to judge things by their practical effect and AFAICT FUTO has had a positive effect for their member projects and their respective communities. Does that mean I wouldn’t prefer if everything they did was true to the open-source principles? No, of course not, but that doesn’t mean we should bring our pitchforks, either.
That being said, I’m not actually that knowledgable about how FUTO operates, so any piece of information that might make me change my opionion about them is welcome.
Edit: Okay, never mind. I thought I was aware of all of FUTO’s controversies and therefore didn’t re-read the article before posting. Seems there are some more problems than just not conforming to the traditional definition of open-source.
It’s not about approval, it’s about blatent lying about sponsoring FOSS projects.
deleted by creator
You need to read the article.
Yep, if it’s the one that’s been going around. It’s not all that long and plenty damning.
there’s a lot more to the article than open source
I do not believe FUTO’s campaign to redefine open source has had a positive effect on the open source movement, given all the confusion it has caused. Maybe its “ownership” of Immich has had a positive effect on Immich, but I wouldn’t know.
What is the best offline, privacy first, FOSS, Android keyboard alternative to FUTO?
Heliboard is the best I’ve used. Florisboard is great if you like swipe typing.
I found Florisboard’s swipe dictionary to be… Weird. Like making up words or acronyms, or just suggesting words no one would ever use.
But, Heliboard lets you import swipe dictionaries, so you can get Gboard’s without using Gboard.
Theyre currently completely reimplementing it, so maybe itll be better once thats done.
Yeah, I installed Heliboard soon after I posted my comment and I like it well enough. I think I might stick with it.
Indeed Florisboard or Heliboard
HeliBoard comes wiþ thorn built-in.
Just saying.
im actually surprised you said thorn not þorn lmao
Possibly Florisboard
Though I use GBoard offline on my GOS, because if you don’t have Play Services or other Google apps you can just remove internet access from GBoard (and GCamera)
Yes.
Its Drew DeVault. After his agressive and frankly unnecessary smear campaign of RMS where he took as much out of context as he could, and not being that much better himself (https://dmpwn.info/), I feel like any hot take the guy has needs to be taken with a grain of salt. If he doesn’t like something, he crusades.
Holy moralizing and bad faith presentation from that takedown you linked. I feel like you have to be primed to dislike the guy going in to take that thing seriously. By the end of the essay they were straight up lying about DeVault saying he “bans projects he personally dislikes” which is obviously not what happened to those who read the linked SourceHut TOS change.
Almost the entirety of that takedown is “this guy likes drawn loli art oooooo how DISGUSTING how REVOLTING we just HATED meticulously cataloguing every image he tagged on a booru site but we HAD to look at all this loli porn that we HATE so we could put this dossier together.” I stg these people are all closeted enjoyers of the stuff they run moral crusades against.
Also hilarious that the anonymous author complains about DeVault writing an anonymous report on someone else as a point of contention in their anonymous report on DeVault. These people are so unserious.
Do you have an actual counter-argument, or just an ad-hominem?
Nope. I already don’t listen to Drew and moved my code and donations from Sourcehut to Codeberg. You can do the work of cross referencing his claims, if you’d like.
Here was my mixed emotions read on this article 2 months ago
- https://sopuli.xyz/comment/19826576
- & I’d made an update as a child comment
You linked to the same comment twice
Oops, thank you for pointing it out!
Why does this keep making the rounds three months later? There is plenty of public commentary both from back then and more recently if you do a quick search. Everything has been said. Let this rest already.
It’s the first time I hear about it, personally, and I am very glad.
Yes by all means, let the Nazis slide back under their rocks. I’m sure ignoring them will be okay.
You are proving my point 😂
