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About “fauxpen source”, FUTO, fascists and capitalism (drewdevault.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 12 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Wow, I never knew about all this. Its quite shocking since in my limited knowledge of FUTO I was under the impression that they support Open Source and are generally good.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    I mean, they do still give money to good open source projects.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Would you consider it a good deed if a rich person gave a homeless person 1 euro while not around other people, and then went around the city proclaiming they support homeless people and have been funding them? In my opinion thats not a good deed.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    I don't think that comparison is entirely fair, but I do think that homeless person having 1 euro is still better than that person not having 1 euro. Especially if instead of 1 euro, they actually gave the homeless donation equivalent of keeping a project like Immich viable.

    I'd also keep in mind that there are other rich person not giving 1 euro to a homeless person, and so while I have my reservations about rich people in general, I wouldn't necessarily single out the one that gave the euro.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    My point was basically to try to make you look at it from a different perspective. Sure 1 euro is better than 0, but thats not the point I was trying to make.

    That looks at it from the perspective of the person in need of that 1 euro, or however much money. Im asking you to look at it from the perspective of the one giving the money. Now ask yourself why they would give just 1, if they can give 5, or 10, or give 1 consistently every month, assuming theyre rich-rich compared to the homeless guy.

    The reason seems to be that the person giving the money doesnt care about helping in any way, they just want to do the minimum so that they can claim they help abd support the homeless.

    Context and intent matters when discussing things like this, I think. If the intent is self serving, we shouldnt be treating FUTO as a beacon of OSS support. What we should be doing is acknowledging that they did give a small one time donation to various projects, but also recognising that it was for self-serving reasons. I'm sure theres individuals who have given more than 1000 in single payments to these projects, or less but more consistently (monthly, every 6 months, every year, etc). What makes FUTO more of a supporter than those individuals?

    Anyway, I hope I explained my thinking well enough :)

    Edit: I gave you the upvote even though I dont entirely agree with the way you see this matter, simply because I saw you got downvoted probably by someone else who disagrees with your opinion. However, upvotes/downvotes should be used to rate quality of discussion, not agreement/disagreement with the content.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Haha, don't worry, I get that perspective. I was actually trying to do the opposite - I feel like the perspective you outline is the default one people will usually take, so I wanted to change that :P I think this article does a good job of that too: just because they're not perfect, doesn't mean someone actively doing some good deserves negative attention, when we don't give that same treatment to others who do less good.

    That said, I'm not arguing that we should "be treating FUTO as a beacon of OSS support". I do actually agree with all of this:

    What we should be doing is acknowledging that they did give a small one time donation to various projects, but also recognising that it was for self-serving reasons. I’m sure theres individuals who have given more than 1000 in single payments to these projects, or less but more consistently (monthly, every 6 months, every year, etc). What makes FUTO more of a supporter than those individuals?

    If it wasn't for this article, I wouldn't actually be talking about FUTO. (Except in the context of Immich, where they actually are the main reason the project's doing well.) So I don't feel like we need to start negatively discussing them just because they're not perfect.

    And don't worry about the downvotes, I don't actually care about them.

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    Only so they can use the projects in advertising without their consent:

    So I asked Rich Felker, the maintainer of musl libc, about the FUTO grant, and he didn’t know anything about it. Rich and I spoke about this for a while and eventually Rich uncovered a transaction in his GitHub sponsors account from FUTO: a one-time donation of $1,000. This payment circumvents musl’s established process for donations from institutional sponsors. 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.

    The extent of the FUTO “grant program”, at least in the case of musl libc, involved ignoring musl’s established process for institutional sponsors, quietly sending a modest one-time donation to one maintainer, and then plastering the logo of a well-respected open source project on a list of “grant recipients” on their home page. Rich eventually posted on Mastodon to clarify that the use of the musl name and logo here was unauthorized.

    I also asked someone I know on the ffmpeg project about the grant that they had received from FUTO and she didn’t know anything about it, either. Here’s what she said:

    I’m sure we did not get a grant from them, since we tear each other to pieces over everything, and that would be enough to start a flame war. Unless some dev independently got money from them to do something, but I’m sure that we as a project got nothing. The only grant we’ve received is from the STF last year.

    Neovim is another project FUTO lists as a grant recipient, and they also have a separate process for institutional sponsors. I didn’t reach out to anyone to confirm, but FUTO does not appear on the sponsor list so presumably the M.O. is the same. This is also the case for Wireshark, Conduit, and KiCad. GrapheneOS is listed prominently as well, but that doesn’t seem to have worked out very well for them. Presumably ffmpeg received a similar quiet donation from FUTO, rather than something more easily recognizable as a grant.

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  • [–] -2 points 9 months ago

    Yeah I read the article. Still, musl libc received $1000, the advertising didn't sell anything, and it got corrected after it got pointed out. One of the founders maybe did associate themselves with someone whose views I might not like, but I feel like if their main goal was to promote that person, there would've been more efficient ways to use that money to do so that would not resolve in musl libc receiving $1000, or in a project like Immich being viable.

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