spon·sor

I know about Corey Doctorow and his coining of the term and his book. I appreciate there are people like him, they do make a difference. I've never heard of Bradley Kuhn, thanks for pointing him out. I'll look him up.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. People like these are doing what they can to further knowledge about how shit is extremely wrong and needs to change.

Louis Rossmann uses the following he has built up over the years to carry the word on the extreme enshittification we live in, and pushes for changes that will be beneficial for us at the legislative level as much as at the operating level.

I do believe that Futo and it's owner are just trying to benefit from him, but that does not remove the fact that Rossmann has also taken advantage of Futo to improve our situation as much as he can without making a penny out of it for himself.

Honor where honor's due, that's my thing.

Are they sitting through hours of legislature meetings just to have a 60 sec chance to speak? Are they meeting with legislators and city councils to discuss causes they care about? Are they making YouTube content going over lengthy legal documents to show people the problem?

Or are they mostly writing books and speaking at paid conferences?

IDK about you, but the former sounds a lot less bougie than the latter.

Isn't part of their mission that the reputation shouldn't matter?

Not at all, at least when it comes to their organization and its investments. Their donations to OSS are one thing, but FUTO controls the name and brand of their direct investments like GrayJay and Immich. This makes FUTO a brand and separating a brand from its reputation isn’t something that can be done. FUTO is a company and companies aren’t your friends. They can promise whatever they want, but they are accountable to what they do.

They themselves have put a huge emphasis on their reputation in terms of their OSS donations as well, often at the expense of transparency and the sovereignty of the projects they’re “supporting”, which is actually what the original post we’re commenting on is about. They were caught slipping donations to individual maintainers of projects and not the projects themselves in order to avoid project rules about institutional donors, and then they plastered the name and logo of these projects on their website without permission. They did this to improve their reputation and instill a sense of trust in the community. Doing so in such a shady, under the table way actively undermines trust.

FUTO is an investment company like any other, only with a mission statement of “Don’t worry, we’re one of the good ones, primarily due to INSERT BELIEFS”. Then they act in a way in flagrant contradiction of those beliefs.

Anybody who feels uneasy over this behavior is 100% justified. Anyone’s who’s lived through Apple’s “Monopoly busting underdog” or Google’s “free and open internet for all, don’t be evil” eras doubly so.