FUTO?
“I will pay for any software, as long as it’s free” ~Richard Stallman
- What is FUTO?
that’s just a list of cool apps and projects - about/What is FUTO?
Disclaimer: All I know about FUTO comes from futo employees. Even worse, they’re employees with youtube channels.
“seeing as this is my video, I am the most right. When you go watch their video then they’re right. That’s how the internet works.”
~ Is One of the Most Played Steam Games A Scam? | Cold Take - TheOtherFrost YT
I saw a comment along the lines of “Louis has a way of being a bit too convoluted (or maybe repetitive?) + presenting things without any room for self doubt or self reflection. It does not create a climate that encourages discussion, only agreement.” Public speaking demands confidence. It’s usually that the interviews, questions and doubts go into their dedicated video. It kinda breaks flow to go back and forth on “the Apple phone is good actually, here have a link:” like I do here, no?
So these people spent a lot of time thinking about incentive structures and the failures of acqui-hires, Silicon Valley types treating the users badly and generally the culture issue where people would pay for worse software because they don’t have the option to not pay, while open source software has this attitude of “everything belongs to the commons, donation-ware built in the spare time” as if top-level engineers have that much free time. They’re taking the Cyanogen Inc. model of full time hires “everything we develop is open source, so if the project goes under, the development can continue” a step further, it’s all under a 501.3 non-profit and the developers remain project leads, FUTO isn’t supposed to interfere with where it’s going. So from the outside it looks perfect, have devs work of software that doesn’t suck, and do enough presentation 
to convince people to pay for apps that respect them. The linchpin of all this is s/w that goes beyond the FOSS standard of “80% completed, kind of a pain to set-up” and is usable by regular people, and to get there:
“FUTO sponsors multiple generous grant programs to provide funding to great projects and people. See our home page for organizations we’ve funded.” https://futo.org/grants/
So now I wear my FUTO pajamas to sleep in my FUTO bed?
Out of their apps I only used Grayjay and the Keyboard.
Grayjay: It’s built to be easy to create plug-ins for all streaming platforms people want, Odysee, Spotify, PeerTube, to have them all in one place because asking people to go to a different app to watch your stuff… means they won’t watch your stuff. Better to smooth out the transition, no need to give up your regular yt channels (unless yt bans or takes down the videos, then the users keep getting them in the same feed, from the altertative hosts).
If Google tries to cease&desist, all that can be hit is the plug-in itself, which is easy to replicate. Learning from Vanced, and Re-Vanced, no single point of failure and no over-complicated fragile micro architecture-dependent injectors. It’s open source, and that kinda forces them to implement things people want to avoid protest-forks (looking at you, Tubular. No hate, I like it). Some people don’t like SponsorBlock, it infringes on Mr. Clinton’s freedom of meow, so it’s disabled by default. One oddity is that playlists don’t show up on search results, you have to go to the dedicated “Playlists” section, there’s a bespoke “Playlist Search”.
It shows creator’s merch below the currently playing video, I have no opinion on that, it’s unintrusive enough that I don’t mind. (I’d rather print their designs on one of my own shirts and just donate, to avoid shipping fees, burning fuel and I know for sure the shirt is my size.)
- I still prefer NewPipe, when it works, there’s no beating a simple, fast client; fast-forward during silence my beloved. It’s also more of a hobbyist project, so when youtube decides to break something, it takes them a day or two to fix it, and I have to download the apk myself because f-droid wants to test the packages more thoroughly. (did you know that android doesn’t allow sending&receiving of APK files via Bluetooth?).
Keyboard: open source swipe, finally! It’s not as good at predicting as Microsoft Swiftkey, but at this point I’m just happy that something exists. I like how it suggests emoji, like if you type the word “turkey” a 
appears in the err… word suggestion bar. The killer feature is the offline Voice input, by the developer of Live Captions | Flathub. Gotta download the whattheyrecalled, training data model weights language packs separately.
- New Privacy Keyboard By Rossmann - ThePrimeTime yt
4:18 about comments asking for technical content on yt.
Grayjay and the keyboard are like KDE apps, standardized base platforms with many plugins running inside, full of features and the occasional weird glitch because some applets crashed while others are still running.
Immich and Circles: I like how these are two separate, host-your-own-cloud projects. Immich is ultra-fast and has a local AI model to understand what is in the picture to help you search for stuff; looking to add federation in the future. Circles is like a fully encrypted “close friends and family” Instagram. Limitations on what you can do with an encrypted cloud and all that, no need to slow down Immich to bolt-on features it wasn’t built to handle.
“You like the software. Great. Pay for it. That’s it. No DRM.” ~Eron Wolf.
“We offer a way to pay for the app once. The app will function identically without paying.”
They’re calling it a purchase. You’re not donating, it’s not charity, you’re getting quality software made by full-time employees. It’s Eron Wolf that burns money on charity because he wants to see this happen, giving people the agency to vote with their wallet for something that’s “worth it”.
Murena’s claim to fame is that they handle both the phone warranties, ROM/OS, the apps and the de-googled server software. Murena has to thank their lucky stars that a previous project lead for GrapheneOS has beef with Louis, because Graphene ROM with FUTO Apps, Nextcloud/Proton servers and more devices supported would have been THE combo, with their social media presence. (Want to write an OS? Start a TikTok et al. That’s how we all learned out about TempleOS). Maybe I’ll get a Pixel 6 to play around with Graphene when it drops under $100. As it stands, FUTO got closer to Calyx and now focuses on apps and user experience, throwing some shade at Nextcloud for being a slow lumbering provider of public office infrastructure gunning for Microsoft’s place. Futo’s looking to start their own hosting offers, if you don’t want to handle the server side of things.
The Five Pillars of FUTOey Software
Source First /Open Source If people are to have control over the computers in their lives, they must have the capability to inspect and modify the software running on them.
Self Manageable Servers (if applicable) Servers should be Source First too. It should be relatively easy for a user to run their own server for whatever service their client software needs.
Sovereign Identity (if applicable) Servers must allow the user to authenticate with a private/public key pair. Email and phone number authentication is sensible for normies, but it must always be possible for a user to transition to using a sovereign mechanism.
Open Databases (if applicable) Crowdsourced content should never be kept hidden in a silo by the crowdsourcer. The creator of the content most likely intended for their work to be distributed as widely as possible. The crowdsourcer must provide reasonable mechanisms for the content to be distributed by others.
End-to-end Encryption (if possible) Servers should never be able to leverage their man in the middle status to discern the content of communications between their users.
0. Don’t Suck. This applies to all software, FUTOey or not. We have accomplished nothing if our software is sluggish, unreliable, or lacks key features. Our clients need to be delightful. Our servers need to help our clients be delightful.
If you tolerated my “include e v e r y t h i n g” writing so far, here’s the full interview/stream where they answer all the questions about structures, goals, to ground-floor programming and triggering the events on the downpress, not the off-press.
Timestamps and my extra comments
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12 minute preamble on Louis’s channel
00:00 issues with the Android ecosystem
02:55 Nextcloud and Immich, a cloud not connected to the internet.
04:36 Video proxies
07:06 Let’s give them millions of dollars. What could possibly go wrong?“Now typically when an open source project has an infusion of capital by a billionaire 99% of the time you are right to think that something bad is about to happen. So we wanted to have an hour and a half long talk with the community where we answer your questions both the easy ones and the very difficult ones to give you an idea of how this works.”
08:37 4 years later, what did the non-profit achieve?
09:30 “Don’t trust me. You should not have to trust me.”
11:06 Vote with your wallet doesn’t work, there are no good alternatives. “Will people pay for it if we build it?” Changing the culture, making people the customer again.
0:00 Introduction
9:30 How does FUTO intend to fund Immich? Will there be monetization? And if so, in what form?
13:56 What sort of return on investment is FUTO looking for when funding the Immich team?
“I want this to become sustainable, that would be a huge success. Chasing 10x ROIs is vulgar, you only get that by abusing customers.”
18:05 How does FUTO make money? Where does the money come from? I learned that nothing is free, you always pay somehow.
This has an interesting answer:
“You’re asking people to pay for FOSS? How do you make money?” Where does the money come from? You. Do you think this is good? We’re asking people to pay for it, we’re not calling it a donation and we’re not calling it “free” software because we want people to pay for it. Do you have the ability to use it for free? Yes. But we’re hoping that if we honestly put out our product and we say “yeah the trial period is indefinite and you can read the source code if you want” that that will develop enough good will that people will say “you know what yeah I’ll pay five bucks for this” so when somebody asked “If I self-host my own instance why should I pay?” um because they coded it. I can’t code this[…] It’s so much faster than nextcloud that I want to say thanks."
22:15 What would happen to Immich if FUTO went under in the future?
26:00 Will FUTO have any access whatsoever to my content as someone self-hosting Immich? Analytics or AI or any kind built into the platform that they can access?
30:50 Will Immich undergo an independent security audit after FUTO takes over?
32:40 Will anyone still be able to volunteer on Immich development on Github?
34:03 Side note: FUTO, an engineering-driven company
35:28 Side note: Very little will change
36:53 The immich logo/brand and name will belong to FUTO, how could a potential fork legally be like with it still being recognized as “immich”?
40:26 If we don’t like the direction FUTO takes Immich, will a pre-FUTO version of Immich be available that we don’t have to update and can remain stable locally?
43:30 I am working on ImmichStat, a self-hosted companion website that shows in-depth statistics of my Immich instance. Will I be able to still use the name Immich?
45:04 FUTO seems heavily involved and invested in blockchain. Is Immich going to be changed in this way? What if we don’t want to be associated with crypto, blockchain, etc?
47:02 Eron, what can you tell the people who believe this is probably going to ruin this amazing project on the long run? Would you put out an official statement about no ads, dataminers or paid features?
49:25 Will immich stay on GitHub or be moving to the FUTO Gitlab?
Zulip, the only chat app that runs fast on a Raspberry Pi.
52:21 Do you have an exit strategy if things don’t work out with them? Transferring all rights mean you would not work anymore on it if there’s a dispute? Would you just fork it?
52:32 Is FUTO/Immich looking for more developers to join full or part time? Are pay ranges disclosed?
54:55 How will very long term project maintenance work now that funding is suspended outside FUTO, and now that IP has been transferred?
55:42 What conditions did FUTO set? Will you still be able to accept donations from other people? Will they own the source code?
1:00:32 FUTO has given a grant to Zulip. On Immich’s Discord someone recently was pushing Zulip. Is FUTO going to force the community to migrate to Zulip?
Telegram responsiveness on the downpress, Engineering tangents, The FUBS bare-metal programming environment that cold-boots to the program in 400ms on a PineBook.
1:07:01 Side note: What will actually change?
1:09:18 How did FUTO pay attention to you?
1:11:05 As a company, can I still offer infrastructure and support for running Immich for my users? So not selling Immich, but selling the online service to people interested in FOSS without IT skills or hw.
1:12:47 Chat comment: Is encryption on your mind? There are less good software app offering encryption.
1:14:40 Will merch be available?
1:15:18 Was there anything that came close to preventing immich from joining FUTO? Like a major disagreement?
1:15:39 Are there any plans to integrate Immich with any of the other FUTO projects (e.g. FUTO) in the future?
1:17:36 Are y’all ever gonna have a stable release that just gets bugfixes and security updates? If so, when?
1:18:28 Can you share some future features? Looking forward to something like a baked-in duplicate photo-finder, auto-add face to albums, fine-tuning on machine learning, features, and maybe highlight videos?
1:21:10 Chat comment: It seems like you throw away money with no plan for profitability. - Talking about the general mindset that people associate OSS with not being able to make money/not being allowed to take money. Good software costs money!
“I could use audio plugins in video editing software from 2002 but not in Kdenlive in 2024. We want open source software to be something where it’s not considered by default "Wait, what do you mean you’re spending money on development? Of course you’re not going to make money.” that’s a fundamental problem with the culture and it’s why we’re to the point where you literally don’t have a choice for certain verticals to get something that doesn’t suck unless you want to just be spied on, tracked, or be stuck in Apple’s ecosystem. One of the things that drives us not to that… There are projects where even if it is open source and free the simple act of saying “would you pay for it?” there are certain people that frown upon that in this kind of communistic way like you’re literally not even allowed to ask for money; how dare you ask for money to feed your family or pay your rent while you’re producing software that millions of people use. And I think that I find it detestable and I think Eron does too."
“Are you talking about kind of the fact that big Tech has abused people for so long that they just don’t trust any kind of free market solution is that…
-The attitude in open source that if you even ask for somebody to pay for the software, there are people out there that will actually get mad at you for that.
-Yeah and I do think the people who get triggered by people asking to get paid have been abused by big Tech monopolies for so long they may not even remember a time when the free market was working properly, that they just have an instinctive distrust of any time people mention free market. I want the free market to work, that’s what we’re going for. If you disagree, if you think all software should be owned by The Commons, it’s okay for you to try to do that but don’t bother us, is what I would say. That’s not what we’re going for here.”
- I think I’m sensitive to this stuff since I worked a few years in a grocery store, dealing with old Warsaw-pact era comunists that genuinely expected to take bread from the store and not pay for it for weeks on end, and would make a scene about it. What can I say, capitalism is still new and novel for us, think of Marcus from Borderlands. Even after the revolution, the only people that knew a thing or two about capitalism were criminals smuggling goods over the border, that subsequently became oligarchs and paralyzed the economy for the next 20 years.
The discussion continues about pride in ownership, and completing consumer-facing software too, not just that proverbial back-bone maintained by one dude in Nebraska. And how to prevent big companies from taking over open standards, ruining them, and people accepting that because the interface is polished.
1:27:07 Coming back to features.
1:28:12 Will Louis Rossmann promote Immich as a Google Photos/iCloud alternative on his YouTube channel?
1:29:35 What are the plans to make Immich a stable piece of software? For example, the iOS app is still a bit buggy.
“We went to the Matrix at FOSDEM and they did not once acknowledge that Discord existed or Microsoft teams existed, they didn’t even think that they needed to be better than those. We’re aware that yeah sure Apple does suck but they’re also good and we have to be better than them.”
1:32:00 Final words. Thank you all!
The presentation itself ~Molly Rocket YT
“Casey Muratori is awesome. My boss is trying to solve the 30 million line problem with an approach I can best describe as Terry Davis meets Howard Hughes. If you think this would be a cool thing to work on and get paid to contribute to, and are qualified to work on it, FUBS · Wiki · Eron / Public · GitLab email me - louis@rossmanngroup.com
This is totally unrelated to the topic of the video but pinning just incase there are some other programming geniuses out there watching this video. You never know, I’ve found 3 already just from comments section…”
The FUBS bare-metal programming environment that cold-boots to the program in 400ms on a PineBook.
Mobility Independence Foundation: FUTO’s latest grant recipient ~ Abilities Expo Houston yt.
Tech freedom beyond computers: Right to repair and open-source hardware for wheelchairs 
; “We are creating a competing supply chain”.
https://futo.org/transparency/
Source: @pixelianska
“WhatsApp is not going to go faster if you have 16 processors instead of 8”
~don’t let the thumbnail fool you, this is for Bork Spec Flip phones. ENMBOR!
Hey look it’s named after me. There were quite a few attempts to bring lightweight Web App-based smartphones, which stripped-back the useful parts of android, while keeping the interesting parts of modern web. KaiOS is such a cool idea, fitting modern webapps into cheap devices that do indeed have internet, technically. Running WhatsApp and Maps is enough to get you by in most of europe. I find these Java feature-phone demakes of bloated modern Webapps charming and nostalgic. I would have loved to see them fit Discord into 240 pixels, but uhhh…
- Is KaiOS dead ? (maybe not, or maybe) : r/KaiOS
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“The web browser is another disappointment, even when compared to the likes of Opera Mini, as it lacks tabbed browsing, the ability to save pages for offline reading, and an ad blocker. KaiOS lacks a good web browser, copy/paste functionality, and an easy way to side-load apps. ~I spent a week with a $17 KaiOS phone - here’s what I learned”
wait wait hold the phone, their latest blog post was 2 days ago and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS#Jailbreak
See it in action!
- Finally! a usable Discord App for KaiOS devices! r/KaiOS
~image credit: diamondburned/Kaicord
