I mean FUTO specifically. It’s not about what license they’re using per se. It’s about them:

• Co-opting the term Open Source. (By the time their apology came, it was far to little too late.)
• …specifically in an effort to sabotage the whole OSS movement by diluting the term. (Especially in the wake of big asshole companies like Meta doing the same.)
• Talking smack about OSS and further pushing their anti-Open-Source agenda in their supposed “apology” to the people they pissed off for having co-opted the term.
• All while acting extremely sanctimonious about how they’re revolutionizing consumer rights in tech or whatever.
• …with a supposedly better license that’s “Open Source plus pay nag screens”. Congratulations, you’ve solved enshittification. (/s)

FUTO Is a for-profit company. If they’d started out saying “yeah, our stuff isn’t Open Source, but it is shared-source and we don’t think we can really survive as a company without nag screens”, I wouldn’t be pissed at them. I still more likely than not wouldn’t use their software, but I wouldn’t be calling them “evil”. But as it is, I’m convinced FUTO is just an asshole company trying to use consumer rights hype and formerly the stolen “Open Source” label to increase their bottom line without even the slightest care about consumer rights in tech. Much like Apple’s famous 1984 Superbowl ad.

As for Rossmann himself, I don’t so much blame him. The work he’s done in increasing awareness of right-to-repair was (when I last followed him at all) awesome. I don’t know but what he got swept up in FUTO’s rhetoric before he really knew what terms like “Open Source” meant. I just hope he eventually severs his connection with FUTO and makes some public statements about what a clusterfuck FUTO committed with their whole antagonism-to-the-OSS-community thing. (Actually, I don’t know if he’s still so much involved with FUTO. Again, I haven’t been following him just because of how disgusted I am with FUTO and his connection thereto.)

Edit: Oh, also while I’m at it, it’s very shitty of them, as a fully for profit company to mislead folks into thinking they’re not-for-profit by using the “.org” top-level-domain for their domain.

FUTO’s Don’t Be Evil Conference

That ship sailed long ago.

♫ Yakety yak, yakety yak. ♫

This makes me think of the commandment “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” from the Dune series.

Seriously, though, I suspect a lot of technologies we currently experience in society only in the context of oppression of average people and widening of the income gap might be able to be put to better use. Not even necessarily because we have rules in place so much as because people won’t be baking their selfish asshole agendas into the tech they build.

That all kindof assumes that humanoid robots would be “tools” for humans to “use”. If of course they (or at least some of them) are more like sentient creatures with hopes and dreams and emotions, that might make for a much different conversation. And that feels like the kind of conversation that’d be hard to even comment on today.

I’m sure it’s sped up.

God I hope so. That video alone is terrifying whether it’s sped up or not. (I concur it’s probably sped up, but jeez.)

The repair cafe has a hackerspace/makerspace in back. The local LUG meets there on Thursdays. And they help maintain the 3d printers and library software at the library two doors down. As well as providing them lendable hardware put together from donated parts. And there are no due dates or late fees.

That’s once more than for me.