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Immich: FUTO — 2 years later

15d 16h ago by jlai.lu/u/overstep8556 in selfhosted from immich.app

When Immich originally joined FUTO two years ago, the news was received with a healthy level of skepticism. Who was FUTO? Why did they want to "acquire" Immich? Did this mean the beginning of the end for the product? Well, it's been almost two years now and we thought it would be fun to have a little retrospective on how things have played out since then.

"Look how much FUTO didn't fuck up" is a weird blog post to write... But the important thing is still true, Immich is still AGPL.

Nah, "look how much new owning company didn't fuck up" is actual news these days. Its good to know that they've been doing well since the aquisition.

only because it'd be hard to get away from the AGPL. FUTO's other licenses are weird for no apparent reason. They make a pretty nice android keyboard, but the license sucks, so I don't use it.

Isn't the license for the keyboard basically just a source-available non-commercial use license?

I mean sure, completely open source would be better, but I can definitely understand why they don't want some big tech company just taking their work and monetizing it

Yes: https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard?tab=License-1-ov-file

But that is still less good than proper Free Software.

I would like FUTO more if they didn't veer off of open source licensing

I agree, but I'm still glad some rich people are spending tons of money to make some free and very useful apps for me.

Ideally they should be doing it like the millionaire that partially funds KDE though.

Are you talking about gaming's lord and savior who casually drops dough on FOSS people and doesn't talk about it everywhere on the internet?

Gaben is great!

But I was thinking of the founder of Blue Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems

According to Blue Systems employee Aurélien Gâteau, "Blue Systems does not have a business model, at least for now".

Nice

The guy (Clemens tönnies) is an asshole nonetheless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems

Biggest meat manufacture in Europe, bad conditions for animals, rotten meat, very tightly knitt family with strange mafia like structure.

Yes he is funding development and that is great but fo r him it is nothing more that saving some pennies on taxes.

I am not trying to defend him or anything, I know nothing about this guy.

But, according to the Wikipedia article, he stepped down from tönnies, he only inherited the wealth from his father, his brother now runs the business.

So he doesn't have that much to do with the tönnies business.

Interesting, I'll read up on that.

Edit: yeah no. He stepped down but holds a significant share in tonnies. And just for kicks: if you speak German read the controversy section on Wikipedia. Atrocious.

If I understood right, Clemens tönnies is the uncle, deeply involved in the slaughtering and with the racism controversies. A real asshole. Clemens tönnies Junior is the one funding the software and he sold all the shares of the slaughtering company to his brother a decade ago. Maybe a better person?

Okay, I overlooked the junior ... Sorry. Will adjust my posts

Its still AGPL, so that is good! But for other things, yes.

Do you mind elaborating more on the topic? I see them stressing that the licence is AGPL and it didn’t change. Is there anything else that is not obvious from the first glance?

Immich is AGPL, but other software they make, like the FUTO Keyboard, are under the nonfree FUTO License

And yet immich is still ahold, so I guess futo has been a clear win so far for immich.

While I would prefer gpl3, still futo so far has delivered only good stuff. (I also use futo keyboard and voice typing).

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Whats-up-with-FUTO/

FUTO is associated with Curtis Yarvin

According to the article you linked it isn't. They platformed him but it isn't owned by him and he doesn't work for them.

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/23176

FUTO has demonstrated other sketchy behavior. The relevant comments were collapsed when I opened the page FWIW.

Also, platforming Yarvin alone is enough for me to avoid FUTO. Everyone is free to draw their line in the sand where they will.

I edited my previous comment from "FUTO is Curtis Yarvin" to "FUTO is associated with Curtis Yarvin" to be more precise.

I completely agree. I just thought it important to be accurate with these criticisms.

Good on ya for the edit :)

Agreed, accuracy and sources are important!

I'm confused. Are futo the bad guys now? All I know about them is that Louis Rossman used to be involved with them. I like Rossman's stuff / the futo speech to text is great (gladly donated to it).

Dunno if Rossman's split with them was just so he could focus on FULU or something more.

Hardly.

Curtis Yarvin and his associates have talked to FUTO and attempted to pitch Eron on investing in his tech startup Urbit. Yarvin also sat down and talked to Eron about issues relating to technology. Eron did not agree to fund their work and did not find their pitch to be particularly compelling. That is the extent of FUTO's relationship with Yarvin and Urbit.

Source: your github link below.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer LettersMore Letters
CFCloudFlare
CGNATCarrier-Grade NAT
DNSDomain Name Service/System
HTTPHypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPSHTTP over SSL
IPInternet Protocol
NASNetwork-Attached Storage
NATNetwork Address Translation
NUCNext Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
SSHSecure Shell for remote terminal access
SSLSecure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLSTransport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
UDPUser Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications
VPNVirtual Private Network
VPSVirtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

15 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

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I did not know this bot existed that is pretty cool.