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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?

    Well, there’s Corey Doctorow, of course. He literally wrote the book on Enshittification.

    There are definitely more “behind the scenes” folks doing a lot for that particular cause who don’t so much have a following of anywhere near the same size, but nonetheless do fight enshittification in big ways. Bradley Kuhn comes to mind.



  • This is all in reference to this article.

    FUTO is an organization that talks a lot of rhetoric about being some bastion of consumer rights in tech, but they’re doing a lot of shitty, shady, and downright evil things. Among them, FUTO has been in the practice of making small grants to FOSS projects (like ffmpeg and musl) and then plastering the FOSS project’s name and logo all over the FUTO site in a way that makes it seem as if FUTO is endorsed by said FOSS projects when that’s not the case at all.

    (All this after doing everything in their power with their rhetoric to try to discredit and degrade the entire FOSS community. They wrote an “apology”, but even in the apology, they express their “disdain for OSI approved licenses”. Mind you, none of FUTO’s projects are Open Source most of their projects are proprietary.)

    After that article came out just a couple of days ago, apparently they redid their site, I’d have to guess in an effort to address the concern that the way FUTO presented their grant program before implied endorsement by a lot of FOSS projects that didn’t endorse them in any way. I don’t think they’ve done enough, and there are tons of other reasons to think FUTO is evil assholes using consumer rights rhetoric to manipulate people in service to its (fully for-profit) bottom line.

    Other concerns in the article include FUTO’s connection to explicit/proud fascists and using their platform to (even coercing Louis Rossmann into) spread fascist propaganda.

    And I’ve got plenty more to say about how evil FUTO is.