Tech Over Tea - The Great Open Source Debate | FUTO

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

A few weeks back I did a video on FUTO's open source definition, this was followed up by a response from FUTO and further videos from me, and today we have Michael from FUTO on the podcast to chat about FUTO's stance on open source, why they initially took this stance on open source, and where they want to take things in the future. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://futo.org/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FUTOTECH Peertube: https://peertube.futo.org/ Twitter: https://x.com/FUTO_Tech ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as always your host Brodie Robertson and today This is this is kind of a big one. I don't really know how it's happened I know that you would say like you've seen my content before but today After I did that video on Futo. No, I'm gonna make sure I Correctly I I think in the video actually did mispronounce it a couple of times and no one caught it. But today we have Michael from Futewon to talk about their open source definition, to talk about the goals of the organization, where it's going, and the new direction. Well, maybe not new direction, but new phrasing of the direction they're going.

So welcome to the show and I guess just introduce yourself. Yeah, so I'm, thank you to have a, sorry, thanks for having us on. I'm Michael from Fudo. I'm the director of growth here at Fudo. I kind of want to, I guess I should start this off by giving like the standard corporate boilerplate that these opinions are my own and I do not represent FUDO. Because on some of these issues that we're going to talk about, there's a lot of discussion about these topics internally. And I want to try to faithfully represent these conversations that are happening, but that might be a bit of a challenge. So I think I want to to, these are my opinions. We're a pretty diverse organization

in terms of our internal stances on some of these issues. Okay. Well, with that being said, then I guess, what is your background in this space? My background, I'm actually, I dropped out of a PhD program and I'm actually a cryptographer for the most part. So, I'm actually, I dropped out of a PhD program and I'm actually a cryptographer for the most part. But now I'm working on more of like the business side of things at Fudo.

Okay. So before we get into any of the like important disagreements, what is Fudo and what is the goal of the organization? FUDO and what is the goal of the organization? Okay. So FUDO is an organization I would say that is dedicated to creating software and technology that disrupts big tech. That's about as simply as I can put it. We have both in-house engineering projects that we invest in as a kind of like incubator. We also sponsor software projects

that already exist through our grants program. We're mainly interested in attempting to fight the kind of, I guess you could call it like a stranglehold that Silicon Valley has over the consumer software space. I guess here we often say stuff like, people have totally lost control over what happens on their computers. And most open source projects that are trying to solve this issue are, you know, completely

funded or beholden to large corporate business interests, or they're not popular. Like these are the two halves of what is going on here in this kind of open source space a lot of the time. And so at our core, we're just trying to like stop big tech and attempt to do, I guess I would describe it as a kind of like agitation via investment. So in the office here, people will often say things like our goal is to take down Google or take down Apple. Like we say this as a kind of joke, but it really is our goal here. Yeah. And so I can go through a lot of the stuff that we funded or this the projects that

we sponsor if you want well yeah let's let's start with um let's start with that like what projects firstly what projects are like developed under the banner of futo and also what projects have you funded outside of futo so um yeah i would say so we we have a lot of, we fund a lot of things. You don't have to go through everything, but some of like the nodal ones that people are going to recognize. I'll try. I'll try. Okay. So internally in-house incubated, we have Circles, which is kind of like an encrypted photo sharing app built on top of Matrix.

We have Polycentric, which is a decentralized social network. We have like the fudo keyboard with text-to-speech which has uh local inference on it so uh there's no network connectivity we were actually talking about this one recently with a we had a person in the office who saw the text-to- speech inference and was like confused like how is this happening locally on my phone? It's so good. And he actually went into Graphene and blacklisted the app, and it was still working. And he was just like, oh, wow, you're not lying.

We fund Image, which is a kind of privacy-oriented replacement for Google Photos or iCloud. We also fund a, I don't know if you necessarily want me to say one of these, we created a video client that you can use to watch videos from all the various video platforms. I'm going to try,

we should probably discuss it a little bit, but I'm going to try and be courteous to not get you a warning on YouTube or something. i've been lucky with it whenever i've brought up the name it's never happened maybe they just have an issue with lewis i'm not sure i i don't know um i guess another notable one is we have harbor which is an identity vouching app i it's hard to describe i i guess the closest thing to it is Keybase. And since Keybase no longer exists.

Oh, I didn't realize it no longer exists. I mean, it exists in some sense. It was bought by Zoom, the video company. And so the product is not the same as it was, I guess is how I would describe it. Okay, that's fair. Yeah. And in terms of stuff we've sponsored outside of our banner, we have, oh my gosh, we have PeerTube, Signal, Tor, Freenet. We have both Calix and Graphene OS.

We also obviously have all of the Rossman projects, like the Repair Preservation Group. like the Rossman projects, like the repair preservation group. We funded a lot of the right to repair lobbying efforts that are happening via Rossman around the country. I guess and I can name some of the smaller projects that have gotten micro grants like GIMP, FFMPEG, VLC, Blender. I if you want to know more, go on our website. Yeah, I've got the website up right now,

and I see a big list here, like VLC, Zulu, yeah, FFmpeg, Blender, Darktable, KeyPassXC, NeoVim, the FSF. Yeah, and we're always open to funding more things, honestly. Like, at the end of the day we just we just like funding projects that um you know we see as supporting our mission which is like destroying big tech well on that note um obviously if there's things that like uh behind the scenes can't explain it like that's that's fine but like where does the funding of Futo come from um so the our

CEO is uh Aaron Wolfe who was a developer at Yahoo back in the day he developed Yahoo games which was then bought by Yahoo he then worked at Yahoo um and then on top of that he was an early seed investor in whatsapp okay and so he as far as i i'm not sure the exact numbers but he is a billionaire and this is his money almost exclusively this is basically just uh that's that's how most of these things are funded okay when you said whatsapp it's like ah yes that makes sense yeah yeah if you say early whatsapp early paypal anything like that like yes okay that makes a lot of sense yes yes and so you know most of this like it's you know a lot of it is like we're not a non-profit but a lot of this is donations and a lot of the incubated investments are also like,

you know, a lot of these investments are intended to be an agitational device. Like our video client is an activist device fundamentally. Like we are basically saying, you know, screw Google. Like that is what we were trying to say. Right. By, by funding these kinds of apps, like that is, that is explicitly our goal. And, uh, if these things do make money, nice, but if they don't make money, that's still okay.

Yeah. And you've got this page on the website. What does FUTO believe? And there's a couple of key points on here. You've got failure of the free market, ethical capitalism, there's a section on social media, and then a section on cryptocurrency as well. Yeah, we can go into some of this. So the belief here is essentially that you have a two-pronged issue here,

which is, first off, the free market that everyone likes so much has failed to stop all these like tech monopolies from forming and taking over essentially everything and controlling in some cases, most aspects of a lot of people's lives are in these like walled garden tech monopolies that the free market isn't fixing. And then on the other half, you have like the Free Software Foundation, or these like kind of open source community projects, which are like, you know, the Free Software Foundation is a shell of what it used to be. And it doesn't have the kind of advocacy power that it used to have. And so in a certain sense, this space is kind of empty.

And we have a million problems with the OSI and the OSIs, like projects that are under the banner of the OSI also. But for the most part, we support the mission of the Free Software Foundation. But we think that they're not you know currently in any position to do much of anything right right okay sorry for cutting you off there what i was going to say is you don't like the mission of the osi but you you have the issue with the fsf you have is that they're just way too small to really do anything productive at this point yeah i mean it's it's kind of they won the battle in terms of like server-side softwares, I guess is what I would say. They have won this battle. And in a sense, that's about all

they've won. When it comes to consumer-facing software, this battle is incredibly lost. battle is incredibly lost. I ideally want my mom to be able to run free software. And we are in a state right now where there is no real usable option for most of these things that fall under the banner of free software. Right.

And that's just a failure on their part. So they've won all these historical battles. Linux is running every server, but they've failed at this greater greater goal which is like consumer market capture i yeah i don't know what they could have done to really resolve that like that's the thing by the time that the consumer side on linux had really become like a major a major point like that was already well into like Windows 2000 era Windows XP and like it was a very uphill battle by then like I wish it had happened as well but it was a massive battle and yes you did have minor minor victories that are

like you know things people remember like windows return day things like that but it's sort of a drop in the bucket yeah like i i know it has a lot of currency in the the you know in in the space of like software developers or people like you and me but um in terms of their actual power into in the public eye has just dwindled down to almost nothing. And I saw once where you covered a blog post that was just talking about a lot of criticisms of the FSF. And I kind of agree with that sort of blog posts thing, which is that even in terms of how they're acting

within the world right now, a lot of this is extraneous conversations about semantics that we hear kind of dislike. And I feel like that kind of loses the thread of what actually made them powerful at the beginning. Like the like trying to do the GNU, it's GNU Linux versus Linux thing is just like, why are you expending so much energy on this?

Just move on kind of semantic issues i guess when you're at this point where you are a fairly small organization the only things that you really realistically can fight are the semantic issues which don't really require that many resources like if you get some viral video that goes out like that's all you need to really fight the semantic arguments whereas Whereas making actual change, making software, like, you know,

making a big blue button like that, making that the main way that people do online calling. Like that's a very difficult thing to do. Yeah. And, and the thing about them is that like what made them powerful at the beginning was making goods, usable software and licenses for their time anyway, you know, like, in the time

of like Unix, and like, you know, early Windows, like this is what a good usable software is for the general public. But at this point, that like, just doesn't really cut it. And I guess there's various interconnected reasons for why that is. So I guess I would say one of the more complicated reasons is that people just don't like doing QA, or quality assurance, or UI work. And they don't like doing that on their free software projects.

So most FOSS projects have terrible UIs. They're half finished and they're buggy messes because these are like passion projects that people are doing in their spare time. And you really just don't wanna do QA grunt work on your fun side project. And so one of the goals here with this kind of licensing that we're introducing and one of our overall goals is that we kind of licensing that we're introducing and

our one of our overall goals is that we we kind of just want to change the culture to make it so that working on these fun side projects is a much more viable financial option for people we want you to be able to quit your job and make these kinds of projects more of a job and less of a hobby in people's spare time. And so I guess I would say that other licenses, to maybe lead a little bit into that conversation, other licenses make it a bit difficult for developers to have their software paid for without going to large corporations. Most of the time these licenses just don't enable people to make a living on this kind of software. And I should also say, I just said a bunch of stuff about the FSF, but we've actually donated to the FSF. We're not against their mission at all.

we still think that like we need to move forward and not be stuck in like licenses and stuff from the the 90s like we we can move forward these things shouldn't be stagnant and frozen in time we can experiment and do new things like that is possible well i sort of i guess it sort of takes us into like the funding problem and the license from as you're saying there so the way that most there's sort of two ways that most uh both free software and open source projects are funded one is a donation model where users who like the application they donate if they feel like donating the second is support services so So a lot like Red Hat, Red Hat's entire model is offering support. That's pretty much the entire way. Like there's not really a sale of software that exists in this space. There is very minor cases, but that's that those are the exception.

Yes, I would say that that is true. yes i would say that that is true so what do you feel like butoh can do to address this problem that is different from what's already happening now and do you have an issue with like the current way that funding how is there an issue with the way that funding is currently done or do you feel like there is a way that it can it's already a good model but it can be expanded upon to be more viable well i i think this is one of the experiments that we're attempting to try here with um just like like first off we're we're in a certain sense we're attempting to rejuvenate this like old school shareware or freeware model. Like people here in the office, I don't know if they would like characterize it that way, but that is what we're doing is we're trying to say like, look,

in the nineties you have shareware everywhere and people were paying for it. People started entire companies on these like shareware freeware models and it just worked and it wasn't a donation it was you buying the software uh and then you could you know you could do this where you have access to the software and then you buy a license to it like this is kind of an old school model but i think it worked and i don't know why most of these software companies have ditched this kind of model to be more proprietary or to be more locked down or whatever. There are all sorts of reasons why, obviously, but I don't think that there's a really good reason for why people moved away from this other than that they want more control over their customers. They want more, you know, there's just monetary incentives

that caused the culture to move away from this. But the model worked fine. And that's the kind of model that we're trying to push, I would say. Well, when people hear that, they do hear, like Freeware obviously has like a, Freeware and Shareware obviously have like a lot of baggage attached. And when people hear that, they obviously still think of the software being monetarily free but they don't associate that with an open source like model that futo is trying to do so how does

that sort of interact with what futo is trying to do here i mean i i don't necessarily see it as some kind of i i guess i'm not sure i understand the question i i guess in a certain sense they interact because you know people like our software and they pay for it they buy a license and it's free if you don't buy a license like you can freeload. You can have the infinite trial period, so to speak, as long as you want. You don't have to buy anything. But yeah, I guess this is the thing. We want to preserve as much as we can

from these FSF-style licenses in terms of individual user freedom. And at the same time, we want to restrict developers from being exploited by corporations. It's that simple. These licenses, especially the OSI style licenses, don't stop developers from being essentially just completely exploited by these large corporations for free labor. And all we're trying to do is split the difference. Let's say like for an individual user, you basically have your freedoms preserved. And then for a large corporation,

you have to, you know, you got to pay, you got to pay up, you got to pay a lot. No, I'm just kidding. But, you know, basically make it as difficult as humanly possible for them to do anything with our software. So the reason I bring this up is because there is whenever the idea of funding is brought up in this space, a lot of people like to some people misunderstand it. Some people do bring it up as a legitimate concern there are people out there like there are big parts of the world where the idea that you can get software for free is basically the reason they are able to do computing so there are like developing nations where people just do not have the money to pay for software there are people who

are like 12 years old they don't have the ability to pay for software yet without stealing their parents' credit card. And because of that, there is sort of this, it's starting to change and people are becoming more open to being able to pay for software. But there is a lot of like cultural pushback in the free software and open source spaces about paying for software, which is kind of funny because in the early days of linux it was very common to have commercial distros it's just that i've brought this up plenty of times before ubuntu basically killed the consumer um the consumer commercial distro because it was just everything all the others did but also better yeah i. I mean, I'm old enough that as a kid, I recall my father buying a physical copy of, I think it wasn't Red Hat at the time.

It was called something else. But I had a physical cardboard box of Linux on my shelf as a kid. I remember this being the model, and I see that it's mostly dead now for Linux in particular, at least. But I guess our experience internally has been quite the opposite. Our video client app, people buy these licenses. It's not enough for it to break even or to come anywhere near the amount of investment that we put into it. But at the same time, it's a sizable amount of people that are open and willing to pay for good quality software. And I think it's a model that works.

And I think that the experimental data that we're seeing so far on the few things that we've monetized, we're just getting a lot of people, like sizable amounts of people using our software that just say like hey i like the software here's a license and reasonable pricing is the other thing about this like if we have it reasonably priced for individuals and of course like corporations uh you know if you're trying to bulk buy licenses or something as a corporate entity then we might uh you know turn the screws on you a little bit but um like uh for the most part uh you know like five six seven dollars for a lifetime license for a piece of software like i think that's pretty reasonable and a lot of people seem to think so no i think i do think it's reasonable as well um and i think that's pretty reasonable and a lot of people seem to think so no i think i do think

it's reasonable as well um and i think for a lot of people that is going to be something especially if they're coming from something like you know the adobe suite where you're spending 10x that like what i don't even know what the pricing of the adobe suite is at this point some ridiculous price um or like any any sort of like traditional commercial software where it's not even a, in a lot of cases, a lifetime license. It'll be you get a license for this month and then you're going to pay it again next month and then next month.

Maybe you get a year. Maybe you'll be lucky and get a year license. But that license could be revoked at any time if they feel like that you're using the software in a certain way. I know Adobe is doing some weird stuff where they're i think they're training on like project files and it getting people are getting banned from adobe cloud depending on stuff they have like saved in it and things getting really weird with that company like adobe is a whole a whole big thing uh but with like most other licensing, it's very much this

short-term model as opposed to what you would see back in the early 2000s and the 90s where it was common to get a lifetime license. Sometimes it would be a lifetime license for a version, like you get software version 3 and you get a lifetime to that. Sometimes it be lifetime for the software and that's that's nicer but that that is i would say less sustainable i think a if a company's selling lifetime for a specific version i i don't have an issue with that right like that's that's fine yeah i yeah and i mean we're experimenting with different pricing models to see what works, to see what's, you know, what people like. And we're open to different types of pricing models. But at the same time, like the few experiments we've been doing for the software that we currently have incubated in-house, you know, like a sizable number of people on the software that we have that has large, or not large, but semi-large bases of users,

people pay, like a sizable percentage of people pay. We might introduce something where it is versioned out in the future where it's like you're paying for this release or that release or whatever. But for now, I mean, most of these projects are in kind of like a quasi public beta almost like the the desktop version of our video client is only just now being released for example so these are very early days for a lot of these projects and we're

still trying to work out the kinks in the pricing model to find something that can work for everyone right right okay that's fair okay so let's move into the the things that have caused issues so with the futo open source definition what was the intention of releasing that document because i know now on the statement on open source it says it was meant to be like a a parody and poke fun at the osi but when i read it and when a lot of people read it it didn't feel like that and maybe i'll grant you that it was a parody okay but what i will say is like it it felt to me that it wasn't clear in any way that it was supposed to be to me like the only line that really indicated that was the first one where it was like a negation of the first line of the osi's definition but what do you have to say on that yeah so i i

would say okay so the futos the open source definition yes it was a tongue-in-cheek parody of the osi's the open source definition um i believe that that was written by our CEO, Aaron. And it's really just was just meant to be kind of like a little bit of a joke. It wasn't meant to be a document that would get like circulated around widely as like our definitions for our licensees or whatever i don't i don't know people have taken it all different kinds of ways and interpreted it all sorts of different ways but it is just meant to be a tongue-in-cheek parody of what they have written on their thing because

like we simply do not care about the os. We actively think that they're doing horrible things in open source land. I'm hesitant to use the word community over and over again, but it rolls off the tongue. I don't like the term either, really, myself. I use it because it's just easy, but yeah. We have a lot of issues with the term community here in terms of using that word for open source and all the critiques that have come out from particularly like the rails guy put

out a critique about this um but yeah so that kind of definition it really was just meant to be a parody the definition that we put out. I saw some commenters on your video that were confused, like, you wrote the exact opposite of what the OSI defines it as. Didn't you realize this is the exact opposite? Did you never read it? It's like, yeah, that's the joke. You figured it out. Like, yeah. Other than that, though, people have had a lot of issues with our use of the term, particularly Louis and Aaron, our CEO, using this term in various videos and writing. But our stance has always been that we simply just do not care about the OSI definition of the word. Like they have no right as far as we're concerned to claim that word. They lost their case about the trademark

they don't have a say in how people use that word but we we understand that like if people are confused and we're like doing all these like inside jokes about uh essentially how much we don't care about the osi uh like that's that's all well and good but if people are actually getting genuinely confused or misled or are misinterpreting what we're saying like a lot of people have been like trying to say that we're open washing it's like we're that's not our intention at all we're not trying to claim anything our license is very clear about exactly what we're doing and how we're doing it. And now it's even more clear now that we've released

our definition of source first. So from here on out, we're just going to be probably saying we are source first, here's the definition. This is what we stand by. We were just kind of using the word very cavalier because we just have disdain for these kinds of like semantic arguments in general, I guess I would say. But at the same time, we don't want to confuse people. Like it's not our goal to confuse people.

It's not our goal to like do this as like a some kind of like ploy to open wash or any of these other things. Like we are very, very consistent on where we stand on the issue. But people were taking this not in the way we intended it to be taken. We intended it to be taken as poking fun at the OSI or poking fun at these organizations that we simply don't care for. OSI in particular, they're in bed with bad actors. we simply don't care for. And, you know, like, OSI in particular, like, they're in bed with bad actors.

They're in bed with, like, these megacorps. Like, almost all their funding comes from these, like, large-scale corporations pushing a specific narrative about open source that, in my opinion, benefits, like, these monopolies. And this is part of the problem. Like, the OSI is just part of the problem

as far as we're concerned. And there's not actually working for us. I look up OSI and then I forget that OSI is also the name of a networking model and it doesn't come up when I search for it. Oh, yeah. It's open source initiative. No, I know it is, but I just searched for OSI

and it didn't come up properly. Okay, yeah, keep going with what you're saying. Sorry, I cut you off there. Oh, no. It's just the OSI kind of enshrines all of these problems with open source and the way corporations use open source. Did you ever see the story about the GPG guy? GPG guy?

No. Yeah, the GPG maintainer. No, I don't think I know that one. His name is verner um you know he's he's like a fundamental maintainer on basically every single repository operating throughout the entire like repo security pipeline and he wasn't getting paid anything for his work and he was about to quit and you know like years and years and years of him working on like sustaining this project in like 20 000 a year in donations like it was just not enough

he was about to quit and he put out a thing saying like look i'm quitting this project that is like the bedrock of all these things and all of a sudden magically a bunch of corporations decide to bail them out it's like this person had been running this crucially important software for years and years and they they they simply did not care until it became a problem you know they they freeloaded until they couldn't anymore and this is just like it's unacceptable for most of these like really important open source infrastructure projects to be operating this way. And this is what happens with a lot of these permissive licenses, like the massive amount of the massive amounts of people that were using the software and simply not paying for it, uh, is,

is just a problem for such a key piece of infrastructure. And like here we, we support these kinds of narratives. Like there's all sorts of infrastructure and like here we we support these kinds of narratives like there's all sorts of protests where like there's like this has been an issue causing people to like you know do all sorts of things like there's the color js thing there's the core js thing it's all the same issue like why did they convert their javascript library into a piece of protestware? Because they weren't getting paid. That was the whole thing. It was lost in the narrative of them essentially causing all these bugs across all this infrastructure, but that just shows what an important piece

of infrastructure it actually was. It's something so simple, yet one little change and it breaks everything. And it's just like why wasn't this person getting paid and we're not the only people that think this i guess is the thing so going back just a bit when you you said you don't really care about like the semantic arguments and all of this sort of stuff i think that's fair but it's also important to remember that a lot of people like the existence of the distinction between open source and free software is basically, like, fundamentally a semantic argument. And the entire foundation of this space is based on semantic arguments. So, like, I and a lot of other people are very invested in those semantic arguments.

are very invested in those semantic arguments, and when the issues are brought up there that sort of conflict with that, like, there are going to be people that notice that very quickly, there are going to be people that call that out, and I, I get that you guys aren't, like, trying to do the whole open washing thing, and that's fair, I brought the term up myself in the video, and, like, from what I saw in the definition that you guys provided, like, that's how it looked, and like from what i saw in the definition that you guys provided like that's how it looked but if it's a parody like as i said that's that's totally fair um i i do think the parody very much missed the mark and a lot like myself included just didn't see it at all um but where i was going with that basically is where was i going with that sorry i i didn't write i did not write the no. I'm not responsible.

No, no, that's all good. That's all good. Semantic arguments. Right, right, right. The point I was getting is like everything in this space is based on semantic arguments. I get it, not seeing

that that was going to be a big issue, but like, yeah. As soon as I saw i knew as like what sort of comments i'll be getting it when i talked about that as well yeah well i guess the thing is is like it's it's important to like note all the comments that are just like you know most people don't know what the osi is most people don't actually know what open source is most people think that it is just like a plain term. And we think that it is just, or I guess, we're not saying this out of ignorance.

We're saying it more so out of like a particular stance, but a lot of people do just say this out of ignorance. And I can see why people might think that we were since we didn't make our stance clear. We hope that our stance is very clear now that we put out like a letter and everything saying like, here's why we hate the OSI and why we don't like them. Why are,

why is the OSI our enemy? You know, like I hope from this point forward, everyone knows exactly where we stand and exactly why we were doing this kind of like provocation, which obviously wasn't clear in the in the little pieces that we put out before um and and for our new term that we're trying to like try out the source first thing one thing that we as part of our conversations on

this year is like we're not trying to start a movement like with this kind of thing we don't want to start a movement or a community or whatever. You know, there's all these like, I guess, fanboy zealots that go around having these semantic arguments on the behalf of the Free Software Foundation or OSI or these other things. And I guess one thing that we do wanna make clear with our new, you know, our new software principles document

that we put out for Sourceverse is that we don't want to form some community of people going around being foodo zealots. Like that's not our goal. We don't want there to be yet another group of fans going around starting semantic arguments with people. That is not our goal. We, you know, first and foremost,

we just want to make good software. We want to take down these big tech giants through aggressive funding of projects that are disruptive to these large scale monopoly organizations. This is fundamentally like activism against big tech is what we're trying to do. And we want to like wrestle control back in the hands of users. to send here not like go be a Fudo zealot running around with the Fudo definition and you know arguing with people online like that's that's not necessarily helpful to what we're trying to do I guess okay so one of the things I bring up with the OSI is even if you don't know about the OSI if you don't know about the OSI, a lot of the way that open source is done today is sort of done implicitly with the definition that the OSI provides. Like the existence of

most of these open source licenses, some of them predate the OSI for sure, but the more modern licenses and the way a lot of people interact with them today is very much derived from the OSI stance so that's why I think like even even though you have issues with the OSI like I still think they're an important organization and do you like did sort of help to define the way and maybe you have an issue with that like they did help to define the way that open source is done today and I think there are a lot of people out there who actually do like the model provided by the osi like that i think is also why there's some pushback against it and why people are like well okay you're trying to do this thing but it's not open source it's something different and like i i think that's the main reason why there's

been pushback there yes so i i guess the thing with them is is that we we do want to push back and say that like this is just like i like this kind of model has just failed so like this kind of model has just failed. So let's backtrack a little. So the OSI, I feel like everyone has read Eric S. Raymond's book. You know, like I feel like a lot of people come at it from that angle and like know all this history about the OSI,

but they've like really strayed from that, that original vision of what they had at the beginning with Eric S. Raymond. I'm not sure exactly what he said to be removed from the mailing list i don't have a lot of the context so i'm not sure if we want to necessarily be standing beside ericus raymond yeah i don't know what he said about that i i think he was just insulting people but it might have been something more than that we don't want to stand uh if he was doing more than that but um i my understanding is that he was like essentially forced out of the organization at a very early stage and that the organization uh is just like completely different

from its founding principles is my understanding or at least radically diverged from the direction that it was intending to go in originally. And I think you see this with all the stuff that they're doing right now. Like, I don't know if you've done any coverage of their AI standard. I only became aware of it, like, last week. I've not looked into it. So one of the things that they're trying to do

is put out this, like, AI draft model that removes the, like, essentially their draft. draft here let me back up so they have a draft of an AI standard which as part of the standard says you do not have to have the data that accompanies the model uh in order for it to be open source uh and so, like, I don't know how you can possibly say that something is open source as a AI model if I can't recreate it. If I don't have access to the data that was used to create it, whatever I do will be fundamentally different. And yet they're trying to say that this kind of thing can be open source, where you can get it certified as open source without putting out the data that accompanies the model, just the code that was used. And I think this is just like fundamentally drafted to help corporate interests.

I think the corporate people on the board of the OSI are essentially saying like, hey, we want to hold on to all of our data. How about if you make the standard that makes us look good, take out the data so that we can hold onto it. And they're just like, okay. This is the same kind of stuff that happens with NIST. I'm pretty sure NIST stands for the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

And so NIST puts out a lot of these, like, cryptography standards that get put in place. And in certain industries, you're government mandated to use certain NIST cryptography standards. And NIST has a similar problem. You know, NIST has a bunch of NSA reps on their board pushing internally for various standards to be put in place. And one thing that they've been caught doing is creating standards with backdoors in them that benefit the NSA. And this is the same thing that's happening in the OSI. They are creating a new standard for AI with all these corporate donors and corporate people in advisory roles dictating what can be open and what can't be. And they want to keep their data private.

So all of a sudden the standard is now you don't need the data. It's this just like weird thing going on here. So they do all sorts of weird stuff. so I they do all sorts of weird stuff I don't necessarily think that I guess what I'm saying is to put it a little bluntly

like you said what about all the people that stand with the OSI and this definition of things well not even just stand with them explicitly the people who are like hardcore free software people who are like everything the fsf does is good not even necessarily people like that for the osi but people who just implicitly support the model they are developers in this space that just they like that their software is licensed under this sort of model well i i think that a lot of

these people are not trying to solve the same issue that we are is the thing like i think that a lot of these people are not trying to solve the same issue that we are, is the thing. I think that a lot of them, if that works for them, that's fine. I'm not trying to tell anyone how to do anything, but we don't like that. And we don't want it for our software, at the very least. Here's the thing, though. We're open to alternative things. Internally here, several of our products are under our FUDO license, which has like things like don't ever remove the pay thing from internally in the app. Or like these other clauses similarly.

But we also have like one of our projects is a BSD three clause license project. Many of our projects are AGPL. Here, we essentially let the developers choose what license to release their code under. We're not controlling anyone that we fund through our incubator to like forcing them to use some license that they don't want to use or something. And that's totally fine.

Like if you want to use AGPL for a specific project and you think that it works better for your project, do it. The main thing here is that for some of our projects, we do want to experiment with different license structures that have different types of clauses in them. And the other thing is for our code that does have, like one example I'm thinking of is our video client app. So with this, we do want community participation.

And the extensible portions of the app, it has a lot of plugins and a lot of things that you can use to extend the app on your own. For these kinds of extensible apps, we allow all the extensions in that app to be, I think it's all AGPL or MIT or something. I think it said GPL V3, something like that. Yeah, I think it's a GPL V3.

Oh, GrayJ plug-in. Oh, GPL, yeah. Okay, it just says GPL code. Yeah. Yeah, I think if you click on that, I think it's a GPL. That might be a typo, but the specific doesn't really matter.

The point here is, is that like, when it comes to the extensible parts of our program, the stuff that people are actually going to be hacking on, like, we're totally fine having that be a free software license, but that we just don't support this like open source funding model that has like this, like fields of endeavor clause. We do want to discriminate against fields of endeavor. That is the whole point of what we're trying to do here.

We want our licenses and our work to be essentially FOSS for everyday people and not FOSS for corporate interests. That is our goal. We want freedom preserved for everyone that isn't a large megacorp, essentially. And yeah, so. Before someone takes that out of context, the fields of endeavor clause,

because I know someone's going to be stupid about it. The fields of endeavor clause, that is point number, what is it? Six. I believe it's six. Yes. So point number five is, yeah, so five is people in groups.

Six is fields of endeavor. So the idea with no discrimination against fields of endeavor is you can't write a piece of software that is open source and then say this software can't be used in, I don't know, military use cases or in corporate use cases

or things like that. Yes. So that is, I believe, yeah, so these are like the kinds of things I there's, there's also licenses that explicitly enshrine this like ethical licenses. Yes. Before. So like,

there's a lot of these ethical clauses and licensees that are kind of like a gimmick, I guess, like we don't really want to put in these clauses as like a form of ethical acts, activism, so to speak. So like, like clauses that force corporations to pay and make sure that they can't use our

code are part of our model. But we, we kind of think it's silly to do the other stuff where it's just like, Oh, we're going to ban such and such like foreign army or whatever. Like those kinds of things are kind of silly. It's like, you're not going to stop some foreign military actor well when you're you put in a clause like when you put in a clause like a foreign army like then you have the issue of if you have developers from different regions like what army are you referring like it just doesn't work in the real world yeah so we're not trying to do anything like that we're just trying to lock it down such that you know these large corporations can't get a free ride that's that's it's really

that simple like everyone makes it so complicated what we're trying to do and there's always like you know there's this like whole cottage industry of licenses that are trying the same thing in various things you know there's like the, you know, business source license, there's AGPL, there's commons clause, there's, oh, there's the elastic search stuff. Like, and all these have their own little story of like a company getting ripped off, you know? Like I, and then you have like, I think it,

for business source license, for example, like the Linux foundation came out and said that like the business source license is a threat to open source. And it's like, yes, we do want to be a threat to corporations reap everything model. Like that is our goal. That is what we were trying to do. And then you have these large foundations like the Linux Foundation that are

just piled full of corporate donors that say all sorts of different stuff like this. And it's just, it's a very weird environment to be saying like I don't like the Linux Foundation But that's the state that we're in right now with how your organizations operate. You're in friendly company I'm not a fan of the Linux Foundation either and that people got to know with me when I do Most people are fine with it. There are certain there are certain people online who Don't like it when you criticize the Linux Foundation.

Yeah. And yeah, so the Elastic Source License is the same story as far as I'm aware. Like the whole issue that created the Elastic, not Elastic Source License, Elastic Search License. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. The whole issue that caused that to happen was AWS stealing

their work. It's another instance of a large corporation just simply piggybacking off the work of others and selling it out from under them. And this is what happens if you use an open source like an OSI approved license or one of these things. It's just

simply not a viable model for trying to do much of anything anymore, because you have all of these corporations just taking extreme advantage of people licensing their software like this. And we really, really just want to fight against this. It's that simple. Right.

This is not going to be like, it's not going to sound like the most empathetic thing to say but when you license your code you are choosing to license it that way what do you have to say where it's like okay yes it's bad that you are being taken advantage of but you were the one who chose that license at the start well i i think that people for one thing there isn't really a third pole of licensing right now there's no like there's you know you have fsf with the extreme freedom and then and extreme anti-corporate like you basically cannot sell and a permissive license thing for the most part, like people will take it and sell a copy of it or whatever.

If it, if it's popular enough and makes money and then you have these other people where you have like the OSI form of things and there really isn't just like this, like nonstandard third poll, there's all these like random licensing options, people don't really understand them in the same way they understand like open source or free software. And there really isn't this like communal knowledge that these third options even really exist, right? Or they're seen as like these kinds of like spooky,

scary things, like, or they're often seen as just like a weird thing. Like, why would you want to use the Elasticsearch license or whatever, you know, like, people don't understand what these are. There's no real third pole of this licensing. And I don't necessarily blame the people that fall into free software or OSI for their project, even if it wouldn't be to their best interest, because there's just not a lot of understanding. There's not an equivalent third pole of licensing for these kinds of more developer-centric developers' rights licenses, is how I would say it.

We're trying to enshrine the rights of developers and make sure that they're fairly paid for what they're doing. And there just is not a lot of understanding of how to accurately navigate that in the space. Okay. That's definitely fair. One of the issues that you probably saw a lot of from my comments,

we've already seen in plenty of other places as well, whenever the way that Futo is doing things is brought up, the term source available is used. And that term is, personally, I'm not a fan of it. I think the source available does not really fit what you guys are doing. But why do you think that term is used so much? And why do you think that it doesn't fit with what Futo's goals are? Well, you can correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty

sure that the origin of source available is actually the it's kind of like a an insult that was it came from like the free software foundation like fans actually i maybe i'm wrong on this but i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure that this like term somewhere in its origin was kind of just like here's the other people here's our opponents kind of thing and we're not trying to be that we're not trying to be an opponent we're not trying to be proprietary software this is the other thing about it is like it's it's such a big tank catch-all term that it applies to nearly anything and everything and it doesn't really help people to understand what it is that we're doing. Like if you hear source available, you can walk away thinking basically anything because it's kind of like a meaningless term that applies to almost

any software where the source is available, which can mean like proprietary things. It can mean source paywall that can mean all sorts of different crazy things. It can even, it's such a catch all term that, I mean, it applies to all free software. It applies to all of open source software. It applies to everything. And the goal of a term should be to help you understand where we stand. It shouldn't confuse you further about what our position is or what you can do or can't do with our software.

And I think that it does that. It confuses people more actually. And that's why we're kind of like not interested in using that kind of language for our own software and where we're trying to invent our own term kind of in the same sense that all these other companies have invented their own license structure, we're trying to invent a term that can be generic enough

that other people can use it, but that firmly says exactly where we stand that we can point people to. I think the issue with Source Available is it also has a lot of baggage with it, where, yes, it does certainly cover open source and free software as well but usually people who are aware of the term the first thing they think about is those like those corporate projects where

maybe like a part of it maybe like a couple of modules are source available but you can't actually compile the entire application where like, yes, you can see the code, but you can't really distribute it and things like that. Yeah. I think that there's this entire camp of these sorts of things. And our thing, it's very clear, you know,

like client source is all available. Anything running on the server that's required is all available anything running on the server that's required is all available like everything is available and you can just compile it if you want it's that simple right right because that's a big problem we see with a lot of a lot of spaces where you may have a license to the software but if the server ever disappears like in in some pieces of software it just becomes useless then yes and so we explicitly put this across all of our uh all of our documents all of our all of our definitions is that if there is any server-side code it has to be made available alongside any client code for any project that we fund, internally anyway.

Right. Okay. This is the thing about these. There's individual licensees. I said some of our projects are BSD, some of our projects are AGPL or whatever. But we kind of want them to adhere roughly to our set of principles and standards like you know and these are wider than what is included in the license like no ads no crypto scams no privacy violations you know no intrusive telemetry like telemetry if it exists

should always be opt out and it probably shouldn't exist for most projects uh do you mean opt so it's it's on by default and then opt out what do you mean opt in oh no no no i well for for one thing most of our projects don't have any anyway so this is kind of a moot point but uh if there is like some telemetry it should only be opt in okay yeah okay so you said opt out yeah no just don't just want to confirm that because that's something we will definitely crucify you on yeah no okay okay just had to make sure there cool um yeah no no sorry sorry it's yeah as i said people are very obsessed with semantic arguments in this space. Yes, I've got to be very careful about what I'm saying, for sure.

Yeah, if I notice something, I'll ask you about it. But there are some people who are not good faith actors who will definitely jump on any misspeak you say. That would be such a silly one, too, because we basically have no telemetry across any of our apps. Yeah. Yeah. I assume if telemetry was done, it would also be just the minimal set of data needed rather than what like a Google approach is, which is get everything possible. Most of our apps are privacy oriented.

So like there's certain things that are necessary, like, you know, like there's certain things that are necessary like you know like there's certain things that you get just from having a server running yeah you get software you like daily user counts and that's yeah basic things like people freak out about ip addresses but if you connect to a server that server knows your ip address like that's just that's yeah that's that's you know if if you want to use tor vpn be our guest like don't that's not a problem necessarily right but the the point i was getting at is like the goal is not to be like you know collect every single bit of data possible all of your cookies all of your location data everything that you could possibly scoop up

and then like you know create user profiles in every single person no, we don't. No, nothing like that at all whatsoever. And we've, I mean, we've given Tor a grant. If you want to, you know, if you don't want us to see your IP when you connect to one of our things, use Tor, we just funded it, you know? So in my video, I brought up the term fair code because I you hadn't you guys hadn't like brought up the term source first yet So I was just bringing up things that sounded like similar to what you guys were trying to do

So why go for a whole new term as opposed to working? with something like fair code which already does exist and giving that sort of more attention because I do feel like that does address most of what you guys are interested in but yeah what do you think about that i i honestly we think what we're doing aligns with what they're attempting but we aren't actually sure like we looked over this a couple times um we're We're definitely open to reaching out and collaborating with them because it definitely is an interesting project. We don't see any issues with it. We were really writing the source first stuff for ourselves and our users.

So we wanted a clear description of what we're trying to do and we think this is a pretty clear description overall. And so we were kind of doing it just as much for ourselves as other people to make sure everyone internally knows where we stand also on these kinds of issues. Because there's some confusion between some people here about what open source is. A lot of people here, like some of the people here about like what open source is, you know, like a lot of people here, like some of the people here working here are like over 50 and they're just like, you know, I did open source in

2002, the OSI didn't exist. What is this? You know, like there's, there's a lot of differing understanding of what is the, what these terms are. And so we're kind of just like, let's just get down exactly what we're thinking so we're all on the same page and we all have something that we can agree on. Oh, the other thing worth mentioning is that we trademarked the term source first.

This has been a long time running thing. We have the trademark filing started going back several months it's okay so you guys had been working on it for a while it's just you'd been using the term open source in the meantime yeah well we we saw that there was confusion but we kind of this is, this is a company that is like engineering oriented and developing oriented. Like our, our goal here is to make products and a lot of the business stuff here, you know, kind of can fall by the wayside, especially the little details like this. Like why did our license have, uh, you know, weird clauses in it Because we left the temporary license up

while we were building out the app. There's all sorts of little things like this that fall through the cracks when you're doing a startup. Or here you're doing several startups simultaneously. It's a lot to deal with. And this is a plan that we've had for a while, but it kind of just like fell by the wayside in terms of like more important things like developing the products that we're building

and everyone here likes to develop code i would say and so a lot of people here don't necessarily want to spend hours debating licensees and meetings. They just want to get back to like making good code. And so that's partially why this is only coming up now when we're getting a lot of people talking about it. So we thought this would be as good a time as any to like roll out this plan. And the thing is with Faircode,

I don't believe something similar exists for fair code or the OSI for that matter. So we have the ability to enforce source first through the trademark. And so this is a set of principles that if people use it, it'll have some teeth to it. Like we can actually enforce it. Yeah. The OSI, they have a, they have a trademark on Open Source Initiative Approved? I think it's approved, yeah.

But it's either approved or licensed, one of the two, one of those two terms. But because Open Source had the term, they were very much part of popularizing it, but the term had been in use, I think you can track it back to sometime in the 80s so you yeah when it's a term like that it's basically impossible to grab a trademark on it unless it's a very specific like very minor niche and just we're never going to get that on software yeah and and lunduk has a a nice post on this going back through the history of the term open source long before the OSI ever existed or any of these actors ever existed. Going back as early as like the 80s, roughly as far as I remember. But like, you know, it's a term that is owned by the community is what we've been saying. It's a term that's owned by the community. It's not the OSI's definition.

Our issue is that the community has essentially spoken out and said, look, we have adopted this as our definition. This wider community of people that sees open source and thinks this definition, we don't want to confuse them. We don't want to alienate definition, we don't want to confuse them

and we don't want to alienate them. And we don't want to like make people upset just because we have a different view on how this term originated and how it should be used. Like it's not that big of a deal to us really is the thing. Right, right. And I understand it's a big deal to some people and we kind of want to respect that.

And that's why we want to use our own term. When you brought up the idea of rural developers just, we don't want to deal with licensing and updating terms and things like that that fits in very well with what you were saying before. A lot of open source projects, they don't have great designs and that's because people are developers.

It's very rare that a project actually has someone who is a dedicated designer there are big projects that do but most often than not you have developers who are putting on their designer hat and the hat doesn't fit very well sometimes yeah yeah for sure it's not just honestly it's not just developing but bug triaging writing documentation everything that is not writing code a lot of things go by the wayside sometimes yeah yeah i mean we're we're trying to beef up a lot of the business sides of things here like

most of the people here are engineering focused and engineering oriented and that's kind of what we believe in here is that like, you know, if you, if you build really good, high quality products, then everything else will basically just fall into place. Right. And that's kind of like our mission here. It's like free open source. No source first, you know, just put some more letters on the end. Yeah, no, like we're, we're just trying to build, you know, Just put some more letters on the end. It's fine. Yeah. No.

We're just trying to build code and software that respects the user, that we can hopefully make some money from, enough to sustain it long term, and stuff that people actually like. A lot of times people use the word delight like delightfulness is lost from software like there's not like i open up an app and it's just like oh wow this is like really well designed like we we want people to react like that to what we're building here ideally you know we we don't want it to be another set of like foss tools that are half built um and we think we're doing pretty good job of that so far okay so when we look at the

we look at source first so you have the you have the public statement that was put out but you also have that that source first page as well um i have that somewhere in my tabs. Where did it go? Where did it go? I lost the page. Anyway, on the open source, the statement on open source. So there are six points here about what source first is. And I think it probably makes sense to expand upon these points. Some of them I think are fairly self-explanatory, like the first point, allow users to see the source code of all our software, but I think the others do require maybe at least a bit of expansion. So, the second point, ensure that you can modify the source code for your own use and redistribute it. This is very much aligned with what we already see from free software and open source, but I think the issue that you should I brought up in in my

video I think is pretty important is in the grade a license there is the the what is what is the specific term about about funding it's I do not have a pull up okay I'll bring it up right now I just want I don't want to misquote it I think I think I know exactly which one you're talking about. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes. Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. So in my video and in the original definition that you guys had,

it made mention of payment links. And you've mentioned payment links yourself as well throughout this discussion payment links should be in the license that you have pulled up yes so the reason I brought issues with this is

if it so there are projects like the awesome window manager which forked off of DWM and at this point it's its own separate distinct project but it is it is forked off of that project and i don't see how like with a project like that it would make sense for somebody to want to go and build a fork like that if the money from that project would have to go back up to upstream so this is an interesting point but this is part of our this this is part of our new model like

this is our idea like we're funding like what would be a good example um for our video client app for example like this is i don't think it's up to a million dollars in funding but it very soon will be it's like people need to understand we need to change the culture around this it's like yes if you fork that project, you are forking like hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment. And it doesn't really matter to me if you change like the color of the client or something. You should not like suddenly have the ability to, you know, skip out on, you out on paying for that. You just got like a million dollars of value in your fork, and it should go backwards upstream. It's kind of like the GPL clause that causes the GPL

to move out like a vine. We want money from forks to flow backwards. The person who started the first window manager should get funding for like inventing whatever window manager they've invented. And I think it should like span out like that. That is a huge point of what we're doing. The thing about this also is that like,

I think that a lot of times the structure that we're going on here is activism. So if you're forking Greyjay, or sorry, if you're forking any of our apps and making insanely large productive changes to them, enough to actually be a standalone project, we want to fund you. We want to hire you, probably.

We want you to be contributing to the software properly or to have an official fork. We want to do that. We want more people working on these projects, and we want to pay them to do that. That is really our goal here, is for people to get paid for their work. And the aspects of these apps that are meant to be extensible are GPL code for those very reasons because we want the parts of the code base that we want people to be hacking on and extending and whatever else to be in a license that allows people to do that without

any worry about any of this other stuff but for like these large-scale consumer-facing apps you It's really not our intention to give them away for free. And we think that people forking the client or the apps or anything else that we're building, sure, fork it, but we deserve some of that money and some of that credit. You know, we deserve to have this like attribution preserved. And I think that's pretty fair, honestly. Okay, so the other issue I brought up with the idea of forking is let's say at some point FUTO collapses

and just the organization disappears. At that point, it would be fair to say that a lot of the development on these projects basically just stops because people can't commit to the repo if they don't have rights to the repo. Now, what a lot of projects, what happens with a lot of projects is that people will then fork that project and then revive it into a new state. But if the original developers are now gone, it, I don't know how you could fork an old project like that and where the money would

really need to go there and how that would really function um i think it would be extremely difficult for this to collapse uh partially because we're you know we have hundreds of millions of dollars of runway um and so most of our plans for our various software span out over five-year to 10-year periods. And so we don't really want... Our goal is to win here and to wrestle power away from these large corporations and have people be using open source get wrestle power away from these like large corporations and

Have people be using open source or sorry open source Source first software in a In a form that is like readily used by everyone in the same way They would use any other app that they use every day on their phone We want replacements for all these major things that by everyone in the same way they would use any other app that they use every day on their phone. We want replacements for all these major things that monopolies have that everyone is basically forced to use. We have this as a large scale plan and we kind of don't anticipate this being an issue for us personally. But we have seen licenses where they auto-convert to MIT or whatever after X amount of years. There's one obscure license that I know does this. I think if this collapsed or something similar, we would probably just

make everything GPL or something. I think it would be up to the individual maintainers of these individual projects. Like, FUTO is an organization that funds projects, but the individual developers on each of these in-house projects has a lot of stay in, like, how they're licensed and what changes would happen to those licenses. We don't, like, force this on them top down. Right. So that would be up to the individual uh projects that we're incubating okay well that makes sense in the context of futo but do you see this model being adopted outside of this because it makes sense when yes there is millions of dollars of runway but well again though like we're experimenting with different forms of licensing. Like maybe it would be good like to experiment with a form of license similar to ours that does have like a 10 year clause that says after 10 years, this auto converts into, you know, MIT or BSD or something like this.

Like, I think that that's a fair thing for people to put in their licenses for here in particular. I don't think that that is our goal. We want to still be here in 10 years. We absolutely have plans to still be here working on these projects and agitating against big tech in like 10 years. Like that, that is our goal. So for smaller projects, I think yes, like having a clause that converts at some timeout period would probably be helpful to a lot of these smaller projects. But I'm not really sure. That license with those types of clauses has not caught on very much either.

It's just a weird experimental license that some people use. And I don't know how well that experiment has gone. It's still up in the air. Right. Okay. That's fair. People should experiment with the licenses more. That's what we're doing.

That's what we want other people to do. Like experiment with your license. Try and make software that is, you know, where the source is available, you know, something that people can like live off of and profit from, like try out different license structures, like just try it. We're not trying to say anyone has to do anything the way we're doing.

We just want people to like respect the way we're doing it because I think what we're doing here is like pretty awesome. Yeah, I think that's a point we should probably hammer home as well. I am fully in support of people licensing their software however they want to license it if you want to like there there are like meme licenses like the be aware license where if we ever meet in person you have to buy me a beer and stupid things like that and like yeah that's kind of a joke license but there's actual like legitimate software like

i found out about this license because one of the libraries used on the ps3 is licensed under that that license uh yeah yeah i don't remember what the library was but like yeah it obviously it's a joke license but yeah if you feel like the bsd3 clause is the best thing for your project, do that. MIT, best thing for your project, do that. Like, I don't like... Maybe you'll disagree with him. I don't like models like open core or proprietary licenses. But yeah, if you feel like that is the best way to do it,

like at the end of the day, like you are the one choosing how your project is licensed. Yeah, I mean, I kind of agree with that. We're not trying to force anyone to do anything that they shouldn't, you know, that doesn't fit with their project or whatever. But at the same time, we have a very specific goal here.

We have a very specific goal. We have a very specific way we're going about that goal. We think it's going to work. And you know, that goal. We think it's going to work. And, you know, that, that goal is to disrupt the tech industry as it exists, like, for our purposes, and for anyone else that, you know, wants to try to not allow companies to exploit their labor for free, and try to, like, exploit their labor for free, and try to have freedom in their software preserved whilst not allowing corporations to exploit it.

I think this is a pretty reasonable pathway that we're attempting here. And I think that there are other licenses that attempt similar reasonable pathways. But if that's not your thing, then yeah, don't try our thing. It probably really matches only to what we're doing and people that want to do things similar to what we're doing and we're fine with that okay so the third point we have on uh what source first software will do is ensure that our software is not limited to use by a particular organization what What is meant by that? That point kind of confused me.

Let's see. Are you talking about the no free ride for Megacorps? It says ensure that our software is not limited to use by a particular organization. It's on the statement, not the... I guess we can look at the actual principles of source first as well no no no hold on let me pull up the statement okay sweet maybe look I don't know how long

was spent writing the statement maybe things are just worded yeah there might be a typo as well let me see where are you under source first will point number three oh that's talking about like the source available type things so like in source available you often have a case where i am allowed to use the source and see it if i pay and then after you pay it's like internally at like a company like if fudo bought one of these softwares it's open source but it cannot be shared outside this

company sure like this is a license that exists in a lot of source available corporate whatever licenses okay okay yeah if you can pay then you get to see the source but only people in your corporation can see the source and yeah microsoft has a lot of their projects yeah yeah exactly that's what we're trying to say is an issue we right we don't want that okay okay yeah for anyone who doesn't know i think you can pay to get like access to the word so i think yeah at least you used to be like to pay the access and stuff like that. Yeah, some more things to that. That is an example of a source available code that we do not have anything. Right, right. Okay.

Okay. Point number four we did touch on before. Any client we release that requires server also releases the server software under principles as free as the client code. I think that one's also pretty self-explanatory if you ask me. Yeah. free as the client code. I think that one's also pretty self-explanatory if you ask me. The fifth one I think is definitely is worded unclearly here like avoid the integration of crypto scams because generally like is this a stance against crypto entirely because generally you don't know something is a scam until the scam actually happens. So for the most part we until the scam actually happens. So for the most part, we...

I guess internally there's a little bit of debate about this. So we don't want to say that a software can't put a crypto payment link inside of it, or something like this. We don't want to say that a software couldn't integrate with like web three or whatever kind of thing but internally at least for our own projects we kind of avoid this and we also kind of don't want to fund or integrate with these like fly-by-night crypto scams that have flooded software you know like there's there's a million examples of these like fly by night crypto scams where you have a cryptocurrency integrated into some product and then people like pump out this

like product and it's just a you know a get rich quick scheme for developers trying to piggyback off of you know random people essentially we we just don't want any association with that we don't have any interest in associating or funding anything with that kind of integration um so that's that's all that means like it isn't like don't pay allow people to pay for your app with bitcoin or whatever that's that's not the the intention there okay okay because like the reason i bring that up is because if someone wanted to make a crypto project under a futo style license like the avoid the integration of crypto scams is just like a real it's it's a really weird phrasing and it's it's unclear like what yeah that's my only point it's sort of unclear what was being said there

yeah well i i i think that we actually took that out of the sourceverse.com yeah definition because it was unclear if i remember correctly yeah so we had similar concerns like we we still want to have that as our stance like no crypto sc're not interested in that kind of stuff. But yeah, I agree. And we did take that out of the SourceFirst.com because it is confusing and it's a little unclear. Yeah, the principles of SourceFirst, clearly these have been more thought through

in the way they're actually written and include explanations of what they do as well i think like having something there at first was a good idea just to you know address what people were saying about um open source and introduce the idea of source first but having a well-structured document it probably should be versioned as well. I don't know. Like that's a good idea. Yeah, probably.

I mean, this is all like, so Lewis put out his comment on your video and a lot of this is downstream from that and we've just been refining it as we go. Yeah, yeah. So, okay. On the principle of source first, this is access to source,

which we covered. Right to modify and share... You have right to modify and share modifications. No free ride for Megacorp. So this was one that was not on the statement, but you have... This is basically what we've been discussing this entire time, though.

Preservation of attribution, which is pretty much a part of open source anyway. Like, that's... Any sense for open source licenses has some sort of attribution, which is pretty much a part of open source anyway. Any sense for open source licenses has some sort of attribution. No advertisements. So this is a hard stance against any advertising in the application. Yes, we're against advertisement. Okay, okay. I mean, in case you couldn't tell by our video client,

we are against advertising. And the last point is privacy is respected. So we reject the idea of the user is the product software business model, which kind of links back to the no advertisement point anyway. But I guess also that includes just general wide telemetry. Yes. And I think it's flipped on that statement also. I should go in and change that, actually. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. So, I think the... How would I say it? I do think having this clearly laid out like this is much better than the state it was in before, because before, it was very much, again, like you said, this is very, very much, you guys, the developers trying to build software, and before, it was very much people piecing together what things, or the stance of Futo based on things that were said in various videos,

various interviews, and it was allowing people to fill in the gaps with what they think the stance is. But I think having something like this definitely makes it a lot clearer on what the goals of Futo actually are. makes it a lot clearer on what the goals of Futo actually are. Yeah, and I think Lewis is probably going to do a follow-up video

as well, and so that'll, after this conversation, that'll hopefully hammer home the point even more. Yeah. I've got a follow-up video that I'm going to be doing on Source First as well, and yeah, as I said, I do think this is yeah this is this is considerably better again if you have any further comments or critiques or whatever

we're open to like like lewis said this is all an experiment yeah we're just trying to do things differently like this has clearly failed for so many developers like even people like like uh like bruce perrins put out the debbie and social contract guy put out a statement recently where he was calling it like i don't even know post open or something weird but like all of these large people within the space see that there's a problem and see that we need to be moving towards solutions it might not be ours it might might not be our, you know, set of like source first principles or whatever. People might like hone in

on some other third pole of things, but like we're at least trying to do things differently in a way that doesn't end up with developers being exploited. We're trying to stand up for developers' rights is essentially what we're doing while also respecting the user.

It shouldn't be this hard. Well, we haven't really also respecting the user it's it's it shouldn't be this hard well we haven't really touched on the user that much like what sort of response have the applications gotten from the user side the people who are not developers who are just they just want good software i mean most people that have tried our software seem to like it. We have lots of users on at least a few of our more further along apps, I would say. A lot of our apps are still at the very early stages. Most of them have a public beta, but there are some in various stages of completion. Everything that has a public beta, I would encourage anyone to try out. stages of completion everything that has a public beta i would encourage anyone to try out which um which which projects are the furthest along for anyone who wants to mess around with some stuff

um polycentric is pretty far along gray j is pretty far along the fudo keyboard i don't know if i mentioned this earlier keyboard yeah yeah the fudo keyboard is amazing um i use it as my keyboard not just not just as an advertising thing or whatever but like it's actually just one of the best keyboards ever um and that is currently in active development like very active development but uh that is a very usable project right now um yeah well with this with this being an experiment, where is this going? What direction is this heading? Five years down the line,

what is Futo doing? Well, I think that we're going to continue to incubate and fund more projects internally that try to disrupt all these products that are happening in the consumer space so like for example there's like no good video editing software that is you know open source or fast or whatever like all of them are terrible obs is a great product but um it we don't have like a real linux or open source video editor right now the best thing we have is caden live and that like yes it's great the work they've done in it but yes it's it's very lacking

compared to even like fairly entry-level commercial products yes we we are very interested in uh we have attempted to fund various hardware projects and there's a million issues with funding hardware projects but it's it's a sad state of affairs that there's not like a good phone option right now or there's not like these things if anyone has any recommendations or people that are super competent in this space please forward them to us because we would love to fund like people trying to do things at the hardware level as well not just software yeah yeah a lot of the yeah the hardware is just a hard one right because you actually need to you need to have production lines you know either or you need to like like take existing products and then modify the software

inside of them and yeah hardware is just a nightmare we i don't really have a good stance on like what should be done about the hardware situation as it exists for like laptops and phones yeah but we're trying like uh there's all these like terrible projects that have collapsed like purism um it's like in a steady state of collapse i don't know if they currently have collapsed or what the situation there is but like there's like all these projects like this and we would really like to fund a good one is the thing. Uh, yeah. Or if you have any recommendations for software in the consumer facing direction that is worthy of like funding or elevating, like we're always looking for new stuff that is a product that

fills a niche that doesn't exist outside of like, you know, tech monopolies. Like there's all these products that only exist within like the sphere of like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Fang stuff. Yeah.

But well, besides the stuff that is currently being worked on, what areas do you feel like are currently kind of underserved? Underserved? I mean, just basic just basic things so like there's not like we've given money to gimp and eventually they'll have 3.0 out one day no but like there's no good alternatives to adobe products for a lot of things for like a shocking number of things. And with the recent Adobe scandal, it's more important than ever to be funding these kinds

of alternatives. And it's terrible that there's just not a lot of good alternatives across the entire Adobe suite of things. There's also just little basic things that you wouldn't even think about like calendars. Like there's not really a good open source calendar app or a FOSS calendar app or whatever. There's just not. And there's a million really terrible ones that you can search through for Linux or whatever, but there's little basic things like this

that we would love to fund. The keyboard is a pretty basic component. And it's weird that these things didn't really already have a good presence um like it's just kind of like these little things matter and they add up to a lot yeah most people wouldn't have cared about what's happening with adobe if there was something in that space at the level of Blender. Yeah. Well, we've given money to Blender also, but the thing is, we want to... There are certain products where they're far enough along, it's something like GIMP or something.

I don't know what the situation is with that or if a cache infusion would help them really. I don't really know what their situation is, but I would love to see something that is on par with Photoshop that I could run on Linux. That's just something I would love to see. But sadly, that doesn't seem to be GIMP so far. I use it pretty frequently, and it's just not the that doesn't seem to be gimp so far i use it pretty frequently and

it's just not the experience i want it to be yeah for what i need to do it's perfectly fine but i like i edit thumbnails like that's what i use it for it's fine for that but if you're doing like one of the big things coming in 3.0 is professional color work. Like, you didn't have, like, basic things like CMYK. Like, that just wasn't there before. And that's finally happening. And, like, other basic things, like, being able to... It's just a basic usability thing. Like, being able to group layers together and move them all at once.

Like, that's finally getting added. People have wanted that for, like, 20 years now. Yeah, and this is the thing like when you have large-scale software that like works in the open source space or fos space or whatever right now it's like what is it it's stuff like linux or it's these like things that are paid for by large corporations donated to by large corporations and it. And it shouldn't be like this. It shouldn't be like this. It should be a model where these companies can exist without the patronage of large corporations.

They should be able to exist and be financially viable on their own. And the thing is like all these projects that are the best projects are the ones that have this level of funding. And that's why we're trying to like give our in-house engineering projects this level of funding, because that's what it takes to build a quality,

a high quality usable product with like good Q and A and like good bug support and all these things. Like that's what it requires is huge cash infusions. It can't be just developers working on their passion project a few hours every weekend. It just can't be just developers working on their passion project uh a few hours every weekend it just can't be that yeah no you are you're definitely right there that like those big really well well-developed projects are just all it's not even like it's not even a bad thing necessarily right like but like obs it's funded by youtube logitech twitch facebook nvidia amd

critter which is a really and that's why it's one of the best products yeah for this kind of thing and it's like and like a critter has they've had funding from intel um blender every 3d modeling firm funds blender in some way like yeah yeah and and the linux kernel like the list is endless yeah yeah this is the thing it requires large amounts of money and if it's not coming from the users it's coming from the corporations and the corporate interests like that is that is what's happening and so we want to try out alternative models where the funding can come from the users. And I think that this should be totally viable.

Like that's like maybe our experiment will go awry and people won't want to pay for it or something. But so far what we've seen is the opposite. The people, when you make a software that's high quality and good and you don't ask for too much, people are willing to pay for it. They're willing to throw down like $ ten dollars on a license it's just not the you know i i don't know why people get this idea that this would be a weird thing especially when it's worked for so many years as like the shareware model in the 90s well this will definitely help with like the the high end gooey applications that you can like visually see but one of the issues that's always brought up when it comes to funding is how do you solve the funding

problem for like the really small libraries those those libraries that are in the back end that they're run by like one dude like you brought up like GPG before you brought up ColorJS things like that like how does how does this model help to really benefit those projects because like paying for libraries is definitely a much weirder state and with with very small exceptions like it's just accepted that libraries are something you interact with for free at this point it's a really good question. I'm not really sure how this model could work out for those kinds of things. I don't know that it actually would work out for like small internal libraries like that. I think that there are alternative models that are similar to what

we're talking about that would work for that better. But with what we're doing, it's mostly consumer facing things. And so I'm not really sure what the exact model would work best for that. It's for someone else to experiment with, I guess. Or maybe it's something we'll come out with in the future. I don't know. Well, I guess the best thing probably with what you guys are doing is just the fact that because you have money coming in there can be money going out to the libraries you depend on yeah i mean that would

be an interesting model to try out um the the issue with that is like how do you divide up right like how much money you you give out it becomes a complicated thing when it ties into that. I think it might actually be better to just have more of these smaller libraries operating in a way where you do have to pay for a license if you're using the library or something like this. A lot of these smaller libraries, you could easily just say, hey, give me $5 to use this library. And if it's something like colors.js you know

i don't know i it's it's really an interesting and odd question i i don't know that we really have a good solution for that do you have a good solution for that no i i wish i had a good solution like i i've spoken to the uh guy who runs open printing um and like printing on linux it's like it's a big thing like that's a big deal and even a project like that like pretty much all of its funding it doesn't come from users it comes from the distros who have some fun like you know the ubuntus and red hats of the world who throw a bit of money their way just to keep that going pretty much and he's he's luckily employed like to be able to work on that project. But if he wasn't,

a good example of this is the libinput. Libinput is such a fundamental part of Linux. It's how we do basic human interface devising. It's just such a core part. And hardly anyone realizes it even exists. It has very little funding. And it's much like the gpg situation where without that things would just collapse the next day like it needs to be there

but it just doesn't really get the funding it really it really needs yeah i i think that this is one of those conversations that just like we need to do something to move this conversation forward i'm not necessarily sure what it is like we're we what we saw is that like with a lot of these you know things like databases or other things that like a company actively uses like these internal software things like you, database is a fine example. I'm not gonna come up with another one. Like a piece of server-side software or something that a company is using,

like it's pretty easy for people to like slap a price tag on that and get companies to pay for it. And a lot of these cases. And so that kind of model, there's solutions for this kind of model, roughly speaking, for a lot of these libraries and a lot of these software setups. But I think where things are lacking is consumer-facing. And that's kind of like business source license type stuff

or other kinds of stuff like GPL that people pay for, like Linux people, people pay for Red Hat, people pay for this kind of code base. And regardless of what license it is, because it's a useful product. And in the consumer facing space, we don't really have good representative products, uh,

for most everyday things that people want to use. Like every single thing my mom uses every day on her phone is not a product that has the source available. Like that's just not the case. And that's where most of these monopolies and large corporations have their power, is they have the capture of every user in most of the things that they use every day at the consumer level. And so that's why we created the mission the way we did, That's why we created the mission the way we did,

is because you want to have something at least working to disrupt what's happening in the consumer side of things. And we didn't really see anything happening there. Yeah, I think the issue you see on the general consumer side, like developers may be aware of how software is licensed, but most consumers, they just see software. Is it good? Is it bad? Maybe there's some consideration now especially with how much attention things like tiktok are getting with like you know data privacy it is becoming like a more mainstream topic that people are talking about but it's still very much

people don't really consciously consume software they just grab either something they are familiar with or something that they are told is good enough yeah and that's that's why we want to be funding things that are just like like essentially what we want to be building is good high quality products like that is the mantra around here it's just like make the product high quality products. That is the mantra around here. It's just like, make the product high quality, make it good, and make it something people actually want to use, and then they will use it. And then it just happens to also be source first, source is available, you can download it,

do whatever you want with it. For the most part, it's kind of like we want to ensnare people by having the good product. And then afterwards, it's like, and it's open source. You can do all these things with it. You can compile it if you want. You get all this extra. And you also get out of the kind like evil clutches of the tech industry.

It's, it's really funny that I keep using the term open source on accident over and over again, because that's what's been happening here. You know, it's like, we're so close to this like OSI definition that we just naturally like wanted to say this and wanted to speak about our software this way.

Yeah. I think. And so I keep accidentally saying it. The only separation between OSI definition and how Futo is addressing it is basically fields of endeavor. That's the main contention.

I guess fields of endeavor and funding. Those are the only differences, really. And that's why I do think that the source I guess fields of endeavor and funding. Like, those are the only differences, really. And that's why I do think that, like, the source available thing just doesn't fit. We already addressed that. But yeah, that, for any, that, I feel like it is way, way closer to what open source is. And what most, like, even ignoring the OSI,

just what most people think of as open source. Yeah, and that's kind of how a lot of people here thought about our software and that's why we use the word like we were using it too is the thing it's like we don't really care about these people's definition um what we're doing is basically free software for you know for the for from the perspective of the everyday individual, this is basically free software. That's basically what it is. The everyday person that wants to grab the code here,

compile it, and mess around with it, it's free software. There's not really much restriction at all, other than just like we want developers to be paid for the work that they put in. That's what we want. It shouldn't be the end of the world to say that uh but people sometimes act like it is well i i think we've pretty much hit on like all the main stuff i wanted to address um so is there anything else that we didn't touch on you think is pretty important to talk about uh no i think we more

than touched everything uh every single person that we talked to has a pet project that they want us to fund so maybe you could say yours i guess well yeah if there's anything uh anywhere you wanted to write people to like the futo website anything on there people should check out uh where should they go uh just go to fudo.org and um check out all of our stuff all of our apps are listed there all the stuff that we fund is listed there uh and then down the bottom yeah there's a link to the grants page which has a link to okay i don't know if this is intentional or the website's weird so there's that link at the bottom that's like your project here. It takes you to the grants page.

And then there's another link on the grants page, your project here, which takes you to a page called your project here. Oh, we're redesigning the website right now, honestly. Like this is like revision number two. And there's a revision number three coming out right now. I think a lot of links were just broken right in the last redesign of the website okay uh this but uh for the most part if you're interested in you know if you want to put forward a software that you think is like exemplary as a piece of consumer software feel free to email us a grant application okay um anywhere else you want to

direct people to like i think you guys like there's a youtube channel for futo isn't there oh yeah yeah there's the futo tech youtube is that linked on the website or not um i'm not sure oh yes it is at the very bottom here bottom yes we also have a pure tube and an odyssey and you know awesome um is that pretty much all you want to mention any like last word you want to say about anything that you guys maybe uh oh well there is the that that source first page isn't actually like publicly announced yet so by the time this comes out this is the public announcement of it so i well this will i this will be out i mean it might be a few days yeah yeah um this will probably be roughly the

first public announcement okay uh awesome well i think this has been a very productive discussion and hopefully people got something useful out of this i there there are some things there are some points i i I don't, like, fully agree on, like, I do think that the whole forking things and doing something, like, in your own direction is important, but, like, I see where you guys are coming from now. Yeah, I mean, again, we're not trying to prevent people from forking it, it's kind of just an experiment, and, like, we, we think that funding should flow backwards to the people that originally put millions of dollars of funding into something.

You shouldn't just be able to fork it and profit from that fork, I guess. That's the main restriction there. Right. Right. Well, okay. If that's all that you want to mention, I'm going to do my things and then we can sign off. Awesome. Okay. so my main channel

is Brody Robinson. I do Linux videos there six days a week. Check that out. I don't know when this comes out, so go over there. I've got a gaming channel, Brody on Games. I stream there twice a week. I'm probably still playing through Sekiro, so go watch me fail and die

a thousand times. I think we're at like 300 by the time this is coming out. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you want to find the audio release, there is an RSS feed. Go to your favorite podcast app, search Tech

Over Tea, and you will find it. I'll give you the final word. How do you want to sign us off? I never tell people they're doing this. It's always funny when they freak out and I know what you the final word. How do you want to sign us off? I never tell people they're doing this. It's always funny when they freak out and I know what to say. I don't know. Just, just check out our software. I think we're doing great things.

Awesome. See you guys later.