WHY. GODSAMN WHY is it lately that any organization behind productsi like turn out to be extreme assholes? we’re on a streak atm i feel like
capitalism and the profit motive, probably.
Libertarians like privacy too and are right wingers.
Why does every mobile keyboard developer have some controversial shit? I just want to text in peace.
quite a bunch of stem computer people are also fascists.
May I recommend Thumbkey its awesome and a bit different from other keyboards. Its concept is interesting ✨
It looks neat but what an absolutely stupid take from a keyboard author
Because it trusts you to write what you meant to write.
Butch if I didn’t let it correct me I’d have to actually mook st the keyboard and who the fuck wants to do thatm.
Phones are tiny and humans are clumsy. I absolutely never mean what I type, as you can see above.
Well, ThumbKey adapts to the limitations of a phone screen, that’s why it’s unique. So, once you are familiar with it, you’re less likely to fumble the wrong key. It takes quite some time though, at least it did for me.
I understand what they were trying to go for, but they failed…not least because they explain that below the fold.
Failed for thee perhaps, but mein hands are smol, vocab’s colloquial, n’ passwords often complex… Autocorrect is the first feature that must die when I adopt devices.
For the sadist in you there’s always https://f-droid.org/packages/se.nullable.flickboard
Just use Gboard and block any google telemetry
Good luck with that on anything that has a locked boot loader or stock OS.
Just use wireguard and block all connections that aren’t going over VPN. Ezpz
Also if you’re on a stock device then you’re already feeding them plenty of data
Using a VPN does absolutely nothing to protect from their apps scraping up and phoning home telemetry.
It’s still YOUR phone. It’s still YOUR GPS location. It’s still YOUR data connection. A VPN is not a catch-all solution to privacy.
VPN to your box somewhere else with proper filtering.
I figured that was obvious
That’s literally not how VPNs work nor are you aware of what you’re talking about.
What
You literally don’t know what you are talking about.
You’re like a computer novice that is only aware of commercialized VPN products thinking you know what you’re talking about but unaware that the commercialized products are open source things that anyone can run, and you’re only paying for the company to run them on their boxes.
rethinkdns works perfectly for me
I know both are kinda terrible but isn’t a facist-developed GPL software better than Google software
Anything on HeliBoard too?
heliboard seems cool so far
Same, I switched over yesterday and I found it actually does all the things I was hoping for!
Reducing keyboard size, removing suggestions bar, adjusting timing on holding for symbols or numbers, emoji key, theming, and swipe typing can be enabled (its just a file that they cannot or have chosen not to install with the app, as the rest is open source as far as I understood).
The only thing I dislike of heliboard is their swipe function requires Google binaries. Most FOSS keyboards either lack some feature I use or are immersed in wild controversies.
And the implementation is nowhere as good as gboard.
Futo’s keyboard isn’t much better for slide to type. I find myself switching keyboards back to gboard when I’m not using voice to text or two thumbs.
I mean, I can’t complain about HeliBoard’s swiping feature, especially considering the alternatives.
Does FlorisBoard have controversial shit too?
No, but they are forever beta. They still lack a ton of features I use.
True
fossify keyboard? extremely basic, but works
FFS
Heliboard seems decent, though I don’t know anything about the developers.
Great article.
God fucking damnit. I just like the on device speech-to-text functionality. Anyone have any recs for another service that does the same thing.
I’ve used Whisper and Sayboard, and they’re both good. Sayboard is faster, but Whisper can handle punctuation.
IIRC they all kind of suck. There’s Transcribro or whatever, but I don’t think it supports many languages (maybe only English?). I used to just use Google’s and then revoked network access.
I found that Google now refuses to work when internet access is not available, even though I previously had offline only voice to text.
With the voice model already downloaded? That sucks, but honestly kind of expected with everything Google’s been doing lately.
Yep, it was my daily driver until one day voice to text stopped working. Restored internet access to it and lo-and-behold, voice to text is back. Tried redownooading the model, etc and had no success in getting it working with internet disabled.
There is Whisper IME.
FUTO is also involved with Immich 🫤
They just bragged with v2 release how they “survived the controversial move to join FUTO” …
I love Immich & use it a lot :(.
Try Ente Photos, I like it more.
I’m still disappointed that you can’t interact with tags at all on the mobile app.
I trust Immich and the AGPL more than this blogger.
I’m going to stop using good free software because I read a blog post by a sketchy guy saying the guys that wrote the software are sketchy. 🙄
No material harm is described in the post. This is a drama blog.
Believe what you want, but Drew DeVault has more of a reputation than FUTO.
“good” is subjective but FUTO’s software is non-free. Their attempts to openwash their proprietary license is enough of a red flag.
It’s not a FOSS liscence, but saying it’s proprietary is also disingenuous, it’s source available.
From a communication viewpoint, that is fair, but to my knowledge (from being a professional software developer), effectively any license that is not ‘open-source’ or ‘free’ is by definition proprietary.
Because those two terms describe licensing standards (the only established ones that I know of). Whereas I believe, “proprietary license” uses this meaning of proprietary:
Nonstandard and controlled by one particular organization.
So, they wrote that license themselves is the point. What it says in there is secondary in meaning.
This is so highly relevant because in legal disputes, there is certain license compatibilities which are known to be possible.
You can take a library licensed under the MIT license and use it in a project that uses the Apache-2.0 license and you’re perfectly fine. This is the foundation of why the open-source ecosystem exists at all.But you cannot take the source code from FUTO and use it in a differently licensed project, because no legal precedents exist to support this. (I believe, the FUTO license also actively prohibits this in some way, but that’s beside the point.)
This has massive implications. Like, yeah, you can look at the code, but it is useless. If FUTO closes shop or enshittifies, you cannot fork their projects.
And because you cannot legally re-use their source code in other projects, likely no one looks at it in depth either.Source availability is necessary but not sufficient for 2 of the 4 freedoms.
There’s no third option between FOSS and proprietary (unless there are licenses that match the Free Software definition but not the Open Source definition or vice versa, I suppose, but I’m not aware of any). All software that is not FOSS is proprietary by definition, whether the source is available or not. It’s not “disingenuous” to call FUTO software proprietary. It’s simply factual.
That’s fair. Only "free as in beer "
Maybe Louis Rossman will see this and beat FUTO back into shape? Maybe? Please? I just want one good outcome here!!
Doubtful, unfortunately. FUTO seems like the sort of narcissistic assholes who won’t be swayed in any way, shape, or form
He’s literally in it.
He’s literally not.
I always thought they seemed shady
This is informative, and unfortunate.
I will be honest, I don’t really expect louis will wade into this issue at all, since he seems to be very uncomfortable with any of the “political” or partisan aspects of the issues he covers.
I can empathize with why one might be that way, but I hope I’m wrong, it would be rather disappointing.
Maybe it’s time for me to open some feature requests on the helicopter repo for futo keyboard features I’d really miss if I left it behind… It’d be good for both projects to be feature rich and competitive anyway.
On the upside, Louis left FUTO last February
Wait, he did? I had no idea
Is that what “fulu” has been about?
I wish my comment included that context for all the people who saw it but I was completely unaware
“FULU” is a consumer rights organization iirc. The name sounds like a spinoff or sister organization to FUTO, but I don’t think there’s an official relationship.
He’s not uncomfortable with it - He hates the cognitive dissonance of being a capitalist and hating the results of it
I’m gonna be really honest, to me that feels like it strays really far into reading people’s minds and headcannoning what’s going on on them. But perhaps you’ve seen more from him than I have, and you’re basing that assessment on greater familiarity.
I do think it’s worth being mindful about how much we assume we know the inner workings of random people through a screen, though.
Wolf also was spouting about how great Trump is and how “woke” shit is ruining society or whatever in January IIRC. I briefly trawled through their social media when I was investigating their keyboard, Grayjay, and Immich and promptly decided to never, ever give them money.
Note that their keyboard doesn’t require network (at least as of now), so if you don’t give them money or promote it to other people, they don’t really benefit.
In the last thread he posted in they’re already talking about the author/article in the OP.
Internet drama truly is a flat circle.
Interestingly, according to one of his recent-ish comments, he left FUTO in February.
Yeah, not sure how much he’s distancing himself from FUTO related things though. He brought up grayjay recently, but only specifically to talk about the devs comments on recent Texas app store legislation. Kind of a wash.
Given he is playing politician now, I don’t think he’s going to make a public statement about it. Not only would it hurt his influence but it would probably stall out any ongoing negotiations regarding right to repair. Shit sucks in general.
JFC can there be nothing pure in this world?
I’ve always had a weird feeling about FUTO, but I thought them giving money to open source projects can’t be that bad. Now I hope they don’t fuck up Immich.
Luckily thanks to their licensing model they basically cannot. Immich has according to github as of now 1606 contributors. Changing the license so that there could even be a proprietary fork would require basically the ok by every contributor (that made a relevant code contribution)
And even if they did somehow manage to get permission to switch the license, all previous versions would still be open in perpetuity so a fork would come easily. Immich source isn’t only open, and not only GPL… but AGPL-3.0 which is as copyleft as you can get.
Thank God! That’s a relief. I thought I was going to have to redo my entire photo library hosting stuff.
FUTO has always been sus, but privacy redditors gave them a pass because of Rossmann’s involvement.
Shit I really liked them. Their keyboard is incredible and Grayjay is hard to replace on desktop. But I’ll get started on replacing them. Any ideas on a good keyboard that’s open-source? Not anysoftkeyboard or mantis. Tried them.
Replaced their keyboard with heliboard and went back to newpipe. Sucks. Fucking fascist.
Freetube is also good on desktop
Yeah, HeliBoard or FlorisBoard would’ve been my recommendation. They’re very similar, though (and presumably share most code between themselves).
Having good things is illegal under the Geneva convention
They’re openly disdainful of all things Open Source and OSI, and their software is not Open Source.
They’re a fully for-profit company using consumer rights kind of rhetoric to manipulate people in service to FUTO’s own pocketbook. Don’t fall for their use of the
.orgtld or promises to “never abuse customers”.I’ve written many times about what assholes FUTO is. I’m fully convinced they’re way more part of the problem than part of the solution and they’re not to be trusted.
They’ve soured me on Rossman. Back when he was doing coverage of things like the court cases around right to repair and tractors and stuff, I watched a few videos of his and thought he was awesome. And then he got involved with FUTO and started billing Grayjay as “Open Source” and I’ve gotten sufficiently disillusioned with FUTO that I haven’t followed Rossman at all. I’ve got coworkers changing their avatars to Clippy and shit, and I believe their hearts are in the right place, but I can’t in good conscience really get behind anything or anyone associated with FUTO.
Edit: Oh. I honesty didn’t even see this OP was a link to an article. Lol. Now I’m very interested to go read that article.
