Gross. Fuck FUTO.
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.
Edit 2: Shite. I’ve now read the article. I knew FUTO was assholes in a lot of different ways, but now I know how deeply, completely irredeemable they really are.
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)
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.
EDIT: Also, there are claims Rossman has a Kiwi Farms account and is at least somewhat active there. I haven’t investigated those very thoroughly though.
Interestingly, according to one of his recent-ish comments, he left FUTO in February.
Why does every mobile keyboard developer have some controversial shit. I just want to text in peace.
Anything on HeliBoard too?
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.
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
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
FUTO is also involved with Immich 🫤
Having good things is illegal under the Geneva convention
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.
Maybe Louis Rossman will see this and beat FUTO back into shape? Maybe? Please? I just want one good outcome here!!
Oh god dammit man.
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.
There is Whisper IME.
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 Gboard 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.
Great article.
Fuch!!! Are they going to see my immich face detected photos to the government for the “final solution” march to the camps and the human powered ovens?
FFS, so what’s a keyboard that isn’t shitty and invasive?
