this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
20 points (64.3% liked)
Opensource
4817 readers
110 users here now
A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!
⠀
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Drew Devault is a controversial personality, but his article on this topic has a good summary of the facts: https://drewdevault.com/2025/10/22/2025-10-22-Whats-up-with-FUTO.html
What part of the FUTO keyboard license isn't open source? It looks like most of what it says is in line with the kind of stuff you find in the GPL, MIT, BSD licenses. Is the non-commercial restriction the reason people say it's "not open source"?
when futo dissolves as an organization, or someone forks their software and maintains it better than they do, that fork still has to have the button to pay futo and not the new maintainer.
there are restrictions on what you can do with the source. that is not open. the source is available and they'll accept your donation of code, but you are donating to a company's product, not a community project.
Yeah, I see what you mean. That makes sense. After reading through some common OSS licenses, I can see the difference between licenses that require you not to modify the license notification, versus software that explicitly forbids certain changes. But, given how little funding OSS projects get, I'm not bothered by the idea that they want to make sure people financially contribute to the original creators. After all, if someone does fork it and do a better job, they could easily just put their own donate button higher up above the original one.