Right to Repair

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Whether it be electronics, automobiles or medical equipment, the manufacturers should not be able to horde “oem” parts, render your stuff useless if you repair it with aftermarket parts, or hide schematics of their products.

I Fix It Repair Manifesto

Summary article from I Fix It

Summary video by Marques Brownlee

Great channel covering and advocating right to repair, Lewis Rossman

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Louis Rossmann's Keynote Speech on Right to Repair (peertube.futo.org)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I mean FUTO specifically. It's not about what license they're using per se. It's about them:

Co-opting the term Open Source. (By the time their apology came, it was far to little too late.)
...specifically in an effort to sabotage the whole OSS movement by diluting the term. (Especially in the wake of big asshole companies like Meta doing the same.)
Talking smack about OSS and further pushing their anti-Open-Source agenda in their supposed "apology" to the people they pissed off for having co-opted the term.
All while acting extremely sanctimonious about how they're revolutionizing consumer rights in tech or whatever.
...with a supposedly better license that's "Open Source plus pay nag screens". Congratulations, you've solved enshittification. (/s)

FUTO Is a for-profit company. If they'd started out saying "yeah, our stuff isn't Open Source, but it is shared-source and we don't think we can really survive as a company without nag screens", I wouldn't be pissed at them. I still more likely than not wouldn't use their software, but I wouldn't be calling them "evil". But as it is, I'm convinced FUTO is just an asshole company trying to use consumer rights hype and formerly the stolen "Open Source" label to increase their bottom line without even the slightest care about consumer rights in tech. Much like Apple's famous 1984 Superbowl ad.

As for Rossmann himself, I don't so much blame him. The work he's done in increasing awareness of right-to-repair was (when I last followed him at all) awesome. I don't know but what he got swept up in FUTO's rhetoric before he really knew what terms like "Open Source" meant. I just hope he eventually severs his connection with FUTO and makes some public statements about what a clusterfuck FUTO committed with their whole antagonism-to-the-OSS-community thing. (Actually, I don't know if he's still so much involved with FUTO. Again, I haven't been following him just because of how disgusted I am with FUTO and his connection thereto.)

Edit: Oh, also while I'm at it, it's very shitty of them, as a fully for profit company to mislead folks into thinking they're not-for-profit by using the ".org" top-level-domain for their domain.