this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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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.
Summary video by Marques Brownlee
Great channel covering and advocating right to repair, Lewis Rossman
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I mean FUTO specifically. It's not about what license they're using per se. It's about them:
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.