I learned very early (by 2004) that Silicon Valley was up to no good. I wound up playing World of Warcraft for years simply because no one I knew actually wanted to create quality software for people without abusive hidden agendas.
At that time, me and everyone I knew understood open source to just mean "the source code is available". This is coming from someone who spent 6.5 years at Yahoo! utilizing open source software every day of my life. I programmed using emacs and Linux. My servers ran on FreeBSD and Linux. The software I wrote (Yahoo! Games) was enjoyed by tens of millions of people around the world and I had quite enjoyed just making good stuff. I had no idea the OSI even existed.
After years of WoW, LoL, random gigs, and personal programming pursuits, I started putting the concept of FUTO together around 2017. The goal of FUTO was to remedy the abuses of big tech through software development. The primary tenet being that the people need to be in control of the computers they own, not companies. None of my friends in Silicon Valley were interested.
While conceptualizing FUTO, my first thought was always "Why hasn't open source solved this problem. Billions of people have access to the programming tools now. Instead the problem is getting worse."
After moving to Austin, and in the aftermath of some gross abuses by the Tech Oligopoly, I finally started finding people who also cared about this problem in 2021. Perhaps I should have found them sooner but I find WoW more fun than networking at alcohol parties. I still had never head of the OSI or knew about their definition.
We started out by making substantial grants to open source projects and funding open source companies. Bad results.
We've since pivoted to building software internally. FUTO now exists to make things good for programmers who want to create non-abusive software. We're getting better results.
We have determined that while "open source" still applies to what we're doing, it's caused confusion because the OSI claimed ownership of the term. While I regret any miscommunication on our part, I don't think the OSI should have continued to pretend like they owned the term after they lost their trademark. They should have pivoted to a new term that they could trademark if they wanted to behave this way.
We have also determined, that "open source", by itself, isn't working. The problems created by the Tech Oligopoly are getting worse. I know FUTO will fail if we abide by the OSI's definition. Hence we have to change things.
