this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
547 points (89.5% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
53370 readers
1416 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
💰 Please help cover server costs.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
By paying for the app, you're merely donating to FUTO. As Rossmann mentioned in his video, it is completely optional to pay.
There's nothing wrong with any app being unprofitable IMO. Public transport and car infrastructure is unprofitable and we don't have a problem with those... heck even my personal website is unprofitable, that's about $200-300 a year being funnelled into something nobody uses or visits.
This is incorrect
Rossmann's personal repair business is financially independent from his employer, FUTO, who only partially sponsors Rossmann's R2R advocacy with the assistance of community donations. Rossmann frequently publishes hour long videos on his main channel crawling through the finances, and has spreadsheets online for public viewing where viewers can do an audit themselves
AFAICT, FUTO is comparable to organisations like NLNET - the same people at sponsor the Lemmy devs. The aim is generally not to fund projects forever, but to eventually open source them after they've been developed to the agreed level of functionality. Seeing as this app is mainly a Rossmann initiative there could be an exception here though - such as Rossmann donating his own money towards development.
I'm probably an exception then lol
Spoiler
A lot of people who follow Rossmann are passionate about R2R, actually owning what you pay for, and not giving excessive control to monopolies like Google.
Grayjay is more along the lines of this spirit, and as soon as they have their DHT video hosting thing ready I'll gladly donate some of my storage space towards it 👌
So Rossmann is a lobbyist for an activist billionaire?
I think right to repair is important btw. Not questioning that.
Yep. And a right libertarian. I stopped watching him when he went from repair content to months long complaining about taxes and talking up Florida and Texas as some great place. Honestly, I am 100% convinced that the only reason he even cares about right to repair is for his work. He has shown no signs of caring about anyone else other than himself in any of the dozens of hours of content I watched of his.
I’m so glad I trained under Jessa at iPad Rehab instead of taking his course.
He’s always felt off to me. And it’s not just because I’m into Apple products. I find it hard to articulate. But I see I’m not alone, thanks for sharing.
Yeah I was in the industry when he got big, and it was hard not to love his anger towards Apple, but eventually it became apparent he was just an angry person and Apple was only his current target. Once he had secured his platform, he felt more comfortable to share his absurd views, and I fear he influenced many impressionable people towards the right with his rhetoric. Dude is not who I want representing the repair community.
This is exactly it. I appreciate that he's a strong advocate for it, and he's a single issue voter/lobbyist, but he really wouldn't care about it if it wasn't his business. As can be seen in how, while he so strongly believes in a right for third parties to maintain hardware, he very clearly doesn't believe in a right for third parties to maintain software with this app being source-available and not FLOSS.
There are plenty of projects that take donations/payments that don't make profit but stay afloat, normally through the team behind it paying the bills. I guess it depends what the running costs actually are, and if it's for people or e.g. servers.
Kodi is one of them
Billionaire, actually.
The billionaire (Eron Wulf) is also the founder of FUTO. They don't have investors.
Why does everybody seem to know all of this dirt about Louis except me? I've seen this "be suspicious of anything Rossman is involved in" comment a few times in the past few days. I'm out of the loop.