What's Up with FUTO?

Some time ago, I noticed some new organization called FUTO popping up here and there. I’m always interested in seeing new organizations that fund open source popping up, and seeing as they claim several notable projects on their roster, I explored their website with interest and gratitude. I was first confused, and then annoyed by what I found. Confused, because their website is littered with bizzare manifestos,¹ and ultimately annoyed because they were playing fast and loose with the term “open source”, using it to describe commercial source-available software.

FUTO eventually clarified their stance on “open source”, first through satire and then somewhat more soberly, perpetuating the self-serving myth that “open source” software can privilege one party over anyone else and still be called open source. I mentally categorized them as problematic but hoped that their donations or grants for genuinely open source projects would do more good than the harm done by this nonsense.

By now I’ve learned better. tl;dr: FUTO is not being honest about their “grant program”, they don’t have permission to pass off these logos or project names as endorsements, and they collaborate with and promote mask-off, self-proclaimed fascists.

An early sign that something is off with FUTO is in that “sober” explanation of their “disdain for OSI approved licenses”, where they make a point of criticizing the Open Source Initiative for banning Eric S. Raymond (aka ESR) from their mailing lists, citing right-wing reactionary conspiracy theorist Bryan Lunduke’s blog post on the incident. Raymond is, as you may know, one of the founders of OSI and a bigoted asshole. He was banned from the mailing lists, not because he’s a bigoted asshole, but because he was being a toxic jerk on the mailing list in question. Healthy institutions outgrow their founders. That said, FUTO’s citation and perspective on the ESR incident could be generously explained as a simple mistake, and we should probably match generosity with generosity given their prolific portfolio of open source grants.

I visited FUTO again quite recently as part of my research on Cloudflare’s donations to fascists, and was pleased to discover that this portfolio of grants had grown immensely since my last visit, and included a number of respectable projects that I admire and depend on (and some projects I don’t especially admire, hence arriving there during my research on FOSS projects run by fascists). But something felt fishy about this list – surely I would have heard about it if someone was going around giving big grants to projects like ffmpeg, VLC, musl libc, Tor, Managarm, Blender, NeoVim – these projects have a lot of overlap with my social group and I hadn’t heard a peep about it.

So I asked Rich Felker, the maintainer of musl libc, about the FUTO grant, and he didn’t know anything about it. Rich and I spoke about this for a while and eventually Rich uncovered a transaction in his GitHub sponsors account from FUTO: a one-time donation of $1,000. This payment circumvents musl’s established process for donations from institutional sponsors. The donation page that FUTO used includes this explanation: “This offer is for individuals, and may be available to small organizations on request. Commercial entities wishing to be listed as sponsors should inquire by email.” It’s pretty clear that there are special instructions for institutional donors who wish to receive musl’s endorsement as thanks for their contribution.

The extent of the FUTO “grant program”, at least in the case of musl libc, involved ignoring musl’s established process for institutional sponsors, quietly sending a modest one-time donation to one maintainer, and then plastering the logo of a well-respected open source project on a list of “grant recipients” on their home page. Rich eventually posted on Mastodon to clarify that the use of the musl name and logo here was unauthorized.

I also asked someone I know on the ffmpeg project about the grant that they had received from FUTO and she didn’t know anything about it, either. Here’s what she said:

I’m sure we did not get a grant from them, since we tear each other to pieces over everything, and that would be enough to start a flame war. Unless some dev independently got money from them to do something, but I’m sure that we as a project got nothing. The only grant we’ve received is from the STF last year.

Neovim is another project FUTO lists as a grant recipient, and they also have a separate process for institutional sponsors. I didn’t reach out to anyone to confirm, but FUTO does not appear on the sponsor list so presumably the M.O. is the same. This is also the case for Wireshark, Conduit, and KiCad. GrapheneOS is listed prominently as well, but that doesn’t seem to have worked out very well for them.

So, it seems like FUTO is doing some shady stuff and putting a bunch of notable FOSS projects on their home page without good reason to justify their endorsement. Who’s behind all of this?

As far as I can tell, the important figures are Eron Wolf² and Louis Rossmann.³ Wolf is the founder of FUTO – a bunch of money fell into his lap from founding Yahoo Games before the bottom fell out of Yahoo, and he made some smart investments to grow his wealth, which he presumably used to fund FUTO. Rossmann is a notable figure in the right to repair movement, with a large following on YouTube, who joined FUTO a year later and ultimately moved to Austin to work more closely with them. His established audience and reputation provides a marketable face for FUTO. I had heard of Rossmann prior to learning about FUTO and held him in generally good regard, despite little specific knowledge of his work, simply because we have a common cause in right to repair.

I hadn’t heard of Wolf before looking into FUTO. However, in the course of my research, several people tipped me off to his association with Curtis Yarvin (aka moldbug), and in particular to the use of FUTO’s platform and the credentials of Wolf and Rossman to platform and promote Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin is a full-blown, mask-off, self-proclaimed fascist. A negligible amount of due diligence is required to verify this, but here’s one source from Politico in January 2025:

I’ve interacted with Vance once since the election. I bumped into him at a party. He said, “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.” I was like, “Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I’m glad I didn’t stop you from getting elected.”

– Ian Ward for Politico

Vice President Vance and numerous other figures in the American right have cited Yarvin as a friend and source of inspiration in shaping policy.⁴ Among his many political positions, Yarvin has has proclaimed that black people are genetically predisposed to a lower IQ than white people, and moreover suggests that black people are inherently suitable for enslavement.⁵

Yarvin has appeared on FUTO’s social media channels, in particular in an interview published on PeerTube and Odysee, the latter a platform controversial for its role in spreading hate speech and misinformation.⁶ Yarvin also appeared on stage to “debate” Louis Rossmann in June 2022, in which Yarvin is permitted to speak at length with minimal interruptions or rebuttals to argue for an authoritarian techno-monarchy to replace democracy.

Rossmann caught some flack for this “debate” and gave a milquetoast response in a YouTube comment on this video, explaining that he agreed to this on very short notice as a favor to Eron, who had donated “a million” to Rossmann’s non-profit prior to bringing Rossmann into the fold at FUTO. Rossmann does rebuke Yarvin’s thesis, albeit buried in this YouTube comment rather than when he had the opportunity to do so on-stage during the debate. Don’t argue with fascists, Louis – they aren’t arguing with you, they are pitching their ideas⁷ to the audience. Smart fascists are experts at misdirection and bad-faith debate tactics and as a consequence Rossmann just becomes a vehicle for fascist propaganda – consult the YouTube comments to see who this video resonates with the most.

In the end, Rossmann seems to regret agreeing to this debate. I don’t think that Eron Wolf regrets it, though – based on his facilitation of this debate and his own interview with Yarvin on the FUTO channel a month later, I can only assume that Wolf considers Yarvin a close associate. No surprise given that Wolf is precisely the kind of insecure silicon valley techbro Yarvin’s rhetoric is designed to appeal to – moderately wealthy but unknown, and according to Yarvin, fit to be a king. Rossmann probably needs to reflect on why he associates with and lends his reputation to an organization that openly and unapologetically platforms its founder’s fascist friends.

In summary, FUTO is not just the product of some eccentric who founded a grant-making institution that funds open source at the cost of making us read his weird manifestos on free markets and oligopoly. It’s a private, for-profit company that associates with and uses their brand to promote fascists. They push an open-washing narrative and they portray themselves as a grant-making institution when, in truth, they’re passing off a handful of small donations as if they were endorsements from dozens of respectable, high-profile open source projects, in an attempt to legitimize themselves, and, indirectly, legitimize people they platform like Curtis Yarvin.

So, if you read this and discover that your project’s name and logo is being proudly displayed on the front page of a fascist-adjacent, washed-up millionaire’s scummy vanity company, and you don’t like that, maybe you should ask them to knock it off? Eron, Louis – you know that a lot of these logos are trademarked, right?