About
FUTO is an organization dedicated to giving people back control over their technology. Through in-house engineering, investments, grants, and public education efforts, we build and fund software that challenges the dominance of Big Tech.
We believe the free market has failed to check the power of the tech oligopoly. Monopolies have consolidated control over how information flows, and most users have lost sovereignty over their own devices. Software creates powerful economies of scale that favor tech megacorps who then use that power to manipulate human behavior for profit. Neither traditional capitalism nor existing open source efforts have solved this problem. In many cases the reasons are obvious: a significant part of the most important FOSS foundations and projects are themselves funded by the tech oligopoly.
FUTO takes a different approach to solving this problem. Founded in 2021 by Silicon Valley veteran Eron Wolf, FUTO operates without reliance on existing tech companies or venture capital firms. We are not expecting quick profits. We will never cash out with a sale to a megacorporation the moment our technology begins to catch on. We will focus entirely on the mission to recreate the spirit of freedom, innovation, and self-reliance that defined the early American tech industry.
We hold ourselves and every project we fund to three pledges:
We will never sell out.
All FUTO-funded projects are expected to remain fiercely independent. They will never exacerbate the monopoly problem by selling out to a monopolist.
We will never abuse our customers.
All FUTO-funded projects are expected to maintain an honest relationship with their customers. Revenue, if it exists, comes from customers paying directly for software and services. “The users are our product” revenue models are strictly prohibited.
We will always be transparently devoted to making delightful software.
All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open source or develop a plan to eventually become so. No effort will ever be taken to hide from the people what their computers are doing, to limit how they use them, or to modify their behavior through their software.