When: March 14, 2026 · 10 AM – 7 PM

Where: 1044 Liberty Park Drive, Austin, TX

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Schedule

10 AM – 12:30 PM

• 10:00 AM — Doors Open
• 10:30 AM — Ehren Kret — CTO Signal Q & A
• 11:15 AM — Eron Wolf — Fireside chat about the FUTO vision
• 12:00 PM — Perry Metzger — AI is coming, and you're going to love it!

Lunch

• 12:30 PM — Lunch (flower child)

1 PM – 6 PM

• 1:00 PM — David McKay — Inside AI: The Context & Control
• 1:30 PM — Scott Aaronson — Q & A on anything science
• 2:00 PM — FUTO: Immich, Grayjay, Keyboard — Immich - Open Source Software That Sparks Joy
• 3:00 PM — Naomi Brockwell — Why Privacy is Essential for a Free Society
• 3:30 PM — Andreas Kling — Ladybird: State of the Union
• 4:00 PM — Louis Rossman — Consumer freedom and the right to repair
• 4:30 PM — Justin Fowler — Stonefruit: A Self-Hosted Second Brain
• 4:45 PM — FUTO hardware team — Challenges in Open Hardware
• 5:00 PM — Vaxry — Hyprland status update
• 5:30 PM — David Wimmell — Paul LeRoux: From Open-Source Cryptographer to Arms Trafficker and Drug Kingpin
• 6:00 PM — Anna Kachiyan and Dasha Nekresova — The state of podcasting past, present, and future

Party

• 8:00 PM — Party

Is this just our perspective, or does the community feel similarly? To find out, we launched our first public surveys around FUTO’s SXSW 2025 conference this past March. We ran these for a month using self-hosted HeyForm, our YouTube channel, and other avenues like our website and word-of-mouth, gathering over 750 (~110 developers, ~600 consumers) anonymized responses. The result was a powerful echo of our core beliefs: over 94% of respondents indicated a willingness to pay for OSS.

This data confirms we're on the right track in redefining what building in open-source means today, creating a path for developers to support themselves and their projects sustainably in the modern age. However, community willingness to pay, while incredibly encouraging, doesn't automatically solve the structural problems developers face. The current ecosystem can still leave creators vulnerable, facing situations exactly like this:

The Developer’s Dilemma

Imagine you're an open-source developer, and on weekends you work on a small but successful FOSS product. What started as a passion project is now a second job that you wish you had more time for. To make matters worse, big tech noticed your project's success and has already turned it into one of their product offerings, effectively eliminating any chance you had of turning this into your full-time career.

You're not alone. Roughly 70% of our surveyed developers cited major pain points in running their OSS projects, and of those, about half were categorized as having major issues with the following:

• Sustainability (finding time and maintaining financial stability)
• Support (keeping up with user requests and troubleshooting).
• Pricing (figuring out fair compensation models without alienating potential customers)

And among projects that attempted to monetize, legal challenges and competition from alternatives emerged as common hurdles.

So, knowing developers face these challenges, what do customers see as preferred ways to pay and receive software?

Monetization Strategies: What Customers Actually Want

Our data shows that more than 80% of customers surveyed would pay once (as a pay-what-you-want and/or one-time purchase).

Yes, despite what many people assume, and while big tech frequently gravitates toward SaaS or subscription models as the route to sustainability, most customers and developers of OSS would strongly prefer the one-time payment approach. Why does this disconnect exist?

We believe it partially stems from subscription fatigue in an increasingly subscription-heavy digital economy. Insights from our survey comments suggest customers find managing recurring payments painful and exhausting. They also mention encountering friction with payment processing, especially dealing with international transactions, currency conversions, and regional tax rules. Furthermore, many prefer directing contributions toward specific features rather than funding general support. Ultimately, customers seem to value simplicity: pay once, download a compiled binary, and use the software without ongoing financial ties.

That said, recognizing this preference while also acknowledging developers' need for sustainable income models is key. This is why at FUTO, we’re strongly encouraging core OSS offerings as self-hostable–perfectly suited for the preferred one-time purchase and binary distribution.

We believe developers can then bridge the gap towards recurring revenue by also offering optional, value-added services, such as a managed hosted version for customers who prefer convenience and are willing to subscribe. This hybrid approach respects the core user desire for simplicity while creating pathways for sustainability.

We understand the nuances of balancing customers preferences and developer sustainability aren’t easy, however. That’s why we’re continuing this work, exploring this topic further in upcoming interviews with survey participants who requested follow-up conversations.

The Price Point Sweet Spot

So, if customers prefer the one-time purchase model, how much are they actually willing to pay? We explored this by asking respondents to select their willingness-to-pay from several price bands for a hypothetical valuable OSS tool. Analyzing these selections revealed an average willingness to pay of approximately $18 USD (a conservative estimate, using the bottom of the selection band). Interestingly, digging deeper showed that those who self-identified as 'frequent' donors to open source projects leaned higher, averaging around $27 USD. It's worth noting this group represented about 10% of our respondents, so consider that context when looking at this higher figure–your mileage may vary.

At the same time, our survey reveals what truly motivates customers to pay for open source projects. A clear roadmap leads the way (68.3%), with usability (63.5%) and funding transparency (59.8%) following closely behind. While communication, dedicated support, and contributor recognition scored lower, they still impact purchasing decisions. Conversely, the main factors deterring customers are 'Affordability,' 'Abandonment,' 'Purchasing Pains,' and other elements we're still analyzing, but the message is clear: customers want to understand your project's direction, find it easy to use, and know how their money will be spent.

Here's what we believe is critical though: if we, as customers, decide to "purchase" OSS, we need to shift expectations around what that means. When you "purchase" instead of "donate", you're supporting the project as it exists today, not buying promises of future features. Purchasing is about sustaining current value while enabling future development. Customers need to apply the same clear-eyed assessment they use with commercial software: is this valuable right now, and does its future direction justify ongoing support?

Protecting Your Work

So imagine you're that developer again—but this time, you're armed with this data on monetization strategies your customers actually embrace and ideas for building sustainably. You've got a successful project people love and are willing to pay for. But there's still that nagging question: how do you keep big tech from simply taking your work and profiting from it without fair compensation?

This is a core challenge FUTO aims to address. We've developed the Source First licensing model designed to help developers establish fair terms that foster mutual respect between creators and users. Its principles aim to ensure developers retain appropriate control over their work and have the ability to require fair compensation, particularly from big tech looking to use the project.

While we strongly believe in this approach, we offer Source First as one of our contributions towards a more sustainable open-source future. It's one option among many licensing strategies available to you. If you're interested in exploring licenses built on these principles, a free resource with guidelines and model license options is available at sourcefirst.com for developers looking to establish clear and fair terms with their community.

Building the Tools for a Sustainable Future

Understanding the challenges and preferences is one thing; building the infrastructure to support developers is another. That's why my team at FUTO is focused on FUTOcore, our upcoming software distribution project.

You’ve chosen a license like Source First to protect your work, and you know users are willing to pay via one-time purchases. But how do you easily sell and distribute your software, especially without getting bogged down in building payment systems, user authentication, or storefronts?

FUTOcore is our answer. We’re creating a dedicated platform–initially launching with a focus on Android apps–specifically designed for commercial open-source. Our goal is to support small teams, and turn their valuable projects into sustainable successes, contributing to a healthier software ecosystem.

To streamline the process further and handle essential software functions, FUTOcore will integrate with FUTOpay, our tailored billing solution, simplifying payment complexities, and FUTOauth, our authentication solution for managing user accounts securely. Further, we will be building telemetry that respects the user while allowing developers to get valuable insights. Together, these tools are designed to let you concentrate on building great software, not just the infrastructure around it.

You can hear more about our overall vision for these tools and how they fit into our broader mission from one of our leaders, Adam Jesionowski, in The Future of Software Distribution.

Get Involved / Let Us Know

If you're interested in learning more about how these approaches might work for your project, or if you found this research valuable and would like us to do more, please let us know!

Your feedback helps shape our direction. You can find me at joe@futo.org, connect with the wider FUTO community on our public Zulip, or reach out via FUTO's social media channels.

According to urbitguide.com, there are about 5,400 Urbit ships online right now—a typical population for these types of projects and more than enough to sustain a vibrant, interesting community. Yet these projects struggle to attract the masses. I believe there is inherent complexity to software and its management when it is needed to perform useful tasks under real constraints, and that no amount of amount of engineering can be done to enable the common Internet user to become an owner and maintainer of a P2P server.

As such, in order to move beyond overly centralized control we have to look towards software topologies that live in the middle of these two poles, between a 1 to 1 and 1 billion to 1 user to owner ratio. Prior to the centralization effects of Facebook and the like, forums served as the primary repository of the Internet's knowledge. These websites lived in the range of 10 to 100,000 users to an owner.

Today, we have need for software more complex than a forum. We have many more modalities for interacting with the networked world and increasingly wield better control over those modalities. Presently the benefits of these pieces of software continue to accrue to hyperscaler companies. Despite their advertisements asserting otherwise, when a single company is managing software for billions of users it cannot care for the needs of the actual individual. Their scale forces them to cater to the average of all possible needs while optimizing for advertising revenue.

The future of the Internet lies in the return of servers that manage 10 to 100,000 users. These sizes of clusters enable individual users to form a culture centered around their shared desires while being maintained by small teams. In moving to highly centralized spaces those cultures have lost something about being themselves. Once they realize they can have their own space, the masses will migrate to where they want to be.

Commercial Software

An Iron Law of Computing is that bytes are easy to copy and modify. Any software that attempts to circumvent this, such as Digital Rights Management, is inevitably broken by people offended at the breach of natural law.

Early Internet pioneers had utopian ideas of byte-freedom. Information was to be shared easily, freely, and without an expectation of return. In retrospect these pioneers were completely correct in the first two instances and missed how the third would rear its ugly head. Having the source available is key: we want to elevate the general understanding of what our computers are doing. However, building software involves even higher levels of inherent complexity than running a server. Writing good modern software demands a significant portion of an engineer's time. While it is possible for that attention to be given purely of their own free time, this usually results in much less overall attention being paid to the software than if they were being paid to write it. For this reason free open software has been partially cannibalized by the needs of hyperscalar companies.

At FUTO we believe there is a simple solution to this dynamic: software should be easily copiable, free to modify, and cost money to purchase. Our own Immich is an example of a F/OSS project that is partially funded through the purchase of licenses. These licenses do not unlock any functionality, they simply state that the owner wanted to fund further development of Immich. Another example is fritzing: their code is open source, but downloading a binary requires a fee.

For our other applications, such as GrayJay, we have adopted our own commercial open source framework called Source First. These licenses enable us to hold firm to the idea that you should pay us for developing an application: modifications to the source code cannot remove the ability to pay us for our work. There has been a reflexive negative reaction to this that I understand: from a non-FUTO developer's perspective their freedom has been restricted. I will ask you to consider the flip side: from our perspective we gain the freedom to continue to grow and develop this software without the kind of perverse incentives that hyperscalers suffer from. Further, we believe that more solo developers or small teams adopting similar commercial open source frameworks would enable them to work on their applications full time, resulting in a higher quality software ecosystem.

Advertising and selling user data collection are user hostile ways of making money; they're extractive of attention. Selling copiable, inspectable, and modifiable software is an honest trade. A piece of software is a proof of work: it exists because someone sat down and made it and usually continues to sit down and write. A user can have a developer's bytes (because this is an Iron Law of Computing), but the developer should rightfully expect something in return for their labor.

FUTOcore

FUTO is launching a new software distribution project called FUTOcore. FUTOcore software is commercial open source software that targets right-sized software topologies. We look ahead to a future where small developer teams help power new communities, ones which grow in health, virtue, and wealth, instead of being mired in the extractive slog of the tech oligarchies.

More information on our plans will come in the next few months. If you're interested in (or currently are) developing FUTOcore software, please reach out to me at adam@futo.org.

Number one: Produce delightful software.

The software we build should provide a welcome contrast to Silicon Valley corporations packed with ads, tracking, and spyware. With our software, we will never remove features, implement ads, paywall functionality, or violate your privacy. However, this costs money, and providing high-quality products that respect users is only sustainable if we can meet our second goal.

Number two: Cultivate a culture where people pay for open software they find valuable.

We want to show the top 1% of programmers and developers that it's possible to make a living creating good software that respects users instead of exploiting them. If we can make this work, perhaps talented developers will quit working for abusive tech megacorps and start building software that truly benefits people.

We have committed to putting a few million dollars into Immich over the next several years. We believe Immich is a fundamentally better product than both Google Photos and iCloud. Through our funding, we want to show users commercial open source consumer software can be delightful products that normal people can easily use. People deserve better than half-baked projects that never make it to completion.

We’re not interested in making products that are merely “okay for open source.” We want Immich and our other projects to be best-in-class competitors to big tech, period !

With Immich, we have heard a lot of feedback about our choice to call it a "purchase." Many people have asked why we don't use the word "donation" or some other language for what we are doing.

We labeled it this way as a deliberate choice. By calling it a purchase, we’re sending a message that this software is worth paying for, just like any other product you use and rely on. The results of this experiment have spoken for themselves.

In just a month after making our announcement that people can purchase Immich, the team made 5x what they previously got in donations for the lifetime of the software.

This is a massive win! We are proving that when people see value in open software, they’re willing to pay for it.

These are exactly the results what we wanted to see; it validates our approach. People have asked all sorts of questions about how our approach to monetization is sustainable, this is your answer.

For many people, sustainable open software without corporate donors may very well seem like a pipe dream. The sales data we have for Immich, FUTO Keyboard, and Grayjay shows otherwise. While these projects have not gotten past the break even point, our internal projections show that they are all making significant gains toward sustainability, and will be in the near future.

Our ambitions go well beyond just these few pieces of software. One of those ambitions is an entire app store that cultivates and brings together freedom-respecting, privacy-first software; all built on the idea that there is actual money in it.

We think it’s possible. These early wins are a first step towards making it happen. Making as much in a month as what was made in a lifetime of donations simply by asking people to “purchase” it after committing to full-time development? Amazing.

This is a direct contrast to open source donation-based business models that rarely work for consumer-facing software. Open source projects that get funding successfully often do so by becoming beholden to corporate interests, while those that shun these corporations often die from a lack of donations.

While we will continue to give grants to FOSS projects, we are under no illusions that there is a future for projects that are run this way. We are carving out a different pathway.

So far, the success we’ve seen from Immich, FUTO Keyboard, and Grayjay leads us to believe that we’re off to a great start.

Our users have damn good reasons to be wary. As Captain Yossarian said, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." (Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. Simon & Schuster, 1961.) People feel anything from suspicious to hostile at any suggestion of telemetry or monitoring.

At FUTO, we’re committed to breaking this spiral. Software companies abuse you to make money because they believe you won’t pay for it; the belief that you won’t pay for it leads to other developers adopting abusive business models. We think good software can be both good AND respectful of your privacy.

Telemetry is a dirty topic that causes intense paranoia because of how companies have continually abused it. Some examples of why we understand our users’ healthy paranoia:

In April 2024, the FCC fined AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon a total of nearly $200 million for illegally sharing customers' location data without their consent. AT&T was fined 0.02% of their net profit for one year for this behavior; sending a message to every company that abusing your privacy for profit is not only acceptable, but profitable, as it will go unpunished. They sold your information to third-party aggregators who then resold it to other location-based service providers.

Let’s not forget about Facebook's psychological experiments on its users. In 2014, Facebook revealed that it had conducted an experiment on almost 700,000 people. Facebook manipulated the content in people’s feeds to study "emotional contagion;" how people’s emotional state changes when reading happy or sad news. This influenced the emotions users’ posts were written with.

This experiment was possible because Facebook’s privacy policies & terms allowed them to screw with their users without permission, and hell if it was written so that you’d understand it. This is done by design; with regards to reading terms of service, the process is the punishment. Imagine if someone was already depressed, anxious, on edge, or close to committing acts of violence. Opting such people into these experiments with no knowledge or understanding of their psychological state is something Zuckerberg had no problem with.

Recently, General Motors was caught sharing driving data with insurance companies without obtaining proper consent from their customers. GM monetized your driving data, collected without your consent, and sold it to insurance companies. These insurance companies hiked people’s rates based on a shitty AI’s interpretation of your driving proficiency.

According to the attorney general’s investigation, GM used deceptive tactics to trick users into opting into this data sharing, implying it was necessary to take ownership of the vehicle, and financially incentivized salespeople to push customers into these abusive agreements. Sometimes GM presented the opt-in as beneficial to customers; claiming it offered discounts on insurance premiums, in spite of doing the exact opposite!

It doesn't have to be this way. Data can be done in a way that follows strict ethical principles. Users of our products have brought up concerns regarding our commitment to protecting user privacy. Most of our apps simply don't collect any but for others there is some data collected. With regards to Grayjay, here’s how we handle data:

1. Source Code Transparency: All source code is available for anyone to review. Within hours of someone asking this question, we provided them a link to the direct page where they may review the code in question themselves. You can see exactly what our software does, how it handles your data, and verify that there’s no funny business going on.
2. Straightforward Privacy Policy: Our privacy policy is less than two pages long & written in plain, conversational, 6th grade-level-writing English. No legalese; it just makes sense.
3. Minimal Data Collection: We collect a single packet of data upon opening the app which has the following in it. This can be verified by looking at the source code itself.
   • The version of the app you’re using and the OS SDK version, to help us improve the app.
   • A randomly generated unique identifier, which doesn’t link back to your identity or specific device.
   • The model and make of your phone, so we can ensure compatibility and address issues specific to certain devices.

The data we collect helps us improve the application, so we can live up to our “sixth pillar” of the five pillars of FUTOey software ( IMO, the most important one) ; don’t suck.

1. Finding & Fixing Bugs: So often we hear people say “Grayjay version X doesn’t work with version Y of Android.” By knowing which Android versions & app versions are having issues, we can fix bugs ahead of time before they become widespread problems, before features in the app that are based on this codebase can continue to be built on top of said bugs, making them more difficult to untangle later.

2. Overcoming Underreporting: Most crashes and bugs never get reported to us, which makes troubleshooting difficult. The data we collect helps us identify problems that might go unnoticed.

3. Checking App Health: Having knowledge of sudden spikes or drops in app usage helps us stay on top of potential issues. For instance, if a plugin stops working, or a change in a content website’s delivery methods starts affecting other apps, we can spot these trends early. If we have a doubling of users in one day, it might mean that other apps have stopped working for a certain platform. If that’s the case, we need to figure out why before that same thing happens to us!

The minimal data we use has been designed in a straightforward, honest way, with the approach we’ve taken ensuring that it is impossible for us to profile you. We get that privacy is a giant concern, particularly with an application you use to view videos on all sorts of topics; if collected unethically this would make it very easy to profile users.

By making source code available, writing a very basic & readable privacy policy, & only collecting a tiny amount of non-identifying data, we hope to demonstrate that respecting your privacy & delivering a good product aren’t mutually exclusive.

Richard Stallman

I learned by 2004 that Silicon Valley was up to no good. I wound up spending most of my time playing World of Warcraft for years after leaving Yahoo!. No one I knew wanted to put in the effort 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. The servers for my product ran on FreeBSD and Linux. The software I wrote was enjoyed by tens of millions of people around the world and I had a great time creating good, usable things. 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 targeted software development. The principle tenet of FUTO I laid out was that the people need to be in control of the computers they own, not corporations and governments. 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 programming tools now, yet the problem seems to continually be getting worse.

After moving to Austin, and in the aftermath of many gross abuses by the Tech Oligopoly, I finally started discovering other people who also cared about solving the problem in 2021. It could be argued that I should have sought people out sooner but personally I find WoW to be much more fun than networking at alcohol parties. Even at this point, I had still never even heard of the OSI nor their "definition" of open source.

FUTO started out with a plan to make substantial grants to open source projects and fund various open source companies. It's fair to say that this ended up with largely poor outcomes. At this point, I have determined that I could pour all my resources down to my last penny into external open source projects and still barely make a dent in solving these problems.

We've since pivoted mostly to building software internally. FUTO now exists as an organization aimed at assisting and funding great teams who want to create non-abusive software. In contrast to earlier efforts, this has been getting incredible results. I am extremely pleased with the amazing things all of the internally incubated teams have been able to achieve.

We first launched Grayjay in October of 2023 and I abruptly became aware of the OSI and all the related semantic arguments that surround the so called "open source community". Many people in this "community" feel like we have mislead them with how we have gone about crafting our FUTO license. I can assure you that it was never our intention.

I fully believe that the term "open source" applies to what we're doing, and I know many people agree with me. I also understand there are some who disagree and feel mislead. For this, I regret any miscommunication on our part.

I don't think anyone owns this term, especially not the OSI. I believe the OSI should not have continued to pretend they owned the term after they lost the trademark. They should have pivoted to a new term that they could trademark if they wanted to behave this way. It is absolutely ridiculous that they continue to slander anyone using alternative licenses with terms like "openwashing". The OSI is wrong and it is them and their large corporate donors who have mislead people.

Now here we are amidst some minor controversy. Through our experiences and experiments we have determined that "open source" by itself is not a working solution. The problems created by the Tech Oligopoly are steadily getting worse and their stranglehold over the consumer software space is suffocating. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are very happy with the current trajectory of open source. I am not.

I know FUTO will fail in our mission if we do not put forward alternative licensing structures. The OSI's definition is not something we will abide by. Given how the Tech Oligopoly influences the decision making processes within the OSI, I do not even know for sure if their goals align with ours.

I am much more interested in building great ethical software that respect our users than passing purity tests put forward by obscure foundations.

Hence, we have decided to go our own way whilst still remaining allied with open source advocates: The Source First Definition. Everything we do is open source, but we must take steps to avoid causing unnecessary confusion and negative perceptions (even if we feel those perceptions are incorrect).