Programming

Only so they can use the projects in advertising without their consent:

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. Presumably ffmpeg received a similar quiet donation from FUTO, rather than something more easily recognizable as a grant.