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Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

Personnaly been using the open source AnySoftKeyboard for the past 8 years without issue. It is very flexible so I am wondering what that brings really to the table. They could have sponsored AnySoftKeyboard instead.

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Both are privacy-focused open-source keyboards, the difference is that FUTO Keyboards also includes a polished voice-input capability designed for dictation and speech-to-text functionality that is also fully-offline capable and built on top of Whisper models. I don't believe AnySoftKeyboard offers this capability but I could be mistaken.

Of the two, only AnySoftKeyboard is open-source.

Correction: only AnySoftKeyboard is open source according to the 0SI definition – an organization that famously did not invent the term open source but co-opted it from Christine Peterson, and which is primarily funded by closed source tech giants, such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft who are wildly conflicted in their interest as they profit heavily from open source software, according to the current definition while contributing virtually nothing back.

Coincidence? I think not.

> according to the current definition while contributing virtually nothing back.

This argument looks a bit silly when even the most cursory research would reveal that many major and widely-used open source projects are most significantly contributed to by people working for these "closed source tech giants".

futo keyboard is not open source. you are lying

What part of the open source contract does FUTO not abide to?

https://opensource.org/osd point 1 ("The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software") and point 6 ("The license (...) may not restrict the program from being used in a business")

Genuinely curious: Why would you have a problem with that? Were you planning on taking their code and reselling it?

'free for noncommercial use' licenses are nothing new, and we have half a century of experience showing that they're a dead end. they make it impossible to form an actual community around the software; the users remain at the beck and call of the software owner. sooner or later the owner loses interest or goes bankrupt, and the users are left high and dry, unable to fend for themselves

a commenter with more patience than i have has posted a longer explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835750 which i don't wholly endorse but which you'd probably benefit from reading

(as another commenter points out, futo's license is particularly broadly written, adding additional problems on top of the usual 'free for noncommercial use' problems)

> The license (...) may not restrict the program from being used in a business

> You may use or modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, all without any anticipated commercial application

https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/latinime/-/blob/master/LICE...

That reads to me that if I type a work email using this keyboard, that would be a commercial use and against the license which makes this a total non-starter.

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