That the developers have more time to develop it.

Your quoted paragraph is the only sane alternative to the ad supported internet. Think Fastmail vs gmail - both are run for a profit, but fastmail’s business model is to simply sell subscriptions. Their incentives are better aligned with the consumer, and while nobody’s going to become a billionaire off the company I have to imagine that they have a very reliable customer base.

Good software should be paid for, devs gotta eat

I know nothing about this person, but on multiple occasions I’ve had the thought that if I was a gazillionaire, I’d sponsor a bunch of open source. Maybe this is that? I’ll choose to stay hopeful (though I’m kinda dumb about this sorta stuff)

This is some naive stuff right here.

Elite programmers make most of the important stuff

This is false. Not even gonna elaborate.

Competition is the solution

No. Competition is inefficient and the best software we have is built cooperatively. Linux, most open source software. We dislike duplication for a reason and seek to avoid it when possible. We try to avoid forking, instead we try to work together as much as possible. Corporations also run things cooperatively internally instead of duplicating effort. Competition is only needed when you a profit driven market is what determines what’s offered and used and it comes with tremendous inefficiency.

I’m a big fan of free market capitalism. When there’s a lot of churn…

Yeah. See above.

If you have an individual in charge of a company, that’s better than having a mob

Oh Jesus… He doesn’t realize that most of the problems that developers face which they can’t fix, including himself when he was at Yahoo, are exactly because there’s a guy or few in charge and the developers have no decision power.

Quit your job …

Nope. I won’t quit my job to join another place where I have no vote. As long as you’re creating companies that aren’t democratic by design, I’m changing one guy profiting from me for another. If the other guy is marginally more ethical, that’s only gonna last as long as the push for profit knocks on the door. We can’t all be CEOs so the only way to build sustainably ethical companies is for them to be ruled by the mob. One person, one vote. Otherwise I’m better off creating democracy by working to unionize the existing corporations.

If the guy wants to fund FOSS, great. But unfortunately this FUTO venture is unlikely to be the organization that dramatically changes the status quo. We need another billi that has read and understood a bit about class analysis and democracy to do that.