Kevin O’Reilly and the Fulu Foundation

Kevin O’Reilly is the cofounder of the Fulu Foundation. Him and his partner Louis Rossmann have made it their mission to help consumers win the fight to be able to repair their own devices in their own ways.

Everyone has a smartphone, and maybe a laptop or a tablet. What happens when you drop it and it breaks? you take it to the store to be repaired. It’s almost instinctual that we need to take our devices back to the companies that made them to have them fixed and our data recovered. we never think about trying to do the job ourselves, even if it’s simple. This is what the companies want, as it’s another part of their profit each year. fixing devices is almost more lucrative than selling them. Companies will go out of their way to make sure that unless they’re involved in the process somehow, your data will be encrypted and locked, or your product bricked, until you pay their often-absurd prices.

Kevin and Louis’ Fulu foundation aims to make sure that companies can’t keep getting away with extorting their customers by changing terms of service or forcing them to keep having to use only their channels for repair and upkeep. The biggest thing they argue for however, is the complete ownership of the things you purchase. Not many people know about this, but with a lot of technologically driven products in today’s age, according to the manufacturer’s terms of use, you do not own that you have paid for. Instead, they say that you have purchased a license to operate their device, or you are “renting” it for a long period of time. This loophole allows for customers to be vulnerable to “at will” changes of user constraints, meaning something you bought years ago could have its functionality removed or hindered simply because a company decided that you should no longer have access. This is normally done to push subscription models and force all repairs to be channeled through company-supported channels. Fulu foundation aims to target legislation to help get rid of this loophole and allow consumers to fully own what they purchase.

O’Reilly initially entered the world of Right to Repair with his article called Deere in the Headlights where he talked about how the company John Deere was leaving farms inoperable because of limited access to the tools to fix a tractor’s computer system. Since then, he has written more articles, appeared at activist rallies, and now co-founded the Fulu foundation to help fight against greedy corporate profit schemes. He hopes that through his work, he can help bring awareness to the issue of self-repair, and fight against the planned obsolescence that companies are trying to push nowadays. It’s the hope of the foundation to push for legislation to close loopholes that allow companies to be exploited, and to have a future where people are free to use what they purchased as they see fit, not as how a company forces them to.