Title of the (concerning) thread on their community forum, not voluntary clickbait. Came across the thread thanks to a toot by @[email protected] (French speaking)
The gist of the issue raised by OP is that framework sponsors and promotes projects lead by known toxic and racists people (DHH among them).
I agree with the point made by the OP :
The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others.
I’m disappointed in framework’s answer so far
Wow framework sells a lot of computers to real fascist psychos. That thread is rough. Comment about ICE only arresting criminals would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic. “I have immigrant friends” lol.
They should just support niri & cachy
This is unfortunate for sure. I want to give them a few days to respond for real, it’s always possible they just didn’t know about the issues here, but even in that thread they’re brushing it off as though it doesn’t matter. I’m not really sure what they get out of donating to these projects other than potential PR, anyway.
On a personal level I’ve recommended their laptops to people who have later bought them, and I was even looking at buying one myself to replace my aging macbook, but I don’t think I can do that anymore while this is unaddressed.
I wonder a bit about how this leaves framework as a company, too. They were always the brand people went to because of their stance on the politics of repairability and environmentalism. If they don’t have the politics on their side anymore, their laptops aren’t a great value proposition compared to other laptops. Sure, you can upgrade a framework, but if it costs twice as much as a similar laptop you’d have to upgrade the internals twice before you’ve saved any money.
i do want to point out how hard it is to even find out about the views of these people, if you just look up the names of the projects and aren’t specifically looking for this information there’s no way you’ll find anything about it
even looking up the name of David Heinemeier Hansson, the more vocally bad of these, i had to go to the 5th link to find anything even vaguely mentioning his views
It’s pretty plain on DHH’s blog:
In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
I wonder what characteristic he uses to define « native brits » that can be seen when walking.
Or just take a look at his twitter. Which Framework obviously did since they retweet a lot of his posts…
Isn’t that a good thing?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really care what the views of the owners of a business are. It only becomes a problem if they make those views plain.
Wow I guess if you have to scroll all the way to the fifth whole link it can’t possibly be plain, can it?
Sure the business owner thinks anyone who isn’t white doesn’t count as a person, but he only uses the resources you give him to promote that point of view as a hobby, so why worry?
Well, I guess he has tried to make his views fairly plain on his blog. it’s just a bit hard to find unless you’re looking for it
It only becomes a problem if they make those views plain.
Even then, who cares tbh.
People who don’t want to give resources to white nationalists. Why do you support funding white nationalists?
they warned us about the framework
I didn’t get that reference… What is that from?
agents of shield. someone develops a tech called framework in the second half of the show. hydra is somehow involved, which makes this a great reference that nobody got because that show is criminally underrated.
it’s also the best marvel tv show despite being shafted by marvel movies because apparently the heads of movies and tv didn’t get along or something.
Phew, for a second I thought Framework had actually done something bad. But its just supporting Hyprland which is somehow considered a far right racist project because an unpaid moderator was transphobic in a discord server. People are really trying to squeeze everything they can from this discord drama that happened years ago.
Or, you know, they are sponsoring a) a white supremacists who believes in the white replacement conspiracy theory who’s in charge of omarchy and b) the project lead of (not just a discord mod) of hyperland. Two awful people that Framework absolutely deserve flack for supporting.
It’s only Hyperland, not
the distroOmarchy.It’s both projects, lead by two different problematic people that Framework are sponsoring.
They explicitly stated that they provided free hardware to Omarchy
Is that sponsoring though?
Yes? How could it not be?
There’s this huge movement in online spaces lately to bash any and all positions and opinions by calling them transphobic.
Vote right? Transphobic. Vote left? Transphobic. Abstain from voting? Transphobic. Support a company? Transphobic. Boycott a company? Transphobic. Indifferent about a company? Transphobic.
The simplest explanation is a bunch of right-wingers are trying to make the term meaningless. Anyway, nowadays when I hear someone is transphobic, I make sure to wait for solid evidence before changing my opinions.
Vote right? Transphobic.
That is correct.
Yes agreed but if you read the whole thing…
There are people in online spaces that just slap the term on ANY opinion.
Want to form a coalition with moderates? Must be transphobic. Refuse to vote Dem because they’re not progressive enough? Must be transphobic.
Bluesky is overrun with them. I’d hoped to find a place here where simply existing wasn’t stigmatized, but these downvotes are telling me maybe Reddit is overrun too…
“where simply existing wasn’t stigmatized”… Yeah I think that’s what most people want including immigrants and trans people. You might need to take a good hard look at yourself for seemingly arguing that a project making it’s own community an unsafe space for people is fine but you’re the victim because people on blue sky called one too many things transphobic.
Other than that your sob story makes it sound like you’re a problematic person and I doubt I’m alone in thinking that. I don’t ever remember seeing an excessive amount of accusations of transphobia on bluesky, let alone reddit since it’s 80% Russian bots. So maybe, just maybe, the problem is you. Do you maybe have opinions that regularly get you called a transphobe? At least, that’s how I read your victim story.
I get your point with the rest but…
Vote right? Transphobic.
Yeah, it kinda is? That’s a core plank of the MAGA platform; it’s practically inseparable. Unless you’re talking non-USA parties but then there’s still a better chance than none it’s a yes.
I don’t even think it “kinda is” I think it fully is. Trans rights are currently against tradition and the status quo, this makes trans rights a progressive topic until the day that trans people are so established in the history of a society that it can’t be argued being trans is some new disorder or something.
I hope that one day Trans rights will have been so established globally that to challenge them is anti tradition and uncouth
What rights don’t trans people have? What rights is anyone trying to take away from trans people? I still haven’t seen an actual answer to this since the “trans rights are human rights” slogan became a thing.
It has to do with a phenomenon that is censored in most online spaces, so I’ll spell it out in capitals, aSjUrIbCoIgDaEl, basically if a person being denied care would cause them to off themselves, then denying care is tantamount to manslaughter.
Post-transition people are reportedly much happier than they were pre-transition, but right-wingers find that icky, so they’d rather commit war crimes than allow medicine to go to those who need it.
If you’re going to write a word with so many Is like suicide you really shouldn’t also throw in a lower case l. It took me forever to figure out what sucde meant because I was excluding the Is due to the trailing l. (Would’ve made more sense also if you just used the phrase offing ones self which you seemed fine with.)
People who vote for a particular party generally don’t agree with 100% of that party’s platform. Just because someone voted for a party that has transphobia-motivated policies doesn’t mean they are transphobic. The correlation may be high, but it’s far from 100%.
You’re right, they are just performing hateful acts towards trans people, they may be doing it out of laziness or ignorance rather than actually hating trans people. As we all know, materially helping an anti trans cause doesn’t mean you hate trans people in the same way materially helping terrorists doesn’t make you a terrorist. Ex: our friends and allies in Saudi Arabia.
If you read the rest you’ll discover that the reactionaries don’t care how you vote, they’ll call you that regardless.
I’m taking from the downvotes that there are a lot of people here who got caught up on those first few words and didn’t bother reading the rest or engaging their critical thinking skills…
When someone uses “critical thinking skills” or “common sense” they sure always seem to be on the wrong side of history.
The simplest explanation is a bunch of right-wingers are trying to make the term meaningless.
You had me until this. The term is already meaningless because of the overuse from the left-wingers. No one right of the far-left cares about being called any of the “phobics” or “ists” anymore because they mean nothing now.
Anyway, nowadays when I hear someone is transphobic, I make sure to wait for solid evidence before changing my opinions.
Ok at least you finished on the right note.
Somebody ACTUALLY on the left wouldn’t use what energy they have trying to shatter any hope of an anti-fascist coalition we have by poo-flinging. Thus, someone who does that must be on the right. Right?
All this because Hyprland…checks notes…seems to allow free speech on their discord?
Guys…come on lol. Why do some people try to make absolutely everything political? not just political either, but radical levels of political extremism. Don’t judge a company by the things random unaffiliated people say on their forums lol. Hell, even if they are affiliated - who cares? Eat some concrete.
It’s funny how the most loud free speech warriors have the most superficial, performative understanding of free speech.
People get beat up by security services in authoritian regimes for reporting on corruption, but for “FreedomAdvocate” here, free speech is about the right to use slurs on Discord.
There is almost an abstract beauty to this level of debasement and regressivness.
That’s a false dichotomy. Freedom of speech should not solely be for those you a priori agree with. That’s how autocrats motivate their supression: it’s always for the greater good, of which they’re the arbiter.
Your continue in the same style and doubling on victim-hood polemics.
Of course free speech includes a variety of viewpoints.
I am pointing out that “FreedomAdvocate” has a comically preformative view on free speech. Rejecting people who use the slur “tranny” is not a free speech issue and shows that FA doesn’t actually care or believe in free speech.
It’s all theatrics to try and show how allegedly independent he is and how is an alleged free thinker.
Embarrassing really.
Good thing the people here are not asking for the government to ban Omarchy/hyprland, but asking “normal people” to not associate with known assholes, which is a very normal thing to ask for. And defending your right to associate with assholes whitout being shamed about it makes you look very much like an asshole.
I once ate a hamburger from burger king made by employee that said the n-word when he was 17! I’m a literal nazi!
Yes a powerful and influential figure in the open source community using his platform to actively promote racist hate speech is literally identical to a 17 yo at burger king. Truly a brilliant analysis of the situation.
I agree with your last statement unironically.
i dont think framework is big enough to factcheck every linux maniac
Yeah I don’t think you get how this works. They had time to research the tool they are recommending but literally nothing about the backers or community? Framework will absolutely have a legal team whose job would include vetting these orgs.
But let’s say you’re right and framework is operating a company with no legal counsel (which is also a giant red flag): their response was “we are chill with terrible people in our space, we have a big tent”. Not “you’re right, we didn’t do research on these guys thanks for bringing it to our attention we’ll do some research”. If they said that, this wouldn’t be a thing. Instead, they said affirmatively “we don’t care if they are white nationalists, we want to include white nationalists in our tent”.
I hope they at least cut their funding now that they know about DHH’s behaviour
100% this. They support many many different open source project and I read people are bitching when they havent had mich time to even respond?
They immediately responded
Hold the phone, since when were Hyprland devs like this?
For a while, but only people that closely follow Linux news would know about it.
First, Omarchy doesn’t need funding or partners. It’s backed by a Nazi multimillionaire.
Second, the whole apolitical argument is bullshit. Everything is political. Support for a distro that doesn’t really need support by nature of being a child of a Nazi multimillionaire is a support for that Nazi multimillionaire.
“We didn’t support them because of that” means nothing. The support still sends a message. Just like artist loses control over interpretation of their art the moment they release it, people lose control over interpretation of their actions the moment they act. Does it sound fair? Maybe not, but it’s how reality works.
So should we all stop using Lemmy because it was made by a Tankie?
A naive answer:
Replace “Lemmy” with a “Nazi manufactured gun”.
A less naive answer:
Consider various meanings “use” takes in your question and decide accordingly.
Tankies, afaik, are just delusional. Do they support murder of non-whites?
And uh…the fact that defederating the tankies is a regular topic of conversation here is 100000000x better than the big tent response.
Not the same thing. Equating the far left and the far right is nonsensical, as horseshoe theory isn’t a real thing. Giving room for such thought only strengthens extreme right positions and is exclusively used to either distract from or downplay far right commentary or elevate liberal/centrist thought as the only acceptable path. It’s interestingly never used by people from the far left themselves.
Your’s either an ignorant take or one with an agenda, which is it?
No we use Lemmy and make fun of the Tankies as revenge
Certainly a tough question. Use Lemmy, okay, but would you send financial contributions to said Tankie? I wouldn’t, and I would judge someone that did. I don’t think anyone can be expected to evaluate the moral virtues of the developer for every technology they use. That’s a supply chain nightmare. But, given the small number of people we directly sponsor, maybe then it’s appropriate to have some standards?
As a non-US citizen, I actually consider /any/ American company that has not moved to be complicit in fascism. At the same time, I havn’t completely stopped patronizing American companies, so I’m not living up to my own standard. I suspect everyone is a little hypocritical.
As a non-US citizen, I actually consider /any/ American company that has not moved to be complicit in fascism.
This is an absolutely insane position to take.
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It’s literally impossible to use the internet (or even computers?) without patronizing American companies, at least indirectly.
It’s certainly not feasible for every company to leave America, but I wouldn’t argue with a boycott of American goods and services on general - and I’m saying this as an American citizen who’s not exactly thrilled about this mess, either.
Using Lemmy isn’t giving that tankie money.
It is is you support lemmy’s development which for a foss platform its expected users do
But not required. If I do not morally support the developer I can instead choose to financially support individual instances, or other projects like Piefed or mbin.
My point here is that comparing this situation to using Lemmy is a bad comparison. Supporting Framework is pretty much exclusively via financial support, the same is not true for Lemmy.
Doesn’t seem clear cut at all after reading the whole thread. You support one thing who’s creator has questionable views but not the other. The main difference seems to be that you like one and not the other.
The main difference is that fascism and racism are fundamentally destructive ideologies/traits, while tankie is just a derogatory term for folks on the far left used by people that think extreme left and extreme right are the same kind if evil. It’s a display of arrogant ignorance, congratulations.
Many would argue tankies live by an ideology with a comparable body count to fascism.
It’s a significant factor for sure. However, this year Reddit has accelerated its enshittification since the API schism and is far too risky to continue use anyway. The only viable alternative to Lemmy that I see is Mastodon and I never really got into the Twitter format.
Anyone who read the thread will see that the OP pretty much dropped it after Nirav’s response. Framework is a tiny company without a PR machine for these occasions, and I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies. Let’s all take some deep breaths.
Their response was “we’re ok with supporting white nationalists”. It doesn’t take a complex pr machine to accept that white nationalists are bad people.
That’s a really piss poor excuse though. It’d be one thing if it was “I like Hyprland, I’ll support that” but then it’s also “I also like Omarchy” annnnd now you’re starting a trend that isn’t a great on to start. THEN you have people in the know who see this trend and being to put two and two together.
Saying that Framework is tiny with no PR is no excuse. It takes all of a few minutes to discover what kind of piece of shit DHH is and what kind of bullshit the devs/mods over on Hyprland spew out. I mean I’ve been a developer for 20+ years now and I knew DHH was a piece of shit years ago. Hell anyone that’s spent any time with Ruby knew he was a piece of shit years ago.
honestly if you had a bit of extra money on you that you wanted to donate to a charity you would utilize your common sense and research said charity before donating money right? I would hope so. I hope a lot of people would. That’s what I do. I’m not going to throw money at some random charity then I later find out uses kittens as toilet paper.
So Framework coming out and saying “yeah we like to support open source projects, sure the ones we support are lead by racist homo/transphobes and a guy that thought Hitler had some neat ideas, no we’re not going to discuss it” is not a great look.
Some people don’t base everything they do on people’s opinions. Crazy, I know.
I can’t think of a single example of this, can you provide something to back your point up?
Me and a friend were talking about this recently. We don’t want to know our musicians opinions either. Because they are usually bastards. I’m just kinda sick of having to carry the worlds woes everytime I do anything. I listen to what I like, and I use services that I like. I won’t be brow beaten by anyone.
I mean if your band starts heiling and you send them a thousand dollars, people are absolutely going to judge you and you’d deserve it. That’s what happened here.
But I already have my pitchfork at the ready!
See…when it comes to open source, it’s a little different for me:
I don’t support or condone any of these pricks, but I can mentally divorce, somewhat, the open source code contributions from the person, because their contributions are useful. If this was a closed source solution, it’d be different, because the code wouldn’t be released into the community. There are a lot of weird, closet-dwelling shut ins that fall into the extremist margins.
A lot of early medical knowledge, for example, was acquired from…less than morally clear ways. So do you just take that information and throw it away on principal? Does that make the death and pain of those people for nothing? Or do you use it and don’t condone the person or their actions? This is a difficult moral choice to make that is heavily debated by philosophy, media, etc. There are entire SciFi TV episodes, movies, and books written about just such a debate.
That said, I don’t know the usefulness of Hyprland. I’ve never used it and I feel like it’s pretty niche, so I’m surprised Framework aren’t telling this person to fuck off.
Also megacorps doing shit like this (sponsoring) vs tiny companies focused on foss (without mega PR, mass propaganda, takeover budgets, etc) is very much not the same thing.
If Google was a tiny corp barely getting by I would morally consider it a lesser transgression using their services (lesser bcs I would still be helping/supporting a business practice that at some future date leads to current Google fuckeries).
I agree. Just as a little reminder. Methadone was initially invented by literal Nazis. It was designed to Combat Opium shortage in field hospitals.
Nobody would say: hey, let us not use this extremely helpful drug because Nazis contributed a lot to it.
On the other side: I would never give a Nazi company money to produce it. Two different scenarios
To put it in terms of your analogy, it’s one thing to use Mengele’s research after he’s been stopped. It’s another entirely to give his research funding when he’s actively running the program.
One is making use of knowledge that comes out of terrible things, the other is complicity that borders on collaboration.
That is fair. My example was extreme, though. These people are just assholes. Do you throw away the code of an asshole because they’re an asshole?
I dunno…I struggle with this internally. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s a hard thing to rectify and I just wish people would stop being assholes to others.
You don’t fund them, that’s for sure
To use another example, a musician might be known to be an asshole during their lifetime. Then they die. Is it harmful to listen to their music if you’re not contributing anything to their estate or their estate isn’t run by similar assholes? It’s debatable and a gray area, but I’d probably say no in most circumstances.
How about if they’re known to be an asshole and you buy their albums anyway, you go to their concerts, and you loudly pronounce on social media how you support them and that their work is great? That’s a much easier case to make to say, yes, you’re being harmful.
You’re supporting someone who is an asshole, and you’re doing–at least–two types of harm:
(1) you’re demonstrating tolerance for shitty behavior which does not provide a good negative reinforcement to correct the shitty behavior, and
(2) you’re positively reinforcing the shitty behavior through your support
It might be more nuanced if there were higher stakes involved, such as if the good belying this debate was of crucial need to help along a much larger good cause. But that’s where particulars matter. The contributions these assholes are making are not solving world hunger. They’re nerdy little Linux bits.
Use the bullshit all you want, but for fuck’s sake stop materially supporting and going on a promotional tour with the assholes that made it.
I think you need to factor in how prominent that person is on the project.
If an asshole contributes some code to a project, ok. If an asshole is the public face of the project, well, there are plenty of alternatives to use/fund instead.
The issue with that is the toxic/racist/homophobic/transphobic people will by their behavior push out people who would otherwise contribute to development of projects. To have a big tent you can’t tacitly accept bigotry.
It’d be one thing if the projects being supported were good and lead by devs with questionable ideals but I’m more upset that Framework decided to support a couple of really shitty projects lead by shitty people. I mean one dudes dotfiles and anothers very buggy WM that you can pay $5 to get “premium” for it? Cool Framework, that doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence in what YOU produce now.
I mean hell I got some killer dotfiles for Arch using River and Sway, where’s my money?
That’s fair and I knew someone would make this argument. My example was a bit of an extreme, though. These people are assholes spreading asshole-ry. Not murderers.
I’m more upset that Framework decided to support a couple of really shitty projects
The thread being centered around this would be 100% more productive than what it has devolved into. Instead people are swearing off the most notable computer company that is fervently pushing for Right to Repair and supporting open source projects. Meanwhile most every other computer company is pushing in the opposite direction…
I would recommend actually talking with (I forget the fancy term) medical philosophers.
Yes, a LOT of modern medicine was created on the backs of torture and vile human experimentation. But a shockingly small amount of the data collected by Nazis et al were actually useful because so much of it was compromised by virtue of the “control” in those experiments generally being a torture victim who was in five other experiments in the past month. And a lot of said innovations boil down to “We all kind of suspected it but couldn’t think of an ethical way to confirm it”
But the key thing to understand: There is a big difference between “Okay… that was REALLY fucking evil but Unit 731 created a lot of data we can sift through and it already exists…” and “Okay, hear me out. We COULD send in Seal Team Eight… or we could wait a few weeks to see if they make a better smallpox first”
And that is the thing here. I am 100% for taking advantage of what has already been done in the world of software development… although rewrites are a thing for a reason. But I am firmly opposed to funding or supporting ongoing work by those chuds. They should be ostracized and vilified at every turn.
I would recommend actually talking with (I forget the fancy term) medical philosophers.
“Ethicist” maybe?
I spent a lot of time recommending Framework, I got family to buy a laptop. Their hardware is fundamentally a political statement that I respuct. Seeing them use a “no politics” fallacy hurts
:/
As a former long-time Ruby developer who also used Rails (Ruby since 2006, Rails came along for me later), I’ve always known DHH was a total douchebag.
It’s nice to know he’s being super obvious about it now. He’s always been awful. He’s just been slightly quieter about it, other than buying million-dollar cars and pretending he’s still relevant.
How is this different from the Lemmy devs, who are known to be pretty political? I was under the impression we were mostly fine seperating the program from the programmer, or is this situation different?
I agree with what NuXCOM said, but to add a little more detail in this situation…
For me, it’s a little different because of perceived influence.
DHH has always been the software equivalent of an Instagram influencer. He’s been selling himself as the mythical 10x programmer and wrote a corny business book with his co-founder.
Meanwhile, he was mainly working on Basecamp and racing million-dollar cars. A lot of his personal cars have been sold to YouTube influencers.
He has had a cult of personality built around him for years, and stupid people in some small software circles love him (clearly, by the rubygems takeover).
The Lemmy devs have no influence at all over software development. Just Lemmy.
Welcome to the reality that there is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism.
Some people choose to use that as an excuse to live a hedonistic lifestyle and do whatever they want. Others use that as a reason to sit and think.
Personally? I don’t like that lemmy is created/maintained by REALLY aggressive tankies or that so many of us have the “official” instance blocked for that reason. It is a big reason why when I decide to make a new account (because this one is getting old) I am probably going to use an instance running a fork.
But one way I reconcile that is by not actually giving money to lemmy development. I chip a few bucks in with certain instances to support the people running those, but not the software itself. And while I don’t like that this encourages people to use lemmy and potentially give money to the tankies behind it… I also acknowledge that most people are too stupid to even understand the concept of “it is like email. It mostly doesn’t matter which instance you sign up at” so… yeah.
At the end of the day, everyone needs to consider their own ethics and decide what they will and won’t give money to. But the key is to actually think about it and sometimes re-think past decisions.
Let me walk you through some of my thoughts on the BDS boycotts. Microsoft I fully support the boycotting of because they have a LONG list of actions that actively support the IDF and enable genocide. Odds are I am still going to pick up the new DOOM at some point on a heavy discount and I will feel bad about it but otherwise? Any situation where I have a choice, I don’t use MS products and won’t until they, bare minimum, treat the israeli government like a normal customer rather than giving white glove service every chance they get. It is an unlikely end state but it IS an end state for a political boycott.
But Disney is a bit different. I personally don’t actually like Disney and got a real chuckle out of Mandalore Gaming’s recent, kind of shitty and ableist, joke about “disney adults”. I ALSO don’t think the BDS boycott has any actionable end state and is… quite honestly, motivated by a very poor selection of rationales that mostly can’t be detected. So I had zero issue paying for Disney Plus to watch Andor and will buy the season 2 UHDs the second they are available, but the rest of me not spending on Disney products has a lot less to do with politics and more me just not liking them.
But I’ll probably also give this another think on my next long car drive. I’ll compare my personal ethics to those of the orgs calling for these boycotts and I will think through both what difference my actions are making (almost zero!) and how my actions impact my own personal opinion of myself.
Because, at the end of the day, boycotts are less about breaking the cogs of capitalism and more about being able to look at yourself in the mirror.
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Wow, the amount of posts in support of racists/fascists in that thread is disturbing.
Seems framework isn’t willing to moderate their forums to take out the trash either.
Yup, says all you need to know.
