Title of the (concerning) thread on their community forum, not voluntary clickbait. Came across the thread thanks to a toot by @Khrys@mamot.fr (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
The elephant in the room more people need to pay attention to that many of us who work in IT are painfully intimate with.
Many IT people are hardcore libertarians who believe in some warped idea that they are where they are through their intelligence and hardwork while completely ignoring many of them come from backgrounds that afforded them the opportunities they are taking advantage of.
100% many of them are sexist, racist and bigoted pieces of shit that hide it at work because they’re adept at masking the fact that a lot of them are borderline autistic at worst and neurodivergent at best.
This is also why you see such a deep investment in idiocy like AI, Bitcoin and other paradigm shifts. They all have their heads up their asses and feel they’re better than everyone else.
Couple all this with the demographic being primarily white males.
Fuck talk to any woman who works in IT. It’s changing yes, but Jesus Christ it’s a cesspool in many ways.
Source: 25+ years in IT
I’m posting my take here before reading any comments, but I will be looking for validation or good counter arguments:
This feels like Framework admitting that the opensource community is too small to exclude anyone, or maybe that they feel they can’t exclude anyone because doing so would damage their ability to do business? I’m not picking up a “we love nazis” vibe, I’m picking up a “nazis are fucking everywhere, what do you want us to do, for fucks sake” vibe.
I don’t know how I feel about that yet.
There are a whole bunch of distros and window managers/compositors that aren’t developed by nazis. I think we will be fine if we exclude those that are.
Yeah I agree completely with that sentiment.
Maybe they didn’t know before, but they definitely know now. It’ll be interesting to see how they respond going forward.
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.
Can you tell me exactly what the lead dev of Hyprland did?
i dont think framework is big enough to factcheck every linux maniac
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?
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…
Did the author bother contacting them first before treating them like utter garbage and trying to rile up a public lynch mob? Just because something is well known to you doesn’t make it well known to everyone. If there are no alternatives with the feature set you are looking for, then sometimes you even have to overlook questionable authors, sort of like Lemmy. If it’s open source and has a license that allows forks, it doesn’t matter that much.
You use open source because of functionality. It didn’t used to be too long ago when people bothered to prove other people wrong through example instead of persecution. If you never convince people they are wrong, you just favor them creating and being in as much of an echo chamber as yourself. Even when they can’t be convinced, there are other people listening to the conversation.
We support open source software (and hardware), and partner with developers and maintainers across the ecosystem. We deliberately create a big tent, because we want open source software to win. We don’t partner based on individuals’ or organizations’ beliefs, values, or political stances outside of their alignment with us on increasing the adoption of open source software.
Even just from looking at it from a practical standpoint, it would sink just about any company if they have to go full FBI investigation for every single member. If you agree with OP so much, then why do you not agree with OP?
perhaps it is indeed best to let it rest for now. i’ll certainly sleep on it now! :slight_smile:
Some people want to watch the world burn bridges.
from what i’ve seen online, the build quality of framework laptops is garbage as well. i’d rather get a (linux) laptop with solid build quality and use it a bit longer instead of having to replace the monitor hinges every year or so.
And that is relevant to the thread because … ? I don’t know, ദ്ദി ? If you are trying to make an objective evaluation of their products, you could not make seem any more of a smear attempt by replying in this thread out-of-context.
It’s relevant because we’re talking about Framework. Product quality factors into evaluating the company besides their poloitical ties.
ദ്ദി, but your evaluation means nothing to me but subjective hearsay.
Here is what responding in the actually proper context looks like: https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/181fl9m/what_are_your_major_criticisms_of_the_framework/
That’s really too bad. Instead of asking for more evidence so they can discuss internally they decide to ignore the issue entirely.
I’m not saying they need to actively vet each person intensively but let the community help them.
Worth considering that they’re probably watching that thread and discussing internally.
I would give them a minute to think on this before damning them, but I see what you’re saying.
It might be the same situation of me. I’m not a fascist and I use hyprland, I just was unaware until now.
tbh, the hyperland thing is, for me personally, not too dramatic. Like there was a failure in moderation and response, but “a manufacturer that supports an floss project that has a discord channel where a mod changed the pronouns of a user and the admin of said channel didn’t respond harshly enough” sounds “forgiveable”. Not ideal, but also not super dramatic.
DHH on the other hand 😅😂…
The hyprland situation is waaaay more than just that. And it’s not hard to find with a search.
Huh? I can’t find anything? Can you help me out?
https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html
P.S. you are right. Google has gotten so much worse compared just a year ago. I had no trouble finding this back then, now I have to dig.
Thanks 😁 Okay, first of all, I agree with the general sentiment. You should not donate money to facists. Which DHH clearly is. (I mean, it’s absurd that we even have to talk about this in 2025, right? 😅) Just to be completely clear here.
I also agree that the hyperland community is full of assholes. However, being an ignorant asshole is different from being a fascist. If you read the blog of that hyperland guy, I get clearly the picture of an arrogant priviledged dude. However, he does not appear to be a nazi. (I wouldn’t hang around with him, but he is not a fascist.)
And for me personally, that doesn’t qualify for a boycott. If we draw the line there, boy would we end up with a lot of services to boycott. Even Linus Torvalds himself is kinda a dick at times (a differen kind yes, but still). Richard Stallman is bonkers. Don’t get me started on Mark Shuttleworth. However, that doesn’t mean that they are fascists and we need to exclude them from our communities. It doesn’t mean that any corp donating to the Linux Foundation is evil and need to be boycotted.
Again, the argument against FW still stands because of DHH and their poor handling of the situation. But honestly, continuing to use hyprland in general is okay in my eyes. Supporting them with money is a bit more nuanced of course, but doesn’t qualify to get cancelled.
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.
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.
Yeah sure so you’ve destroyed your car, stopped buying fuel, gave up sigarettes, stopped buying stuff from Amazon, gave up the supermarket, single use plastics, gave up Windows and let’s be honest, any other computer manufacturer aside from super niche ones? Because I guarantee you that the money you spend in that stuff is magnitudes more damaging than whatever tiny bit of a framework computer’s value is going towards these two developers, let alone the fraction that they may actually invest in nefarious deeds.
People need to learn to pick their battles.
A key difference here is that Framework is trying to build a “community”. At least some of their value depends upon community if you think about it for a bit (e.g., if nobody uses the marketplaces, they’d be empty of goods and a lot of the point is lost).
If they center assholes as being representative of what the community is about, they naturally exclude others by doing so.
It’s easy to take the “can’t we all just get along?” stance with this, but some things require a little more reasoning and philosophy than platitudes.
What good is a big tent if most normal people left the tent because you platformed assholes at its center?
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
I don’t even know what the fuck Hyprland is because I am firmly in the Ubuntu ecosystem
First rule of a PR crisis that has high online visibility is to stop talking.
I work for a fascist. He’s my father. Fox is on his TV in his office beside mine right now. I suppose most would hate me if they knew that without knowing I cancel his vote out every time.
This might be a similar kind of situation.
I don’t see the problem. Make sure to take as much of that fascist’s money away as possible.
i guess no more framework for me.
Hyperland sounds more like edgelords.
The DHH fellow is a full on Nazi-style racist.
Hyprland*
I am being an edgelord and I am going to call them Hyperland.
I think that’s someone else (if you were unaware).
I mean, it’s a tiling wm, of course they’re edgelords
whyareyoubooingme.jpg
This is the problem with the “we’re not talking about politics in here” approach. A lot of smaller companies, entities, “influencers”… will attempt to become apolitical, a ploy to market to as many people as possible, but it’s ill advised. You have to make your beliefs actually clear from the start. And after a certain size, you must avoid becoming too personal about things. Get a PR specialist if you can, even. It’ll save a lot of headache to kearn you can’t please everybody, and there’ll always be someone dissatisfied with you, so you better choose early who they’ll be.
This is the problem with the “we’re not talking about politics in here” approach.
Vulnerable minorities are always “political.”
There is a great book by a journalist who was fired by WashPo to being “political” about their identity.
The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity by Lewis Raven Wallace.
It is excellent and details why having a view from no perspective is damaging to minorities and others with disabilities, etc. We must have principles and speak about those in journalism. If we stand for nothing, we default to the status quo.
If DHH’s wet dream comes true Nirav would be back in India no matter how much money he gives him.
