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
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.
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?
Not the same but sure. Go ahead. There’s piefed.social too!
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.
It’s literally impossible to use the internet (or even computers?) without patronizing American companies, at least indirectly.
Yeah, or just playing games. Maybe if you only buy European made games from GOG exclusively?
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.
no, because “tankies” are not at all equivalent to nazis.
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.
If the far right would stop using Lemmy that would be fantastic news. (inb4 hurr durr echo chamber!!!11!)
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
I don’t even know what the fuck Hyprland is because I am firmly in the Ubuntu ecosystem
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?
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
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).
Holy shit, this thread makes me throw up.
Guess we will go back to classic used hardware?
And if someone here has a comprehensive guide at hand to completely decouple from big tech to sustainable human tech I would be very pleased (if not no problem I’m still planning to create a good working guide myself).
Used thinkpads are cheaper and reuse is one of the best ways to reduce ewaste by using something that was headed to the landfill. I’ve been happy with my t480s.
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/
Projects are not their authors. Please give the politics a rest. I’ve had enough of politics lately.
It’s become all about purity testing. From both the right and the left. And since any purity test can be anything that anyone wants it be, everyone is guaranteed to fail it at some point. And because the internet never forgets, something you said 20 years ago now is grounds for being purged. Without any thought to what that person now believes and how they think.
Is this situation relevant to that example? Are the people in question changed since the time in which the accusations were made?
Rebranding personal ethics and morals as “a purity test” is disingenuous at best.
If you’re going to take umbridge with someone’s approach at least do it directly instead of this backhanded high horse bullshit.
I’ve been thinking similar things. Maybe online platforms, including Lemmy, can be a bit unhealthy.
In the real world, if you say something a bit embarrassing in front of one person, they’ll probably forget it after a while. Years later, nobody knows you said it. But on Lemmy, if I tell one person my opinion on a topic, that opinion exists on my profile for the rest of time, unless I delete the comment or my profile.
Off with your head!
you can give politics a rest, but politics won’t give you a rest. especially if you are gay, trans, black, or in any of those marginalized groups.
Amen. I get the sentiment but Jesus Christ everything is politics when you boil it down. Yes it’s draining to focus on it 24/7 but it’s equally destructive to bury your head in the sand.
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.
Yikes. I loved that framework trailblazed repairable laptops, but those responses are pretty bad.
Edit: it’s so much worse now. That thread is flooded with bad faith far-right assholes, who in another thread admitted to trying to silence dissent by reporting comments to get the treads locked, and one called for framework to ban discussion of this issue entirely.
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.
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
Were the views associated with the company? Or was it purely a personal blog?
The distinction matters. Many people are able to separate business from politics, but some are not. The former aren’t a concern, the latter definitely are.
Your right. I can’t seperate people/business and politics.
Because people take the money from business and advocate for the death of me and my trans community.
I don’t see a reason to spereate those two.
The furthest I’ve seen is advocating for conservative politicians, which is generally for more favorable tax treatment and maybe some more flexibility in what services they need to provide to their employees.
I don’t think business owners care about the trans community for good or ill. The only reason it seems that conservatives care at all is because liberals are so vocal about it. And liberals aren’t even really pushing for anything to help the trans community, it’s mostly lip service.
The real enemy isn’t you average conservative voter, but specific politicians pushing a populist agenda, which paints trans people as the enemy. If it wasn’t trans people, it would be gay people, some variety of immigrant, etc, the target is less important to the movement, they just need to be weak and unpopular enough for them to get away with it. Again, it’s not your average voter, but whoever is pushing that agenda.
Wow. Okay. Thats a really bad response.
The furthest I’ve seen is advocating for conservative politicians, which is generally for more favorable tax treatment and maybe some more flexibility in what services they need to provide to their employees.
First off, that’s still indefensible? Like advocating for less worker safety isn’t a good thing right? Or lower pay? Like those are all agreeable bad things for companies to be doing right?
We’ll come back to the second “where the money comes from”.
I don’t think business owners care about the trans community for good or ill.
That’s a pretty broad brush there.
Chick-fil-A does a pretty good job of showing you that’s not a rule by any means.
The only reason it seems that conservatives care at all is because liberals are so vocal about it. And liberals aren’t even really pushing for anything to help the trans community, it’s mostly lip service.
This makes no sense, If neither side cares, then why is it a problem?
Also, why are conservatives in your view just reactionary to what every ‘liberals’ are saying?
The real enemy isn’t you average conservative voter, but specific politicians pushing a populist agenda, which paints trans people as the enemy. If it wasn’t trans people, it would be gay people, some variety of immigrant, etc, the target is less important to the movement, they just need to be weak and unpopular enough for them to get away with it. Again, it’s not your average voter, but whoever is pushing that agenda.
This is so submissive to hate. Heaven forbid we don’t tolerate intolerance? This is such dismissive “it’s the way it is” talk.
I never said my problem is with the average voter (although the average Republican voter absolutely hate my guts). My problem is with the money that flows. It’s the money fueling this hate. So yes, where I spend money has ALWAYS been political. So yes, it matters who my money is funding, and if that fund is funding my danger.
First off, that’s still indefensible? Like advocating for less worker safety isn’t a good thing right?
I think it makes logical sense. They own a business, so they see everything as a cost, and that includes employee benefits. They’re merely voting for their self interests.
And while I likely disagree with them, I think that’s how the system should work.
The counter to that should be regular people voting for their self-interests. Average people want better benefits and whatnot, so theoretically politicians should take that into account when crafting policy.
The issue here isn’t business owners voting for their self-interest, but a mix of politicians not actually providing good representation and yet still getting reelected (gerrymandering), not having good options (only two candidates are viable), and media spin (again, with only two parties, they need to pick one to get favorable treatment).
why are conservatives in your view just reactionary to what every ‘liberals’ are saying?
That’s their purpose. Conservatives are pretty universally against change/in favor of reverting change, while liberals want more change. Sometimes you want one more than the other, depending on what’s going on.
The problem is that our political system only has two viable options, so both parties jump all over the place to pick up votes and it’s actually unclear why they have the positions they do. For example, Republicans used to be super anti-union (they love representative democracy, but not in the private sphere?), yet they courted labor unions last year. Why? To get swing state voters. They’re less about pushing ideas and more about maintaining power.
The real issue isn’t conservative voters, but our entire voting system. If we had 5 viable parties, people could effectively vote for the direction they want the country to go. If you don’t like the way the GOP is, you should demand more viable options so people can express themselves better.
If DHH’s wet dream comes true Nirav would be back in India no matter how much money he gives him.
and that’s the better outcome
