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.

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.

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.

i dont think framework is big enough to factcheck every linux maniac

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

That thread was a painful read. Framework laptop is off the wishlist.

Hyperland sounds more like edgelords.

The DHH fellow is a full on Nazi-style racist.

isnt steam comments having the same far-right comments, honestly they are infesting every online space, with comment sections, with anti-woke comments, far right comments

I would say most of the customers of Framework are the kinds of people who espouse the kind of antifascist ideology that that guy that started the thread does.

I don't think that the fascist sympathizer circle and the "willing to pay more money for an ethical laptop that isn't beholden to a big corporation for repair" circles have much overlap.

This is easy, "Framework doesn't support fascism or racism in any form. We support open source software and right to repair. Due to concerns with ideology in some of the projects we sponsor we are reviewing the projects we sponsor to make sure that they align with our values as a company."

The fact that they aren't willing to say so says plenty.

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.

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.

Edit to add that here’s a presentation talking about “The DHH problem” in 2014. The updates are darkly humorous.

Ugh I hate reading threads like that, the amount of delusion, stupidity and ignorance really gives me no hope for humanity.

Just vile people, fuck off fascists.