Framework supporting far-right racists?

Yup, says all you need to know.

It hurts to see posts saying "Framework is not political"... Like damn it is, what do you think the mission of framework is?
"Technology is apolitical" that's entirely false. A load of decisions about tech are made politically, or at least with a lawyer behind you telling what is and what isn't legal (these laws that were decided... By politics).

I think tech communities will have a major split in the coming years.
On one side you have the "apolitical devs" who don't understand they are making political decisions every damn day. They claim to be centrists but it's all a facade for neo liberalism.
On the other side, you have people that understand the reality we live in, that understand every decision they take is gonna affect the human that is using their software. That we are responsible for what happens into the world and that allowing fascists to spread their ideas will end badly.

Staying neutral is giving your ok to fascism and racism. Staying silent is how these ideas and movements take place and is a political choice.

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.

First: ouch. Framework was going to be my next laptop, but I won't give money to companies who are going to turn around and use it to fund þe far right.

However: þere are requests in þe þread for evidence. It's not exactly þe first þing þey ask for, but it does pop up. Þe issue is twofold:

1. When provided evidence, it's written off and ignored. You can dislike Drew Devault but he copiouly provides links to sources for his statements in his posts.
2. Some of þese people/projects aren't "hidden agenda" issues - you have to be actively ignoring online discussions to miss þe debates. Or, Occam's Razor, you don't care or - worse - agree wiþ far right. All þree are really concerning for a company.

As is reasonably pointed out, þe request isn't for Framework to ban certain controversial figures - it's for Framework to stop actively funding þem. Funding, which comes from sales.

Oh - most of þis comment isn't directed at your comment, BTW. Just about þe quest for sources. Þe rest is my hot take on þe debate.

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.

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.

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.

I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies

But now they should know right? But the response makes it clear they don't really care. They want to include everyone in the "big tent", which clearly runs afoul of the paradox of tolerance. I am not a fan of their response.

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.

But I already have my pitchfork at the ready!

I don't know who you're going to find that's better, all these big companies are inevitably supporting way more problematic individuals

They have been off my wishlist purely because of the cost, even DYI with missing pieces is $550. That’s more than my laptop was new so pass.

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.

I was this person. It is possible to reform, but it takes genuine curiosity and willingness to be wrong. Neither of those is rewarded by the IT environment of the last 30 years.

At my company, most of the IT team are hardcore Trump supporters who do not see a problem with working with LGBTQIA people and being polite to their face, while also wanting them to have less rights.

Yes, they are all white men. And yes, all of them will tell you how hard they worked to get there, completely oblivious of how much an advantage they got to get there.

White dude in software here to echo the same sentiment. So many of my colleagues have never experienced any hardship of their own or viewpoints of people with different experiences. They don't think about how their privilege has helped them get where they are, and how their company culture often subtly (at best!) reinforces their worldview and massages their egos. They've never tried to think critically about their "meritocracy" or "libertarian" beliefs and how many people are unjustly excluded from the lifestyle they enjoy.

20 years in software development for me.

Those things are a far cry from being a nazi. Just because you see a problem with DHH doesn’t mean the majority do.

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.

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 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

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?

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.

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 don't even know what the fuck Hyprland is because I am firmly in the Ubuntu ecosystem

Nah the hyprland guys are fucking bigots, not just edgy kids.

Hyprland*

I mean, it's a tiling wm, of course they're edgelords

whyareyoubooingme.jpg

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?

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

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?

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.

This is where every discussion and topic involving DHH has begun and ended for me. If Oxford defined "techbro" his face would be the illustrated example. He's the prick Zed Shaw warned us about. And everything, EVERYTHING, that has transpired in the past year, is entirely on brand for him. He is a narcissist, a sociopath, a racist, Elon Musk fart huffing fascist piece of shit; and nobody in the Ruby community should have given him any quarter. I KNEW THIS IN 2008.

And yet, here we are, 17 years later.

I write and maintain Laravel for a living now.

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.

Exactly. While I appreciate that a stock corporate “we’re looking into it and will complete our investigation right after you forget about it” would likely not go over well here, the response they issued basically made the concerns seem like a low priority.

Giving money to right wingers is no longer an issue of differing opinions. It’s literally arming the people that want people like me dead. I can’t dismiss that to keep the peace. I can’t just sit here and say “fine, I will allow myself and my entire community to be snuffed out quietly because it’s more convenient for you.”

The poster’s concerns were clear and vivid. Easily understood. And immediately dismissed.

It’s unbearably frustrating that so many in the world are think the complaints of those being oppressed aren’t important. I keep getting the response of “who cares, you’ll be dead soon anyway and then this argument won’t matter”

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.

I don't care if they're selling computers to fascist psychos.

I do care that they're using their soapbox to promote those fascist psychos.

Wow framework sells a lot of computers to real fascist psychos

A computer company doesn't do a political evaluation of each of their customers. When was the last time you had to submit your political beliefs in order to buy a computer from...anywhere?

Not sure if they are a large part of framework's consumers, or just very vocal in that thread.

and that's the better outcome

This is the problem with the “we’re not talking about politics in here” approach.

Vulnerable minorities are always "political."

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'd imagine Dell or Lenovo would ALSO be giving money to people you disagree with, albeit more secretively. Plus, their laptops are less repairable.

There's no ethical consumption under Capitalism, so you pick the "best" choice; Framework might still be "best", they haven't discarded all their competitive advantage.

I'll probably do System76 for my next laptop, but I was considering Framework for my next phone. I don't expect to need to purchase either soon tho, so lots of time for the decision calculus to change.

I believe the thread was automatically locked due to community reports and then a mod manually unlocked it?

Tbf I don't know much about the Hyprland history. The point raised by the OP on the forum links to tweets by both framework and Hyprland accounts saying framework became a "gold tier sponsor" of hyprland. It's fair to assume that involves a donation.

I read the forum thread today and there's a screenshot of the type of talk the hperlnd people do.

https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986/32

I get the impression a lot of people think that framework are a lot bigger than they actually are, in reality they are not much more than a start up

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.

Did the author bother contacting them first before treating them like utter garbage and trying to rile up a public lynch mob?

Yes, the community.frame.work is the preferred method for asking questions to Framework (see: https://frame.work/support), and the first post makes a few statements about non-Framework persons/projects and Framework has sponsored, and asks one question to Framework.

So, if you'd read the damn post, you'd know this is exactly how Framework asks to be engaged.

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.

I'm eager to see their response (and actions taken).

It doesn't seem at all they supported toxic behavior directly for that, to advance the toxicity, just several projects.
\ Maybe they'll clarify their stance.

They are a tiny corp, they don't/can't PR immediately.

I saw this just this morning.

If you have a space for sheep's and wolves, you'll only have wolves.

Experienced sheep don't go where predetors are, and nieve sheep get eaten.

Same applies to spaces. If 'everyone' is welcome, you'll soon find it to not include everyone.

Þose true colors are already on display. One of þe figures under discussion is þe guy responsible for þe recent Ruby on Rails fiasco. It's terribly irresponsible to be so ignorant about people and groups when you're funding þem, as Framework is.

Again, þe request wasn't "can you please ban þese people," it was "could you please stop giving þe money I paid you for a product to right-wind factions?"

I think there's a fundamental asymmetry between receiving resources from persons you disagree with and providing resources to persons you disagree with. As long as your tasks aren't doing fascism, I think it's fine to get paid by (i.e. take money away from) fascists. But, no matter what you might get from persons with bad politics, if you transfer resources to them, they are going to use those resources to pursue those bad politics.

(BTW, Fox isn't right-wing enough for the real fascists; too many facts. OAN is what they watch, I think.)