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
You must log in or register to comment.
Yep that’s I read from 2023.
He responded in a couple of blog posts:
- https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity
- https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists
I opened up the discord community just now to see what was there, and I just saw people being goofy and talking shit to each other. In all fairness, I wouldn’t hang out there either, but that doesn’t mean anything.
To summarize, I don’t see the Hyprland devs trying to harm others. Folks like DHH are a different story. Of course this might all change tomorrow - who knows?
Lesson learned - companies should never support open source projects because you run the risk of pissing people off.
The community is pushing them to improve their stance. All they have to do is acknowledge the communities problem with this and stop funding and promoting two objectionable projects.
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.
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.
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?
i dont think framework is big enough to factcheck every linux maniac
DHH is clearly a turd, and I want nothing to do with his projects.
I’m not sure I understand the opposition to Hyprland though. I enjoy using Hyprland, so I’ve tried to make an informed opinion on whether the project is harmful. Note that I have only reviewed public information, so I might only be seeing the tip of the iceberg.
According to his blog posts, the creator of Hyprland seems to have received criticism well enough (back in 2023). Are other people in the community the main concern or am I missing something? Forgive my ignorance
Dhh is also a guy who fights apple and google and Microsofts. A guy who says the cloud is stupid, a guy who says American companies will do as instructed by the orange government hence Europe needs to build their own infrastructure and companies.
I am ok with that. Never heard or read about him being a conspiracy nut
I’m ok with those things too. I just recently found out about all the crazy stuff after the rubygems takeover. I’m not really a ruby fan, but that seemed pretty shady.
There were some controversies due to the toxicity of Hpyrland’s community (namely its discord server). See this post for example
Edit: I should have read OP’s linked post first, which actually also refers to Drew’s post.
Hyprland and Omarchy seem like alright projects. Someone over at Framework is personally using both so sponsoring them seems pretty natural imo
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.
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.
But I already have my pitchfork at the ready!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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…
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 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
:/
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
If DHH’s wet dream comes true Nirav would be back in India no matter how much money he gives him.
Just saw this on Mastodon. They locked the thread in question… that’s very disheartening. Terrible really. These people are either ignorant or complicit. Perhaps both. In any case, let’s spread the word and drive them out of business.
I believe the thread was automatically locked due to community reports and then a mod manually unlocked it?
I am appreciating many of the replies pillorying the “big tent” response, but what an obvious non-answer to a very real problem. It all smacks of Framework being cool with giving money to far-right provocateurs, and a well off shitheel at that.
