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
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
I get your point with the rest but…
Vote right? Transphobic.
Yeah, it kinda is? That’s a core plank of the MAGA platform; it’s practically inseparable. Unless you’re talking non-USA parties but then there’s still a better chance than none it’s a yes.
If you read the rest you’ll discover that the reactionaries don’t care how you vote, they’ll call you that regardless.
I’m taking from the downvotes that there are a lot of people here who got caught up on those first few words and didn’t bother reading the rest or engaging their critical thinking skills…
When someone uses “critical thinking skills” or “common sense” they sure always seem to be on the wrong side of history.
People who vote for a particular party generally don’t agree with 100% of that party’s platform. Just because someone voted for a party that has transphobia-motivated policies doesn’t mean they are transphobic. The correlation may be high, but it’s far from 100%.
You’re right, they are just performing hateful acts towards trans people, they may be doing it out of laziness or ignorance rather than actually hating trans people. As we all know, materially helping an anti trans cause doesn’t mean you hate trans people in the same way materially helping terrorists doesn’t make you a terrorist. Ex: our friends and allies in Saudi Arabia.
Voting isn’t a hateful act. Any insinuation of that needs to stop.
Voting can absolutely be a hateful act, I literally can’t imagine what happens in your brain that makes you think otherwise. The entire US 2024 election was hate vs not-the-hate-guy. A vengeance fantasy for middle aged white men.
No, if you think that, your brain is twisted by whatever spin your preferred media choice puts on.
The 2024 election was more about people wanting to see change, and one candidate clearly offering it and the other clearly not. Look at Harris’ polling timeline, she was doing well up until the beginning of October, so what happened? For example, she wouldn’t change anything from Biden’s first term, except having a Republican in the cabinet. Trump took that and ran with that, and I think that describes her support dropping around that time. People were unhappy with Biden’s first term, and she wouldn’t say anything bad about it. I didn’t watch the 60 minutes interview, but I’m guessing that went similarly.
I think most thought Trump was mostly rhetoric except the couple things they cared about. I think most thought he was bluffing about tariffs (or thought they’d work differently), thought he’d actually bring prices down, etc, which explains his cratering support so far. The average voter is kinda dumb/naive, but I don’t think they were largely voting on hate against immigrants, trans people, etc.
I don’t think you can advocate for anything even remotely on the “right” in political discussions anymore unless you mean MAGA. That well is so poisoned at this point that everyone is going to assume you’re a MAGA troll wearing a mask the second you voice any right-leaning opinion.
It’s pretty unfortunate. There are plenty of “live and let live” types in the US that identify informally as libertarians and would make great allies.
The simplest explanation is a bunch of right-wingers are trying to make the term meaningless.
You had me until this. The term is already meaningless because of the overuse from the left-wingers. No one right of the far-left cares about being called any of the “phobics” or “ists” anymore because they mean nothing now.
Anyway, nowadays when I hear someone is transphobic, I make sure to wait for solid evidence before changing my opinions.
Ok at least you finished on the right note.
Somebody ACTUALLY on the left wouldn’t use what energy they have trying to shatter any hope of an anti-fascist coalition we have by poo-flinging. Thus, someone who does that must be on the right. Right?
Oh so your position is that all the Democrat politicians/celebrities/media mouthpieces/people on the left throwing around fascist/nazi/transphobe/racist/etc at people they disagree with are not on the left? They’re actually far-right and it’s all a psyop to make those terms lose all meaning?
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.
Wow framework sells a lot of computers to real fascist psychos. That thread is rough. Comment about ICE only arresting criminals would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic. “I have immigrant friends” lol.
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.
Not sure if they are a large part of framework’s consumers, or just very vocal in that thread.
I wasn’t worried about that I was just disappointed by the thread
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.
Yup, says all you need to know.
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.
Some people don’t base everything they do on people’s opinions. Crazy, I know.
Me and a friend were talking about this recently. We don’t want to know our musicians opinions either. Because they are usually bastards. I’m just kinda sick of having to carry the worlds woes everytime I do anything. I listen to what I like, and I use services that I like. I won’t be brow beaten by anyone.
I mean if your band starts heiling and you send them a thousand dollars, people are absolutely going to judge you and you’d deserve it. That’s what happened here.
I think that’s an intentional mischaracterisation. It’s more like sending money to a band that can’t be fucked moderating their discord.
That’s how it would have been if they hadn’t responded with big tent. Once they responded with “we do this on purpose” it became a thing
I can’t think of a single example of this, can you provide something to back your point up?
You can’t think of a single example of someone’s opinion not influencing someone else?
Correct, we are raised from birth on the opinions of our family, society, etc. I don’t know anyone raised in isolation.
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 dont think framework is big enough to factcheck every linux maniac
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”.
…a legal team checking out linux forums and discord servers for anti trans actions…you ok buddy?
Before they invest money? Yes
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?
They immediately responded
I hope they at least cut their funding now that they know about DHH’s behaviour
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…
A breakdown of DHHs racist post, in case people don’t want to look up the original
https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thought/
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 very much care about the view of business owners are; it’s how I decide to where my “vote” goes when I “vote with my wallet” as I’ve frequently told to do by Capitalism supporters.
Voting with your wallet has nothing to do with politics, but price, quality, and service.
Voting is wielding political power, whether it is with your wallet or anything else.
It doesn’t have to be, and that’s my point.
Using your wallet doesn’t have to be political.
Voting is, by definition, political. It is a common part of several different methods of resolving coordination problems (i.e. politics).
No, voting is only political if it’s part of a political process. Everyone in a group voting what kind of pizza to order isn’t political, and it can merely be informative (e.g. the person ordering the pizza could pick something else). Voting is only political when it involves government.
“Voting with your wallet” a metaphor. It just means changing your shopping habits so a company loses revenue, usually due to a recent change. Maybe it’s a policy you don’t like, or maybe it’s a drop in quality or something. It’s usually not a political act, though it can occasionally impact political policy (e.g. if the boycott is in response to a political change that involves the target company).
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.
Wow I guess if you have to scroll all the way to the fifth whole link it can’t possibly be plain, can it?
Sure the business owner thinks anyone who isn’t white doesn’t count as a person, but he only uses the resources you give him to promote that point of view as a hobby, so why worry?
I don’t know, was it a personal blog, some social media post, or a page on the company’s website? You didn’t specify, and I honestly don’t care enough to try to replicate your search.
If they’re able to separate personal views from how they run their company, it shouldn’t really matter what those views are.
It’s literally in the post you’re responding to. I didn’t do any external research other than read the thread.
This is the part I’m talking about:
i do want to point out how hard it is to even find out about the views of these people
…
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
You are not the person I originally responded to, how would you know they were referencing the OP? There aren’t even 5 links in the article, and if we count the embedded X posts, the fifth link is about Hyprland. I’m pretty sure that’s not what the OP is referring to.
The OP’s point is that it’s hard to find info on these people’s views, and the links in the OP are from other people doing that digging. As in, we likely wouldn’t know their views if these bloggers didn’t dig through posts looking for it.
Tbh I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Person said they had to scroll down 5 results to get to the asshole being an asshole and seemed to think that was proof it’s hard to research (hence my “five whole links”) and then you seemed to be saying that since it’s “hard to find” and the business isn’t slapping a nazi flag front and center on their website means it’s fine to use their stuff. If that’s not what you meant, great. But you said the same thing again, so I’m pretty sure you meant it.
I’m saying that there’s a good chance Framework didn’t know the views of those projects when they donated, so ascribing those views to framework doesn’t make logical sense. That’s all.
It only becomes a problem if they make those views plain.
Even then, who cares tbh.
People who don’t want to give resources to white nationalists. Why do you support funding white nationalists?
You’re not funding white nationalists (if that’s what these people are, I have zero idea who they are), you’re funding the product they’re making.
If I send you a dollar and you send 50c to white nationalists and then you tell me that and I give you another dollar, now I am funding white nationalists. This isn’t complex. Knowledge+action = result.
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 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.)
Agreed- you’d have to also know the type of mad sh*t that comes out of his mouth for confirmation. In this case you may have to take my word for it.
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.
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.
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 think it’s more about repair ability than it is about upgrading. At some point you’re going to end up with hardware that needs a different motherboard and then you might as well just replace the whole thing. There really isn’t anything that can be done about that.
To be honest I kind of think framework go a bit far on the modularity of the device, it’s a nice to have but really I’d be perfectly fine with a laptop that just has a replaceable keyboard, screen and battery, as those pretty much exclusively tend to be the parts that go wrong. Hell you could strip it down even further and just have an easily replaceable battery and it would probably be fine for 90% of people.
Hell no, I love that I can just upgrade to a better Mainboard in a couple years
Why would I also ditch all the other components because of a CPU change?
I mean I assume it’s because you wouldn’t in fact be able to get constant upgrade you’d end up being limited by socket design and things.
There has already been at least one incompatible motherboard upgrade. Essentially a whole new line of framework laptops.
Yup, I’m not s huge fan of the FW12 because of the 3rd format they now have to maintain
But the Mainboard of 12, 13 and 16 are all interchangeable inside their model line
You’re not really limited by socket design, as you change out the whole motherboard
The only limit is the physical size inside the case. And maybe thermals
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 guess no more framework for me.
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).
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
:/
