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
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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?
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?
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Hold the phone, since when were Hyprland devs like this?
For a while, but only people that closely follow Linux news would know about it.
Projects are not their authors. Please give the politics a rest. I’ve had enough of politics lately.
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.
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.
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).
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
It might be the same situation of me. I’m not a fascist and I use hyprland, I just was unaware until now.
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.
They should just support niri & cachy
they warned us about the framework
