Six days ago, upgradeable laptop maker Framework tried to convince its fractious user community to live in a “big tent” after a Debian developer objected to the company’s sponsorship of Hyprland and its social media promotion of Omarchy, with both projects associated with politically polarizing viewpoints.
Antoine Beaupré, aka anarcat, demanded that Framework clarify its political position with regard to these two projects.
Hyprland, a Wayland compositor, is led by a “toxic and hateful community,” Beaupré observed, and Omarchy, a Linux distribution, comes from David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH), a controversial figure in the Ruby and Linux communities.
The problem here isn’t that Framework failed to keep track of the ideology espoused by every major developer on the projects they contributed to or endorsed, which, to be honest, isn’t something I’d expect of them. The problem (as usual for a corporation) is how they handled complaints. Trying to sweep stuff under the rug in the Internet age just results in someone setting the rug on fire. If instead, Framework’s response had been “We’re sorry, we didn’t know, we won’t give money or free advertising to any projects this guy is involved with from now on,” the whole mess would have died down by now except for a few people grumbling about how they should do more research before sending money out.
DHH is such a shit heel.
Kindof amusing to see people call “purity testing” on people who object to someone who’s quoted as being upset by checks notes a lack racial or ethnic purity.
[Sarcasm] C’mon everyone, can’t we just get along and hold hands with racists and other people who consider the rest of us subhuman? As long as what they’re doing doesn’t bother me personally you’re all overreacting and fragmenting this
nazi barcommunity!Edits: fiddling with phrasing :-\
It’s called the tolerance of intolerance.
Politics in my [insert literally fuckin anything]? It’s more likely than you think!
everything is political. anyone who says different is shitting themselves or selling you something.
I don’t even understand what the article said! Bro we are cooked so bad with politics.
People here complaining about purity testing even though really it’s just poison testing.
The standard isn’t even if it’s pure in ideology it’s to test is not poisonous.
being antifascist could only ever be “polarizing” if the person getting offended is an anti-antifascist aka a Nazi
I think it depends very much on what you think is fascism.
Lemmy users sometimes think using harch language is “fascism” because they are young and dont know what real fascism was like.
That being said, I havent read about what the Hyprland devs have been saying or doing, so sure, maybe they are bad people. I will go read about it now.
Edit: I looked into it and its not fascism, as usual. It seems to be the usual stuff that is being called fascism when its not. Its all about how they moderate their forum and how they talk to people there. This is not fascism. Treating people rudely is not fascism. Making bad jokes is not fascism either.
They may be dousches but we wont have another Stalin on our hands from this direction, dont worry. :)
FW is giving an openly racist and fascist person money for a project
That’s what people care about. Not the moderation behavior of the project
Yeah but like I wrote, the definition of racist and fascist here is probably very stretched into silly levels. As usual on Lemmy and I guess other social media.
“Probably very stretched.” “I guess”
Why not support right-wing goons as a default position when reading takes time and effort? Umberto who?
I love how they always portray projects like this as “politically polarizing”. You look inside and it’s always just plain old not-polarizing misogyny. Really shows where this “news” outlets stand.
The media has been complicit in all of this by sanewashing all of the insane shit that’s constantly happening.
The weird thing for me is the financial support coming from Framework to Hyprland. It would be one thing if Framework was working with Hyprland to test compatibility and functionality on their machines and do specialized bug testing. They could kind of justify that from a purely technical stance.
But the fact that they picked a very niche project for no apparent reason to support with a significant monthly financial contribution is so strange. There are numerous other niche distros/projects that aren’t mired in controversy that Framework could have worked with, (Alpine, Void, ElementaryOS, etc.) so why Hyprland/Omarchy?
Very disappointed. I’ve been pushing Framework computers very strongly for friends and family over the last year, plus I’ve been planning on getting one to replace my aging Thinkpad. Now I am going to hold off until the dust settles on this.
Supporting Hyprland definitely looks like a mistake, they weren’t aware of what went on around there.
They probably should have gone with supporting Niri and maybe Cosmic instead.
I agree, but then why would they not retracted their support? If it really was an honest mistake and they weren’t aware of the situation, I would think they would apologize, explain that they didn’t know, pull their support, and issue a statement about the kinds of values they want to promote in the FOSS world.
But instead, they have doubled down, the CEO himself. It’s very strange and concerning.
Omarchy uses Hyprland, so I guess they started by promoting Omarchy and maybe DHH asked them to sponsor Hyprland
It was a yellow flag when Framework invested heavily into an affordable non-repairable, non-upgradable desktop designed for AI developers. “Let them make money,” they said, as Framework positioned itself as a Trojan Horse to the ubiquitization of harmful AI.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I was saving up for a Framework 16, but I’ll just stick with my Thinkpad and get the next Steam Deck for gaming. It’s really a shame that such an important company would support transphobia and white supremacy, not just rhetorically but financially, as Hyperland gets ₤600 a month from them and DHH gets ₤24,000 via Rails.
I know this will be a controversial take since Framework is so beloved, but that is just how I personally will choose to spend my money.
I agree with your conclusion and I abhor Framework promoting either of these two projects.
But the APU in the desktop has, I suspect, a real reason for having nonreplaceable RAM. If I understand correctly, they can’t achieve 8000 mt/s memory speed or the wider memory bus with replaceable RAM. And since that memory is shared with the GPU, that speed becomes important for gaming or other GPU tasks. Hence why 6400 mt/s seems to be the max memory speed for a lot of the zen5 desktop chips, at least in prebuilts
I have that chip in my laptop (the “AI” Max Pro 395+) and I don’t ever use it for LLM shit. It’s a very performant and efficient CPU, and shockingly good for gaming too.
So even tho I hate the “ai” branding it’s actually a very very good CPU and GPU
What I’m hearing is that Framework chose power over user-replaceability, and that really seems to go against their mission. The specs sheet on the Framework Desktop is something par for the course with another company.
I don’t doubt that the Desktop is good for LLMs and gaming, but that’s beside the point for me personally.
Framework tried to design a version that worked with SODIMM with AMD but the performance was seriously hampered, and the plan was dropped.
yeah, like… They genuinely tried.
I got several beefs with framework, but this isn’t one of them.
I have a similar experience. I was saving up for a framework 13 for a general more ethical option, but that AI mini PC was extremely disappointing and got me more radicalized into free (libre) software as a consequence. Could you clarify the white supremacy and transphobia? I usually concern myself with strictly free software, so I’m unaware of such controversies.
Hyprland is the project associated with Transphobia. To put it delicately, the original developer was so cringe to the point that others didn’t want to work on the project.
DHH is the developer who is associated with White Supremacy, as he started making overtly white suprematist comments on social media.
I don’t buy from fascist supporters if I can help it. Screw Framework
This definitely had a negative impact on my view of framework, can’t say I’d buy from them again.
Same. Considering sending an email to tell them this.
Already have, along with my concerns about the outsized money going to essentially DHH events.
Might even sell my FW, I don’t think I want to be associated with the brand at all.
Which brands are acceptable to be associated with?
(I don’t own one, and I’m not familiar with what other brands are available these days.)
A great question. MNT would probably be the best answer - open source hardware to create open source hardware, uses the fediverse, F/LOSS focused, no venture capitalists/investors, etc.
If we go most ethical option right now, I’d say its keeping the hardware you have running. Framework is far more niche, which is where it becomes a brand statement more quickly than, say, grabbing a used thinkpad and dropping linux on it.
Edit: Just to mention, I’ve been debating getting a Pocket Reform for myself of late. I might build my own though with some changes, and just get the board from them.
I’m amazed that they haven’t backtracked this yet. They’re just cool losing all those customers.
idk, looking at twitter, there seems to be a pretty good number of fascist techbros who are congratulating framework on this
i guess framework doesn’t mind the change in audience…
I mean, its twitter. Its almost entirely fascist tech bros there.
Bots pretending to be tech bros*
Twitter is basically millions of Groks in a trenchcoat at this point.
I don’t believe any kind of analysis that depends on measuring sentiment on social media given that it’s trivially easy to run hundreds or thousands of accounts on a 5 year old graphics card and some vibe coding.
Theyre not gonna, look at all the comments itt that are ok with giving money to transphobes
It irks me to no end that both here and in the framework community forum people will try to downplay just how awful DHH and their ilk are.
They’ll never say that they don’t mind supporting someone who’s transphobic, or a nationalist, or a racist. Instead they’ll just say that you need to separate the art from the artist, or that you’re just engaging in “purity tests” or whatever other bullshit reason they can throw to absolve themselves from supporting objectively shitty people.
In the current political environment, it’s profitable to have right-wing extremists alignments and they’re aren’t sigh, or even happy to be part of it.
If the sales fall, there would have been or will be a “southpark-sorry.gif”
Funny how that just keeps on happening?! Why can’t we have left-wing extremism ever be profitable 😤
Because if you’re out there grifting people for monetary gain, you’re not really a leftist.
Because left wing extremism is anti-capitalist.
Left-wing podcasts churn huge amounts of money, Chapo Trapo House, Cool Zone Media etc… Individuals like Ibrahim X Kendi and the BLM project grafted away millions of dollars to buy mansions and luxury office space with do-nothing employees.
Left-wing has no issue making money. Rubes come in all political affiliations.
None of those are extremist though 😔
Tech companies and preventable controversies: name a more iconic duo.
TL;DR for just updates since the initial story: Basically say that they believe Hyprland cleaned up after having an initial problem and totally ignores all the stuff about DHH, despite that seeming to be the biggest problem people had with what they’ve been doing.
