I’ve been out of the community (and generally HW dev) for a while now, getting out of a prolonged burnout episode worsened by a bad health background. As someone who used to do a whole lot of Framework third-party HW/helping people within community/general Framework advocacy, and still do (just on a smaller scale), I’ve been sent this link a number of times today. Hope I have something helpful to contribute.
Even on its face, this looks like a dumb action for Framework to take, unless it’s meant to manufacture controversy. I’ve been seeing heaps of Omarchy posts on social media before I knew anything about DHH’s numerous indecencies, and the outstanding focus on Omarchy specifically was surprising. At the time, I assumed it was just that good-looking and functional. However, the longer that posting lasted, the more social media objections I saw, and at some point I decided to look into it.
Now that I’ve learned about DHH, If the aim wasn’t to have the Omarchy PR (and funding? damn) blow up, the social media team did a bad job vetting things they focus on. At its very best, it’s just a slow year? Either way, DHH has taken a number of far-right stances to the extent it’s appropriate to call DHH far-right, yet, he’s comfortable lying by misrepresenting his own stance.
Reading DHH’s pseudointellectual writing on things like ADHD, it appears he’s either not very smart or just disingenuous, which are about the only two ways you can start a blog post by pretending social understanding of ADHD equals diagnostic principles as applied by medical professionals, and then never engaging with the diagnostic principles beyond surface-level limited quoting, or factors like brain function differences. Again, either genuinely dumb, or disingenuous on purpose. This is exactly the kind of person that people will object to supporting.
The world is getting increasingly polarized and politicized. If you’re a company working within one of the few civil rights causes (right to repair and ownership) that isn’t yet politicized, to your sheer luck, it’s not clear to me why you’d want to polarize your standing by giving support to a vocally far-right developer and providing frankly noticeably outsized amounts of PR to his project. This association tangibly makes Framework hard to recommend to others for me, both in my personal and my professional capacity, and overall, it’s just puzzling to see.