this is the most level headed take ive see in this thread
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I respect this, I really do. I would prefer to see the entire forum frozen than allow this thread to continue. There is no discussion taking place. Just recriminations and shouting past one another. The community has demonstrated an inability to have a discussion on this topic.
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Thatâs not totally fair. Thereâs a lot of fluff and drama, but some of us are still trying to make actual points.
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Iâll concede that but itâs a minority of posts from what I can see and any reasonable discussion is getting drowned in noise.
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I agree that this thread should be closed, additionally this is a forum for a computer company, not a place to discuss political beliefs and I would support the moderators baning discussion of politics in the future, clearly OSS and politics donât go well together.
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I had to wait to post, as I previously mentioned I created a new personal and not work-related account, so there are limits in place.
Iâm going to start off by saying I would be perfectly happy with seeing someone change their behavior and demonstrate a basic level of human decency. To date, I have not seen that with vaxry (as demonstrated by the previously mentioned blog posts), and DHH is speed-running away from any form of basic decency.
Iâll also note that no, you can not separate the individual from the organization. Not when they arenât just âone of manyâ, but deeply ingrained and providing direction.
Iâm not interested in a debate about qualifying the definition of a nazi, or making comparisons of whether Company A is worse than Company B, or who is involved in genocide and who is not. If they participate in and actively support something I consider awful, both Company A and Company B go in the same bucket to me. Iâm not setting up a ranking system for how terrible a company is, and Iâm not interested in debating that, so please realize I have no intention or desire to engage with anyone trying to do this with me.
So here is where I am, in simple bullets.
- I think there are a ton of projects out there worth supporting in the open source world that are not run by people espousing hate, or implicitly supporting it in their own actions. Omarchy and Hyprland are not on that list.
- I find it odd to even support Omarchy and Hyprland in the first place, when there are more hardware-related efforts which need funding and could be funded by framework, which would be a more direct benefit to both framework and framework device owners.
- Just like framework can choose to support whatever projects they please, I can choose to support whatever manufacturer I please.
- Frameworkâs choice of projects to support absolutely influences my choice of support for framework.
- By choosing to support Hyprland (vaxry) financially and Omarchy (DHH) in marketing and hardware, I will make my choice to not support framework by recommending their hardware internally or to my clients. This is not exclusive to framework or this situation, I have made this choice with other companies many times in the past, for many different reasons.
- I have, to date, found the response by framework to be disappointing. I have found the lack of effort to even basically vet who is getting support by framework (both financially and in marketing push) to be disappointing as well. Choosing to use twitter of all things to post âresponsesâ to issues brought up here I also find off-putting.
As of right now, that disappointment will translate to me not purchasing or recommending framework products, both internally in my organization and externally to clients.
That is all there is to it. I hope framework reconsiders their approach, and who they provide support to, whether direct (financially) or indirect (hardware, marketing, including in default deployments, etc). Should framework reconsider their position, I will, of course, reconsider mine on framework.
Until something changes though, that is where things are for me.
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Computers are a tool that is used by everyone. Both people who lean politically right and left both use computers.
If Framework followed your suggestion, it would likely be branded as a âleft wingâ company and might see boycotts from âright wingâ persons.
I do not see how this would be good for Framework. Moreover, I do not see the necessity of boycotting people based on their political speech when they make substantial open source contributions.
What is even worse, is that after doing some research, I found no evidence that DHH made racist or fascist statements, but rather he seems to have posted some blogs sharing egalitarian, anti-Progatzi (progatzi = progressive nazi), and anti-affirmative action opinions and sentiment:
A good quote:
If these four factors do indeed bring forth the waning days of DEI dominance, I think itâs important to try to extract some good from the worthwhile aspirations of a misguided movement. Divorce the specific tactics, and especially the ideology, from the valiant drive to promote equal opportunities for all. You can sign on to that mission without even accepting the premise of DEI.
From this, we can see the cause of the Progatzi (progressive nazi) hatred and anger against this man: He simply disagrees with the premise that opposite racial discrimination is needed to counter racial discrimination. Far from being a right wing extremist, so far based on my research, heâs simply a centrist who opposes affirmative action and the so-called âanti-racistâ movement. Sound minds can reasonably debate whether or not âanti-racismâ and âaffirmative actionâ are themselves racist, but to close down that discussion is in my mind a form of intolerable anti-intellectualism.
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Iâm not mad, just disappointed.
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I do not think so that there is an attempt to sell out, or it does not look like this at the moment. DHH is quite popular, so I guess folks in FW wanted to advertise their laptops on his platformâŚand sure enough DHH did posted a favorable unboxing post there. I think nobody in FW had any idea, what DHH is writing in his blog.
Regarding Omarchy, its actually gaining some attention, and not due to Framework (as some of here eagerly pointing)âŚthere have been several favorable youtube videos about this distro during last weeks (canât wait those apology videos coming up soon now, if authors will find out). It seemed to me that its gaining some traction, especially among people, who value productivity, so support from @nrp seemed logical. And aside preinstalled programs, curated by âopinionatedâ DHH himself, it does look awesome (even if it is just a bunch of dotfiles that will set Arch+Hyprland as claimed here, I donât have any idea)âŚand it got me interested on switching to Hyprland actually, especially since I have switched to LazyVim as well this year. I guess that installing Hyprland (or god forbid, Omarchy) this makes me now a âfascist by associationâ so have to stick to my old unproductive WMâŚ.
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hyprland is just an eye candy version of sway. i can also recommend niri, as it takes a novel approach to tiling by adding scrolling. feel free to use hyprland, though. people will draw opinions about you, in regards to that. similar to anything else you do. no one here cares if framework employees are using these things, it comes down to advertising for them and funding them.
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Thanks for the recommendation. Will give it a try.
This is so disappointing, I feel like now I have the laptop version of owning several Teslas. You were wrong. You continue to be wrong. And Iâm jumping ship now before I confirm what the sleeping arrangements below deck are. But the smell and the screaming are more than enough for me to make a confident decision here and now. Spoiler: fashing is still enshittification.
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The problem is that OSS (and especially FLOSS) is inherently political. The idea that we (and not some company controlled by billionaires) should have the final say over how we use our devices is political. The idea that software should be free to modify and transparent to users is political, as it puts control (and therefore power) in the hands of the users (rather than the company or organization making the software).
The other, more specific problem here is that Framework made this political by repeatedly tying themselves to someone with racist beliefs (publicly professed on his own blog!). They made this even more political when they doubled down saying that DHH is welcome in their âbig tentâ, since that is a political position. Deciding who is part of your big tent necessarily entails making decisions on which political positions are dealbreakers. Itâs why I asked above what would be a dealbreaker. For example, if someone you publicly associate with (and shout out) happened to also publicly be a member of Patriot Front, would that be a dealbreaker? For people not from the US, Patriot Front is a white nationalist neo-nazi group. I would hope that no matter how good the FLOSS software, Framework would stop shouting out that person or their software.
And thatâs the point. The people alleging here that this is making FLOSS political also have their own lines. They just donât think DHH is bad enough to merit this discussion, whereas plenty of people (myself included) do.
I suspect that you, for example, would not publicly associate with someone like Musk (unless youâre far-right, in which caseâŚwhatever). And you would be annoyed if Framework started shouting out some OSS Musk was involved in, say. Then, someone who supports Musk might turn around and say literally the same thing you are saying here: âWhy are you making this political?â. It already was.
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I feel like now I have the laptop version of owning several Teslas.
A better simile might be going to a shop to buy groceries, realising the shop has a Tesla powerwall, having a go at the owner, getting a blank look in response, then spending the day standing outside the shop door calling on the whole town to picket it until the owner comes out and apologises.
Later it turns out some of the allegations being flung about arenât even true, but only a few people notice this and their voices get lost in the rapidly growing crowd of protesters.
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After doing some more digging, perhaps this seems to be possibly what some people are using to accuse this person of being racist over?
I canât, per se, view this as racist so much as anti-immigration nationalism. Those distinctions are, however, perhaps ultimately semantic differences of opinion to some wit, though I find the alternative lacking.
When I think of a racist person, I think of the people who want to exclude people from participation based upon race. If I read this post, I see, perhaps, someone who appears to be what you might call a nationalist.
Is there a distinction between nationalism and racism? To my mind the answer is yes, there is an important distinction between nationalism and racism. The nationalist might oppose immigration, but he or she does not advocate for stripping privileges from persons who are already citizens based upon their race.
I have met those who would say that people of certain races should be entitled to certain privileges and opportunities, to wit, these are the racists. Perhaps there is a correlation between nationalists and racists. I am not going to claim for one moment, that there is not overlap between these two groups. Clearly, many nationalists are also racists and vise versa. But those groups are nonetheless, not the same. To, without evidence, claim a nationalist to be a racist, merely because he mentions race or ethnicity in the context of a nationalist rant, seems disingenuous and anti-intellectual.
Moreover, what would you have him do about his own opinions? Is he not permitted to complain about the totalitarian crackdown on dissent of the UK? Can he not complain about the problems facing his own ethnicity the same way the progatzi allow the minority ethnicity groups to complain about racial issues without an ascription of moral fault?
Perhaps this instigation of a double standard is viewed less favorably by those subject to its intolerance. It is quite often I see those espousing so-called tolerance advocate for consequences to those merely venting their own frustration and sharing opinions. Can you consider the possibility that the same standards should be applied to each person, regardless of whether they belong to the âwhiteâ group or other ethnic group?
Have you not ascribed positions to a man who has not shared them merely by his perceived membership in a given group? Isnât that the central wrong of racism to begin with? To judge someone by their group rather than their individuality? Do you defend or distinguish these?
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Calling the guy who complains about there not being enough white people in London and celebrates Tommy Robinson marches a âcentristâ is probably the richest thing in this whole thread. Anyone who claims to have read his blog and not having found anything objectionable are just telling on themselves. Centrists, suuuure.
Personally, I have previously cancelled my FW12 preorder because of a variety of reasons and circumstances, but with the full intention of getting one in the future. How Framework handles this has a lot of sway over if I go through with it or not. For clarity, I feel kind of âehâ about the Hyprland situation, seeing as theyâve put in active effort to better their community. Promoting the DHH guyâs projects and by extension DHH himself is the stinky part for me. I wish we could live in a vacuum where we can just look at the software and focus on that, but reality doesnât work that way.
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Perhaps centrist is not the right term, given the lack of original sources I had to do my own digging to find the primary sources. After some additional digging, I did find a blog post regarding a nationalist rant. Even so, Iâm not sure Iâd call this individual a right wing extremist, he seems to hold what Iâd consider more mainstream right-wing positions on immigration. Perhaps under the totalitarian UK government, things do not appear that way. I can see how the government banning dissent could distort your view on what is centrist and right wing. A political position held by around 40% of the population is hardly what I would call âextremistâ even if it is a minority one. Nor have I been able to find evidence of the so-called racism.
Now, perhaps this is an aside, it stands to reason that framework should not, in general, get involved in such petty semantic disputes nor cancel someone for mere blog posts, regardless of how offended some people are by those blog posts. Should it do the same for those on the right offended by âextremistâ left wing positions, it would result in alienation of many in the trans community and such. That is not good for a computer company.
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Being upset that you donât see as many white people on the streets as you used to seems pretty dang racist to me. Talking warmly about a bloody Tommy Robinson march without a single word of disavowal is incredibly telling.
Iâm not asking Framwork to cancel anyone. Not promoting any or other shithead is not cancelling them.
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Iâm both mad and disappointed. I had bought a framework 16 secondhand missing a few parts, and now it looks like that money is going to be a waste, since I canât buy the missing parts and in doing so knowingly support a company that supports fascists.
This is a thermocline of trust moment. There may still be room for them to turn around, but the timeframe for that is likely measured in hours, not days.
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That language could perhaps be viewed as racist. I think you can also view it as a nationalist viewpoint. Itâs certainly possible that you can view nationalism as a plausible pretext for racism.
One counter point is that he uses the term â60% Native Britishâ to refer to the âWhite Britishâ ethnic group in the 2000 year data, which expressly excludes the ânon-British Whiteâ group. Given his exclusion of non-British whites, I think this can be viewed more as a nationalist position than a racist one. If you donât want to draw a distinction between nationalism and racism and lump them together as âfar rightâ, thatâs your prerogative I suppose, but donât expect not to be called out on it.
I think if framework promotes a project that someone works on, thatâs not the same as promoting the person. Furthermore, they can promote open source software they work on without endorsing that personâs political viewpoints.
Thereâs a difference between not promoting racist post, e.g. by not promoting DHHâs blog, and cancelling the man.
Cancellation is, in essence, in most regards not about refusing to promote a nationalist political blog (or racist, if you interpret it that way), but rather, about the refusal to promote anything associated with the individual or cause the individual financial harm.
If Framework says they wont promote his political blog, thatâs reasonable and not cancellation. If however, they want to refuse to fund or promote an open source project because of who runs the project, that is cancellation.
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