No, it’s not a nationalist viewpoint. It’s a racist viewpoint. And really, I don’t think you believe for a second that he, a Danish man, would ever have written that blog post in a world where the number of white Brits was down to today’s number but the number of white people overall had stayed the same.
I’ve said my piece. Have fun, everyone.
Have you tried installing gentoo?
You know, I’ve seen two major positions here: “this sucks” and “who cares”. which is funny to me because just not caring/not seeing a problem is hardly enough impetus to write a whole comment about it, and imo not really enough for Framework to need to take this into account. How many people actually care about specifically Omarchy/Hyprland being given this type of support by Framework in a positive way, and how many are upset about it? From what I’ve seen, those who are upset are in the vast majority of the people who have mentioned any specifics about the projects or leadership, and many people are posting here more so because they don’t like the politics of the people who are upset or else just want to have an opinion on the wider discourse of “cancelling”.
I mean full disclosure, I’m very put off by these decisions on Framework’s part as well, but I am taking solace in the fact that it seems like in terms of people who really care about this particular decision rather than having a soapbox to talk about the generalities of whether or not the wokes are cancelling FOSS, many other people seem to see the issues I see.
This whole thing really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and really I’m pretty stunned at the extremely poor response - Nirav’s initial response, etc - for reasons both moral and business related. Not everyone needs to share my morals. That’s fine and good. But wow does Framework have some work to do on the business side. One of the most important things a business has is their reputation. They’re hard to mend after being broken. And Framework is truly damaging theirs by the act of supporting (financially or non-financially) bad actors in the open source world and the world at large, but also their inability to anticipate any issue in doing so and their inability to address it well. I would imagine there is a legal team screaming somewhere. I hope there is. I hope the teams at Framework are taking this beat to assess their stance, and find someway to apologize and work towards repairing things with their customers. I’ll refrain from buying anything further from them until they do.
Now excuse me I have fascists roaming my streets pointing guns at people, abducting neighbors based on their skin and language, shooting priests in the head with non-lethal weapons, and generally goose stepping down Michigan Ave. because they’ve been empowered and emboldened. Words matter. Actions matter.
To be honest, I had no idea who DHH was or what Omarchy was before this showed up on my Google News homepage. However, I want Framework to support the best Open Source software, regardless of whether or not the authors are “left wing” or “right wing”.
I do not think a person’s Open Source project should be cancelled because of some blog posts. That idea is a threat to the success of Open Source software.
It’s not a “who cares” moment for me, I want Open Source software and more importantly Free Software to succeed. Having another group, the progressives, take over our Free Software movement and co-opt it for their own purposes is harmful. I have seen how they, the progressive operate. Inochi2d is a good example of an Open Source project that was shunned by some progressives. There is no Open Source alternative to Inochi2d, all alternatives are proprietary. Yet the progressive crowd was more than willing to tell people to use Inochi2d alternatives like Live2d (proprietary) instead. The progressives are not on our side, they’re only on our side when it’s convenient for them.
IMHO, it went off the rails (pun intended) right in the beginning, with wild claims like this:
I hope this thread settles down finally, soon. A lot of damage to FW, hopefully we will get over from this.
Yes, that’s true, but no, he hasn’t argued for that directly (not in any public channels I know about, anyways). As mentioned previously, a lot of DHH’s writing consists of fairly obvious dogwhistles, so while I know a fascist when I see one, you could probably take any individual piece of writing from him and convince yourself he’s just a “normal” nationalist.
But frankly, I’m not trying to convince you that he’s a fascist, I was just stating that I already know he’s a fascist and refuse to support him. People who actually care will be able to see his character from his blog.
if you have no idea who DHH is or what Omarchy is outside of a cursory look, how can you also imply that to avoid supporting them threatens supporting “the best” open source software? you’re kinda doing what I said in the post, where instead of evaluating the merits of the software in question or what’s going on in this particular situation, you’ve decided that there’s a Point to be made here about, as I said, “the wokes cancelling FOSS”, and gone on a soapbox to make it.
It’s kind of funny honestly, and the fact that instead of DHH or Omarchy you’ve made this about your personal opposition to “the progressive crowd” really shows that you are the one co-opting the FOSS movement to further your political agenda.
What I can see so far is that Nirav was supporting what he thought was cool open source software. What you guys are saying is “cancel this software because the author is right wing”. If you said “support this other window manager because it uses less RAM” instead then I wouldn’t feel the need to comment here like this. I want Nirav and Framework to continue promoting the best Open Source software on the merits of the software, not the authors. If Nirav says the software is cool, then I’m inclined to believe him (even if personally I hate tiling window managers).
I’ve contributed many thousands of lines of code to open source software; some projects are run by left wing people, others by people who are more right wing, but what unites us is our shared commitment to Free Software. Our community is being invaded by people who don’t care about that and instead want to turn Framework into a left-wing politicized weapon. How much open source code have you written? I’m willing to guess none.
And let me add, if the right wing people wanted to co-opt open source, I’d be just as opposed to that. Usually that doesn’t happen since many of them are luddites.
This isn’t about left-wing vs. right-wing, this is about normal people vs. sexists, racists, and transphobes. Unless, of course, you think that the right-wing is inextricably tied to racism, sexism, and transphobia (and I’m not sure I’d disagree).
What then is your take on the idea brought up in the very original post of this thread that DHH is also inherently a bad actor in the open source software world in spite of some great work in the past?
If you want to separate the art from the artist, by all means do so.
I can’t, or more specifically, I refuse to separate them. Even if a project would implement the perfect desktop environment, I will not willingly contribute to the ego and platforming of someone so diametrically opposed to some people existing that they would use their own notoriety to promote such ideas. Because supporting them grows their influence.
This is the whole issue here. By not walking back their support for such projects, frame.work’s “big tent” approach essentially becomes the Cursed Bar, where if you let one Cursed Person stay in the non-cursed bar, congratulations, now you have a Cursed bar (replace the Cursed word with the obvious).
Supremely sucks since I was clicks away from ordering a 16 for myself, but I’d rather wait until this situation sorts itself out, for better or for worse, and choose then.
I’ve been writing open source code since I was twelve. I have commits in the Linux kernel. I see you’re continuing to project your personal vendetta against “the progressive crowd” onto other people and onto your perception of the movement, lol. My involvement with FOSS far predates any kind of political awareness I might’ve had, and I’d consider FOSS a cornerstone of the kind of political freedom I think is necessary for society.
You also are being pretty credulous towards Nirav’s FOSS opinions, who is in fact just Some Guy. I’ve been somewhat surrounded by Hyprland and Omarchy before all the stuff about them came to light and a lot of people dropped them, and I have to say I’ve never felt compelled to switch away from StumpWM-on-NixOS; I don’t think these projects have a ton of technical merit, and I think the creators have acted in ways that I think harm the open-source movement itself a lot more than a somewhat flashy tiling WM or a fifty millionth Arch-but-with-software-I-like derivative help it.
You keep talking about cancelling but I don’t really consider this cancelling at all. I’m not trying to get DHH fired or anything, and I’m certainly not trying to get Nirav fired. I’m just telling Framework that they’ve lost my business, and why, and what they can do to get it back. That’s just… a free market?
personally, I couldn’t give less of a shit if someone believed the only way society could exist was a hyper capitalist death spiral or if they’re incapable of working with teams like KDE, GNOME, Freedesktop, etc. so long as they’re not a douche towards minorities or the like, I don’t care who Framework supports, because a lot of people have different opinions even if some people think they’re really damn stupid, I just don’t want Framework to support someone harmful to people like me or my friends.
I am aware that’s the point you were trying to make, but clarifying exactly which crowd of progressives you’re trying to use this discussion to make a point about by assuming they’re the only ones who could possibly disagree with you or who are currently disagreeing with you doesn’t really discount the fact that you are, still, using the discussion to make a political point about a group of people whose ideas you don’t like rather than about the FOSS community, the people in it, or the software it produces. Just because you’re being centrist doesn’t mean you can’t do political co-option.
not to constantly use myself as a counterexample, but cancelling is a constant and tiring weapon in progressive spaces too, and I am indeed quite sick of purity testing. I won’t say there’s no purity testing in this thread, but a lot of the one-and-done messages I see from people who pretty clearly don’t care about arguing a point are along the lines of “I just don’t want my expensive-computer money, that I paid extra for to support a good cause, going to support people that kinda make our community suck instead”, which I don’t think is purity testing so much as a desire to make the community the best it can be.
personally, I plan to buy a framework laptop. and I am not exactly one to care about who they work with.
if they would like to work with republicans, sure, they can do that.
who cares?
what I will be concerned about is if framework starts to down their hardware to the point where it is no longer easy to repair. if that happens, I can understand.
i’m not gonna not recommend framework based on who they support, that’s whatever, unless they start sending me notifications on my future laptop with a banner that i’m forced into, then I will no longer support them. but untill then, i’m gonna prosede to buy framework products when i’m ready.
At this point I’m kinda fed up with both sides of this argument. I definitely don’t remotely agree with the politics of DHH, and had been puzzled about how much framework was promoting Omarchy on social media a few days before this whole thing broke out (I’d never heard of Omarchy before that, and confused as to what exactly it offered that was so distinct and uniquely useful to explain the promotion it was getting once I did look into it). So I definitely do think it’s weird how much that was promoted, and likewise, though I haven’t read as much about the specifics, hyprland also seems not too closely related to the core priorities of framework? So I do think that there’s some explanation due from framework about that, clarifying if they were unaware of the controversial creators of these projects, or perhaps some member of the team in charge of sponsorships and social media does align with their politics, and used that as a factor when deciding what to support (and if so, should perhaps be let go).
In my eyes, what would make this better from framework is a reaffirmed commitment to open source projects, a pledge to better vet the projects they support (not only for controversial opinions like these, but also for relevance to their core mission, not just eye-candy projects like Omarchy).
I found their donation to LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) to be inspiring, and it raised my awareness to a small, relatively unknown, but incredibly valuable project for the open source community. Those are the sorts of projects that they should be promoting, and I hope they’ll put more time and research into deciding who to support going forward.
Yeah, I’m just gonna say my piece and then dip, but this sucks.
Bought my fw13 like three weeks ago and finally got Arch all perfect on there, started singing the praises of framework, and then this happens. To say the experience has been soured is an understatement.
To be clear: I don’t have a problem with Omarchy from a software perspective. I think it’s neat. Seeing Nirav, a CEO, find time to contribute to it was also neat. But I’m not above admitting I was ignorant and uninformed. Now having a fuller picture of the maintainers, and considering framework is doubling down on financial contributions to these teams, I’m just bummed.
I stand on the side of decency, unquestionably. The beliefs of these devs aren’t decent. It’s fair for people to feel betrayed and hurt by this discourse; I do too to a certain extent. I still love my fw13, but my vision of a long-term upgradable laptop has been put on an indefinite hiatus as long as the team commits to supporting these types of devs.
It’s just another laptop now. That’s all.
You are correct in assuming this,
as well as this,
But this thread isn’t people who are annoyed, this thread is people who seem to want Framework to go out of business or stop supported omarchy and hyprland. If Framework started supporting some hypothetical OSS project from Musk (someone who I do personally hate), I would stop at being annoyed, I wouldn’t call them out on the forums and I would likely continue to use and recommend Framework products because at the end of the day their support ends up back in OSS projects even if it has to go through some people that I don’t personally like. If, in this hypothetical world, Framework were to do something far more drastic and publicly announce that they hate gay people or some adjacent to that, they I would probably speak with my wallet and encourage others to do so, this is capitalism and depriving companies of money is a very strong motivator.
you also mentioned that
and in all honesty, I don’t think your right about that. I don’t think wanting control over my own electronics and data is in any way shape or form political. If anything I believe that it is a form of protest against companies like google or microsoft, I hate big tech and I hate they way that they collect data so I took back control from them. I have a personal vendetta against these companies so I do this more as middle finger to big tech than anything else.
I accidentally posted this as a reply to the main thread not to you so I gotta add some text here so it will let me post this again.
(edited to fix grammar lol)