Framework supporting far-right racists?

[GhostLegion]

Even at my most volatile on this forum, I never, NEVER engaged in this level of smearing and personal attacks on other users. So enough I say. There are approximately zero new thoughts being added at this point and I am openly asking for this thread to be locked and any related threads to be locked and deleted.

Everyone’s concerns have been well-established at this point. I have read people waxing poetically about the tolerance paradox and nazi bars several times now. I have seen people throwing around terms like leftist loon, commie, fash, etc quite enough. None of you likely know any other personally to make any kind of character judgement. So let’s quit with the character assassinations of other users. Especially considering a fair number of participants literally just joined this forum.

@nrp @catastrophic I ask you lock this thread, it has already devolved into hysterics at this point. Perhaps in a week you can unlock it and a civil conversation can be had. Even the OP wants everyone to just chill out.

I really don’t care if I’m called a fascist here, none of you know me or my politics so don’t even pretend to try to put me in a political box. If you knew me personally and my values, you wouldn’t even dream of applying that label to me.

Lock the thread, there is nothing more of value to be said here.

[citizen86]

Oh I see. Someone tried to add the racist bit, but got modded. Was that you?

While I do agree that he seems to be speaking rather highly of a far right activist in his latest blog post, I also still believe that Framework sending a laptop amongst who knows how many to Omarchy the open source project, does not mean Framework supports bigots and wants trans people dead. I still maintain this is blown way out of proportion because of the title of this thread and a lot of preconceived ideas along the way. You’re free to disagree with me, I don’t even care if you attack my character as you have been doing. I’ll just point out for all your justice, you are the one getting your messages reported by the community. And this is a new account, I don’t even have the ability to report comments right now

[lbkNhubert]

I agree. This is a good community. This thread is not one of its finer moments.

[1111]

Literally because there is other people with the worst takes ever coming out of the wood works here; I’ve been a user for the longest while, and still reading posts.

I do disagree with you and other people who are downplaying this, because at a time where big tech is bending the knee to help harm others. So I don’t think is “blown out of proportions” that people do not want other tech companies to have association with these individuals.

And I think is fair game that people voice their concerns, just as much as how you and others voice your indifference.

[JackOfManyTrades]

yeah, I agree, this is way beyond acceptable, what is going on here.

[citizen86]

I’m just curious then, I see Framework retweeted DHH talking about a Framework laptop over a month ago. They don’t retweet his crazy tweets or his political tweets. Why is it all of a sudden a huge deal? I don’t think I’m downplaying this, I’m trying to give a reasonable response to what I would consider being in hysteria

[katchowski]

tbh I don’t get why people are freaking out about this, we should leave politics out of OSS, clearly it doesn’t go well. Framework is a company with a goal and people should let them do what they need to to achieve it.

[lukee]

I wouldn’t think it’s a huge deal at all if Nirav said something like “oh, I was unaware of DHH’s views, we will no longer sponsor or advertise Omarchy and will do some minimal vetting in the future”. But instead, Nirav explicitly welcomed DHH and his ilk into the “Big Tent”, and as long as DHH is welcome there, I want no part of it.

[CHARLES_YOUMENG_OUGU]

Hello! Just registering that as someone who loves my Framework 16, has bought a bunch of peripherals, and has gushed about it to friends, I will probably just stop doing all of that if this is the company’s stance. Hope you change your mind!

[Geoff_Sanderson]

The person behind Omarchy, DHH, apart from the chaos he has caused in the Ruby community, has publicly promoted white supremacist views. I am a Framework customer but, seeing how Framework is supporting this person and even doubled down, I am now ashamed to have supported this company. If I had known they would have supported DHH, I would not have given Framework a dime.

In all industries, but especially the tech industry, everything is political. I chose Framework because of their political statement against big tech companies, supporting the greater good by giving customers the right to repair. But if they are so easily bent toward supporting racism, then I no longer have a reason to support Framework. Perhaps I’ll even sell my device and get a decent amount for it while I still can…

Framework: there is still time to go back on this! I, and I’m sure others too, are willing to continue being your customer, but only if you walk this back. Please apologize for supporting DHH and end your promotion of his projects. While you’re at it, please end your recurring financial support of Hyprland; while the community has supposedly improved, the lead dev still supports fascists, including DHH himself.

A large portion of your customer base (including at least a few enterprises) do not feel safe when your brand is associated with these figures. You can still fix this!

Thanks

[FedX]

The decision of Framework to support Hyprland and particularly Omarchy is honestly more puzzling then enraging. I have no experience with Omarchy, so I can’t speak to that project personally, but I have used Hyprland extensively and been driven away by the community more then once. It’s a fine enough project. Sure it looks good and has some better defaults then Sway, but it’s super unstable and not really worth daily driving. Maybe it will get there, but Varxy is liable to burn out before then. It doesn’t quite make sense for a laptop brand to support this, and certainly not get their brand tied up in Varxy’s antics, but the project holds potential, and I could see the investment so to speak working out in the long run. But I digress.

No, what’s puzzling is what appears to be Nirav’s personal preference of Omarchy. As has been pointed out above, it provides nothing special, and makes absolutely no sense for a laptop brand to get their image tied up in. I say this because Framework has a RISC-V laptop that we all forgot about, which if implemented well, would be awesome. But to implement RISC-V and ARM laptops well, projects focusing on those like PostmarketOS need to be supported, a far more logical community for Framework to give support to.

This seems to speak towards underlying leadership issues I have observed in Framework for quite some time. Their business model is unsustainable, with products seemingly rushed to market (see firmware issues on the FW16 and case cracking on FW12, both of which I have experienced).

I think we are getting lost in the weeds here. Is the support of Hyprland and Omarchy questionable? Yes certainly. Is it horrifying? Not not terribly. But it does seem to be yet another crack in the promise they made of repairable and fair devices. This also makes me question Nirav’s leadership of Framework and what his future plans are and the underlying motivations behind supporting these two projects (Omarchy in particular). Is he looking to sell out and DHH has connections? Are they getting ready to IPO and doing stupid stuff to rapidly grow the business? No matter what, until I see a change in how FW is run, or its leadership, I cannot recommend them and will be highly tentative to support them (hey, they still make good laptops, and the FW12 I am writing this on is my favorite laptop of all time with little to no competition).

So a more reasonable question is “Framework is a business, and they will screw us. How do we protect ourselves from the whims of its leadership?” To that I say, Framework put themselves in a highly vulnerable position to such a smart community by making everything open source. Go out, learn KiCAD (or Horizon EDA), and make expansion cards, mainboards, cases and whatever other nonsense you want. Most everyone here has a FW, and they made it easy to keep them running indefinitely for the technical minded users. So go, make cool stuff!

[catastrophic]

Hey all, I understand the ask to want to lock this thread. The reality is if I do, it will just result in more topics being created and I want the community to have a place to have a discussion.

I also want to provide clarity on the Discord as I am the one who runs it and I was the one who placed the pause on it. The pause was put in place as the moderators have chosen to take a hiatus and I fully support their decision to do so. I placed the pause on the server as I would not be able to properly moderate it without negatively impacting both our community and the work our moderators have done in the past.

[katchowski]

this is the most level headed take ive see in this thread

[GhostLegion]

@catastrophic

I want the community to have a place to have a discussion.

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.

[gvisoc]

That’s not totally fair. There’s a lot of fluff and drama, but some of us are still trying to make actual points.

[GhostLegion]

I’ll concede that but it’s a minority of posts from what I can see and any reasonable discussion is getting drowned in noise.

[katchowski]

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 don’t go well together.

[Joe3]

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.

I’m 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.

I’ll also note that no, you can not separate the individual from the organization. Not when they aren’t just “one of many”, but deeply ingrained and providing direction.

I’m 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. I’m not setting up a ranking system for how terrible a company is, and I’m 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.
• Framework’s 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 “responses” 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.

[rn1234]

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 “left wing” company and might see boycotts from “right wing” 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:

The waning days of DEI's dominance

A good quote:

If these four factors do indeed bring forth the waning days of DEI dominance, I think it’s 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, he’s simply a centrist who opposes affirmative action and the so-called “anti-racist” movement. Sound minds can reasonably debate whether or not “anti-racism” and “affirmative action” are themselves racist, but to close down that discussion is in my mind a form of intolerable anti-intellectualism.

[Kelly_Wu]

I’m not mad, just disappointed.