I will add that all of the movements behind those issues were largely laser-focused on their specific issue. Today, the left has forgone that and is attempting to force the world to become more inclusive in every conceivable way all at once, which is never how social change has ever worked.
Expecting the world to drastically change immediately and calling everyone who has any level of concerns regarding this a “fascist” or a “Nazi" is causing immense damage to the entire progressive movement. People who have progressive beliefs but a more realistic belief in implementing them (like me) are instead met with accusations of supporting the opposite side merely due to not sharing their extremist beliefs. And it’s left to the right to recruit these disillusioned individuals, which is the mechanism which has led to the resurgence of far-right politics that we’re currently seeing.
A number of folks have reached out to us over the last few days to ask that we share more about which organizations we sponsor. This is certainly something we should have been doing already for transparency, and today we’ve published the list of all of our 2025 sponsorships so far, which total around $215,000. We’ll be keeping this list up to date over time. In addition, we would love nominations of a broader set of mission-aligned organizations we can sponsor, and we’ve created a submission form for this. As you can see from the list for this year, our focus is primarily around funding organizations developing Linux distros and window managers, open source firmware, educational organizations doing open source hardware development, and open source infrastructure that our hardware products and website depend on.
Since this thread started in part around our donation to Hyprland, we wanted to provide additional specific context there. We decided a few months ago to be more deliberate about funding the maturity of the Linux desktop by providing support to both distros and window managers. On the latter, we started sponsorship discussions with the GNOME Foundation ($1,000/month), KDE Foundation ($10,000/year), and Hyprland (600€/month) at the same time, with the plan to announce them together. We sent the funding to Hyprland and GNOME Foundation last week, and have been working with KDE Foundation to finalize our sponsorship. We’ve also been working with GNOME Foundation on announcement timing, as they needed to update the sponsor list on their site. We missed on letting Hyprland know that we wanted to announce these together, and they shared the sponsorship shortly after receiving it last week.
On Hyprland specifically, we were aware that there was past toxicity and controversy in their community, so we did research into it before deciding if we could sponsor the project. What we found was that there were past failures in moderation early in the creation of the project that had resulted in a toxic community, that the project lead vaxry had overhauled moderation years ago as a result, and that the community as it currently stands does not represent the one in which the issues occurred. Over the last few days, we’ve gotten additional outreach from others in the community who were initially concerned about our sponsorship of Hyprland who did their own research and came to a similar conclusion to what we did.
Going forward on this topic:
We are going to continue to update our list of sponsorships as we go to give transparency on what we’re monetarily backing. As noted above, in general we want to coordinate the updates with the organizations we sponsor so that their website updates and announcements happen around the same time as ours.
We’re requesting that you provide additional nominations of mission-aligned organizations that we should sponsor. Note that in the near-to-mid term, we’re still prioritizing organizations focused on open source firmware, software, and hardware that make the ecosystem around our products more mature and accessible. If you have recommendations of other good organizations, please feel free to submit those in the form as well, but they may come into future funding cycles.
Before we sponsor an organization, we will continue to research and confirm that as they currently exist, they uphold appropriate community standards and are structurally set up for that to continue to be the case.
Although this thread has continuously spiraled into unproductive directions that have needed active moderation, we do still plan to keep it open for now and merge additional related new threads into it. Please remember to follow our forum rules though and keep conversation productive and free of personal attacks.
Thank you @nrp. I’m a little confused though. You previously said:
I don’t see Omarchy or any of these other distros listed in the blog post, except for perhaps the hardware donation to NixCon representing a donation to NixOS. Perhaps some of the donations above didn’t happen in 2025, so they wouldn’t be in the blog post. But Omarchy was created in 2025. Could you explain this discrepancy? Maybe I’m missing something.
The list includes monetary sponsorships and unit donations, but not units sent for marketing (e.g. press units) or development purposes, some of which is pre-release hardware we send under NDA. These are marketing/R&D expenses rather than donations, but also, we haven’t been doing good record-keeping in the past on these. The list in my earlier post (“Fedora, Bluefin, Bazzite, NixOS, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Omarchy, and many other distros”) was a subset of R&D units we sent to open source developers in 2025.
Edit: We’re updating the blog post to clarify this point further.
Corporate lingo aside, this is honestly a really disappointing response. Most of us in this thread have already somewhat established that Hyprland put a lot of effort into making their community more inclusive, but most debates in this entire thread had nothing / very little to do with Hyprland. You haven’t addressed anything regarding Omarchy, which is the main concern here. Why did you [Framework] keep posting about Omarchy on Twitter? As an extension to this, why did you then post about being pro-immigration and pro-LGBTQ+ also on Twitter, especially when DHH has clearly shown to be against both?
I’m willing to put my opportunities of being hired by the Foundation on the line, if it means not listing Framework on the site as it stands, until addressed properly. What y’all did was not okay, to put it bluntly.
How is it disappointing? It simply means Framework didn’t sponsor Omarchy to begin with. Nirav just sent a laptop to the developer, maybe did so out of his pocket for the sole purpose of R&D that at the moment he deemed beneficial. Framework account posted about Omarchy because it’s a popular distro. Framework posts about popular stuff in OSS/OSHW communities every single day. It doesn’t mean Framework sponsors any of those projects.
While I don’t agree on Vaxry at all, my issue with whats being said now is its in stark contrast with what you said initially - from “Big Tent” to “We don’t think its a problem anymore”.
Then not addressing DHH at all, or the substantially higher marketing/promotion that went to omarchy, or the fact that its extremely obvious how much that situation has not changed.
That is… unfortunate.
I think I’ll have to stick to my previous comment then. I really do hope this changes in the future for the better.
Because people are (rightfully) angry with DHH, who happens to maintain that distro. Nirav and probably some other people in Framework liked the distro, made posts about it (like, they did with thousand other projects that they share but don’t endorse and who knows if they have awful maintainers) and eventually decided to send a laptop so its further developed. Its obviously not an official sponsorship and Nirav/other people in Framework didn’t re-iterated their support of Omarchy in any shape of form (like, they did with Hyprland which got rid of toxicity) which should be telling what they think of DHH.
Framework making posts about them != sponsorship. As I said, Framework shares every OSS/OSHW stuff that they like on their Twitter account. Maybe some of them have authors even worse than DHH, who knows? Its actually why Framework needs and constantly searches for a social media manager and content creator as you may have noticed. Nirav, after all, is a human being and has toooo much on his plate. He is also an engineer, not a communications/PR specialist. Nirav himself made a short saying he needs help, and they are still looking for a social media manager everywhere, to avoid miscommunication as it happens now.
For the laptop given to DHH, just have some emphaty for a microsecond and put yourself in Nirav’s position. In Turkish we have a saying “verilen mal geri alınmaz“, which means you can’t get back what you gave. Nirav just gave it to DHH, how do you expect him to get it back without further damaging, like, everything? What would you do in such situation? What he can do at max is to not share anything about this distro anymore + not sponsoring it which is literally the current situation. He can’t get it back, he can’t do anything else other than not further collaborating with Omarchy. While you write, have you thought about Nirav’s mental health as much as you have thought about DHH’s racism and transphobia? This amount of heavy pressure on a single human what drives some people to self-h*rm and even s*icide.
This has all been discussed so so much. The people who don’t see it as a problem, aren’t changing their mind. The people that say any Twitter post or laptop sent is support and shouldn’t happen, they’re not changing their mind either
Good response @nrp and def a step in the right direction (possibly the first of many more to come). I, alongside many others, genuinely want to see Framework succeed in a landscape of unrepairable fast-tech world. Please keep supporting OSS and right to repair, and creating an inclusive community.
All people want is for Framework to apologise for sending hardware to DHH, a person who engages and supports racist, anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-abortion views and has supported a lot of terrible things in this time where so much and so many of us are under threat.
We want Framework to
Apologise for sending hardware to DHH/Omarchy,
Commit to not doing it again
Make amends by setting up a set of ethical guidelines on who they sponsor and who they give hardware to, even as part of marketing. (It’s not a good look to market towards a person who supports the far right even if that is not your intention)
If Framework did that, @nrp I think it would go aways to ameliorating loss of trust and the sense of betrayal many of your customers feel that has them deciding and declaring openly not to buy your products any further (to the detriment of the open source community).
@tansiret no one is asking Nirav to take any hardware back if it’s been given already.
When you say “we” you really mean a select few of you. Actually, a very small minority of you. These views do not align with me and do not represent me. I don’t want any of the listed things. A lot of people don’t actually.
No one owes anyone an apology for the business decisions they have taken simply because you don’t like another business’ owner. This is absurd. If it’s a deal breaker for you simply jog on. In your words “these things are not hard”. Move on and take your custom elsewhere. It’s not hard.
As people might know, I’ve been having a conversation with @nrp about this ever since our couple of messages here. I wish that @nrp’s public comment here:
… would have been made public as part of the blog post directly. Particularly this bit:
… because:
it matters, so much, that Framework did that research. for me this is the key difference between uncertainty about the politics of Framework (where the whole thing would have been dog whistlings) and due dilligence (where this is all a basically massive misunderstanding
it’s actually pretty awesome that Hyprland made amends. this is why we do noise like this, to effect change, and it’s amazing this happened, and Hyprland desserves credit for this.
So, for me, this announcement is a bit of a missed opportunity: the above comment could have made it in the blog post, and would have been useful to put more prominently.
But as things stand, I’m more at peace with the recent moves. I am truly grateful that Framework seems to have done their homework on this… I do still wonder about the Omarchy publicity that Framework has been pushing, but I guess it’s a lesser evil, compared to a sponsorship…
I still support locking this thread, at this point. It has grown far, far beyond any possible productive conversation. Perhaps a new thread following the blog, with proper guidelines, would have possibly lead to a more productive conversation, but at this point, that ship has sailed, and I feel better about the whole thing than before.
I will end this update by sharing publicly an apology I sent to @nrp now five days ago:
(I would have updated my original post on top to say this, but the topic is (thankfully) in slow mode, so I’m posting this as a comment instead.)
In terms of transparency everything is welcome, but I think you could also publish the criteria you will be following to allocate support for organisations. Thay way we can keep our expectations managed and you can establish a transparency and mission baseline that we can use to make our own decisions as well. When you make the submission form public for the community to nominate projects, or for the project to nominate themselves, you’re operating some sort of a de-facto grant program. In grants, the rules and process of adjudication needs to be clarified from start to avoid falling into or be suspect of nepotism.
While I think that the Hyprland matter may be addressed by your commend and while I may chose to trust the background check (plus redention and blahblahblah), the concerns expressed above by others and me about Omarchy are still not fully addressed.
