Six days ago, upgradeable laptop maker Framework tried to convince its fractious user community to live in a “big tent” after a Debian developer objected to the company’s sponsorship of Hyprland and its social media promotion of Omarchy, with both projects associated with politically polarizing viewpoints.
Antoine Beaupré, aka anarcat, demanded that Framework clarify its political position with regard to these two projects.
Hyprland, a Wayland compositor, is led by a “toxic and hateful community,” Beaupré observed, and Omarchy, a Linux distribution, comes from David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH), a controversial figure in the Ruby and Linux communities.
The weird thing for me is the financial support coming from Framework to Hyprland. It would be one thing if Framework was working with Hyprland to test compatibility and functionality on their machines and do specialized bug testing. They could kind of justify that from a purely technical stance.
But the fact that they picked a very niche project for no apparent reason to support with a significant monthly financial contribution is so strange. There are numerous other niche distros/projects that aren’t mired in controversy that Framework could have worked with, (Alpine, Void, ElementaryOS, etc.) so why Hyprland/Omarchy?
Very disappointed. I’ve been pushing Framework computers very strongly for friends and family over the last year, plus I’ve been planning on getting one to replace my aging Thinkpad. Now I am going to hold off until the dust settles on this.
It was a yellow flag when Framework invested heavily into an affordable non-repairable, non-upgradable desktop designed for AI developers. “Let them make money,” they said, as Framework positioned itself as a Trojan Horse to the ubiquitization of harmful AI.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I was saving up for a Framework 16, but I’ll just stick with my Thinkpad and get the next Steam Deck for gaming. It’s really a shame that such an important company would support transphobia and white supremacy, not just rhetorically but financially, as Hyperland gets ₤600 a month from them and DHH gets ₤24,000 via Rails.
I know this will be a controversial take since Framework is so beloved, but that is just how I personally will choose to spend my money.
I have a similar experience. I was saving up for a framework 13 for a general more ethical option, but that AI mini PC was extremely disappointing and got me more radicalized into free (libre) software as a consequence. Could you clarify the white supremacy and transphobia? I usually concern myself with strictly free software, so I’m unaware of such controversies.
I don’t buy from fascist supporters if I can help it. Screw Framework
Yeah good luck with that. The righteous left doesn’t want empathetic coexistence with alternative views any more than the immoral right does.
DHH has fairly normal right wing views. Nobody has been able to point me to anything so objectionable that should mean he is excluded from the community. The worst I could find is that he thinks it would be better if London was predominantly native British, which I don’t think is an out-there idea.
These inclusive communities have to learn to be more actually inclusive. It’s ok to ban him if he’s harassing people due to their political views in the Ruby community, but it looks like all he did was post some moderately right-wing views on his blog.
Not going to hold my breath though.
I don’t know anything about the Hyprland guy but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a similar story.
https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thought/
If ethnic cleansing constitutes “fairly normal right-wing views,” then right wingers have no place in polite, civil society because they support a violent, genocidal ideology. How can we have empathetic coexistence, for example, in a government that forcably disappears legal non-white immigrants and sends them to labor camps via federally funded masked thugs operating in unmarked vans? How can anyone peacefully coexist with a group that only wants to make space in society for white Americans and is willing to achieve those ends violently and extralegally?
It didn’t used to be this way. Right-wingers can go back to peaceful coexistence when they put aside the supremacist and nationalist viewpoints and return to advocating for low taxes and small government. But make no mistake, the Right – the intolerant ones – have to change first. The fact that you think that this is “normal” is a chilling indictment of modern society. At this rate, in 10 years you’ll think unelected leaders, concentration camps and death by firing squad is “normal” too.
deleted by creator
Does anybody have a source of the direct sponsorship to Obarchy. All I found was a couple of Twitter posts.
its because tech companies are generally so out if touch with their userbase
Tech companies and preventable controversies: name a more iconic duo.
I’m amazed that they haven’t backtracked this yet. They’re just cool losing all those customers.
idk, looking at twitter, there seems to be a pretty good number of fascist techbros who are congratulating framework on this
i guess framework doesn’t mind the change in audience…
I mean, its twitter. Its almost entirely fascist tech bros there.
Bots pretending to be tech bros*
Twitter is basically millions of Groks in a trenchcoat at this point.
I don’t believe any kind of analysis that depends on measuring sentiment on social media given that it’s trivially easy to run hundreds or thousands of accounts on a 5 year old graphics card and some vibe coding.
Theyre not gonna, look at all the comments itt that are ok with giving money to transphobes
It irks me to no end that both here and in the framework community forum people will try to downplay just how awful DHH and their ilk are.
They’ll never say that they don’t mind supporting someone who’s transphobic, or a nationalist, or a racist. Instead they’ll just say that you need to separate the art from the artist, or that you’re just engaging in “purity tests” or whatever other bullshit reason they can throw to absolve themselves from supporting objectively shitty people.
In the current political environment, it’s profitable to have right-wing extremists alignments and they’re aren’t sigh, or even happy to be part of it.
If the sales fall, there would have been or will be a “southpark-sorry.gif”
Funny how that just keeps on happening?! Why can’t we have left-wing extremism ever be profitable 😤
Because left wing extremism is anti-capitalist.
This definitely had a negative impact on my view of framework, can’t say I’d buy from them again.
TL;DR for just updates since the initial story: Basically say that they believe Hyprland cleaned up after having an initial problem and totally ignores all the stuff about DHH, despite that seeming to be the biggest problem people had with what they’ve been doing.
I’ll admit I’m not up to date on the hyprland/vaxry lore – but I don’t understand the level of outrage based on this article…
I’m also not sure why the sponsorship of a software project is necessarily being treated as a 100% endorsement of both the maintainers and their alleged views.
I’m also not sure if infighting and purity testing will help the movement(s) right now. Once it’s the norm, sure, but it’s still a relatively fringe movement within the industry.
Most of the discourse was about Omarchy/DHH, not just Hyprland, though that was a part of it. It is not purity testing to block people who don’t work well with others or are hateful like DHH from a community. If you want to bring people who want us dead into a community then everyone else is going to leave
The main problem is
- Np contributed to and glasses Omarchy
- People wonder why DHH was sponsored with hardware
- Generic response about “big tent” ideology to include everyone - including racists and transphobes like DHH
- People are upset because they don’t want to be in a Nazi Bar
- NP makes twitter post about how people want to ascribe values to him he doesn’t hold, that he’s pro immigrant and pro lgbt
- Np responds in forum thread that they reviewed hyprland and determined that theyd improved their moderation and were ok to sponsor (monetarily)
- Framework responds they’ll make a blog post clarifying their sponsorships
- Blog post coincidentally excludes omarchy
- People question it and basically just get a “we will get that updated” response
- I still dont see it there
You cant claim to be pro immigrant and pro lgbt when you actively invite white supremacists and transphobes into the community and then try to avoid responsibility for that by not commenting or not retracting support or not clarifying how you’d avoid it going forward
The project may not be political (it is) but the people who use and support the project definitely are. If you want to kick out the community by inviting Nazis, then all that will be left once those people leave will be nazis. And if you knowingly collaborate with Nazis, you are a nazi.
I still dont see it there
Because the “update” to the blog post was:
Note that this list does not include products sent for marketing use or R&D use
As a way to not talk about DHH/Omarchy directly, or the promotion they were doing (which was many times more than anything else they were talking about).
Þe comments devolved into flamewars, but it boils down to: if you take money I spend wiþ you and give it to people who want to oppress me, I’m going to stop buying your product.
Þe issue isn’t Framework using Hyprland or Omarchy; it’s þat þey’re giving computers and money - material support - and moral support by talking þose projects up in social media (especially Omarchy).
Þere’s a big difference between using FOSS led by a politically controversial figure, and sending the figure money. Especially when þat money derives from customers said figure openly claims to want to oppress.
Yeah, sometimes its not practical avoiding certain projects (see fucking JavaScript), but promoting and funding is a major barrier and red flag…
Offtopic, but whats up with the cyrilic looking character you are using? Is it to fuck with bots or something else entirely?
It’s the thorn character
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Bonus: In printing, the Y character was often used as a stand in instead of creating a dedicated thorn printing plate. So places named ‘Ye Old Shoppe’ the ‘Ye’ is actually ‘The’
If I’m mot mistaken, it’s a cool character English USED to have for the “th” sound. Would be neat if it came back, if that’s the goal 👀
Using thorn in English is a pathetic bid to appear smart.
If we deleted everything written by insufficiently pure developers, we wouldn’t have a Linux desktop. Especially if we count the ones that were smart enough to not bring up anything political in public.
Not a fan of DHH, but then you delete Rails then there’s no GitHub, GitLab, Mastodon, and many many other things given how popular Rails is, and that’s just that one guy.
If you include all the sketchy stuff that happens in the supply chain mining the minerals, processing, assembly all the way up to the final computer product, you just can’t morally justify supporting any manufacturer either.
This really doesn’t do anything useful other than feeling good to not support one of those guys. If anything it just adds extra political drama that feeds into a much bigger worldwide division problem.
The people who pretend that they can keep politics out of their life are always the people who are benefiting from the current political system. Nobody else in the world is so ignorant.
Definitely, but there’s a middle ground between “let’s pretend politics doesn’t exist”, and “you must 100% agree with my views or I’ll cancel you”.
@Max_P @stewie410 This is just wrong. Taking a stand against things like this causes change for the better in the long run. Rails will survive without DHH, like Linux survived without Reiserfs and MySQL survived after Larry Ellison. There may be some pain involved, but we owe it to ourselves to tread the better path, and make bad people just socially unacceptable.
See also: javascript and Eich
Ah, to live in a world without JavaScript and weird, Nazi crypto dipshits 🥰
Here‘s my take as a relatively tech savvy guy with no introspective into the Linux scene and its political affiliation: I’ll buy framework products because of the repairability and upgradability as long as I can run whatever I want on it.
Most consumers that are sustainability minded (like myself) have no clue what hyprland or omarchy is.
I’m sure it’s a big deal within a small niche but the average consumer won’t know or care.
But now that you are aware but you choose to bury your head in the sand. Okay…
We already know people like you already made up your mind. What’s the point of this comment? Was this post going to stop you?
To be honest i just read some abbreviations and terms i dont understand and I really do not have the time to go down the rabbit hole.
I just wanted to add a viewpoint to the discussion that the potential commercial target group larger is than the bubble in which some of the people here seem to be. I find this legitimate.
Framework has directly and indirectly supported devs that are far right, one much more hard right than the other, but both are far right.
The direct is money. Indirect is marketing.
You don’t really need to dig into anything here, those two sentences sums up the entire situation.
Thanks for the clarification. In the face of modern debates there is only black and white - if you’re not like us, surely you’re like them. I don’t find it cool that they support right ideologies.
I’m against it and I will keep it in mind for future consideration, but supporting the right surely is not the extent of the things they have done or what they are actively doing.
Where there’s light, there’s shadow and the message for right to repair and their exemplary designs for repairability also has an impact on society as a whole.
I can find it shitty that they support people who I disagree with ideologically and great that they make repairable and sustainable products.
I absolutely agree that its great that they support the right to repair. That is, to me, what makes the response here so disappointing.
I personally do not want my money to feed the far right, and the simple fact is, that is where a portion of framework purchasing is going. These are not projects where there is a person or two within a large group who are far right, but projects where they are the project fundamentally. What throws me as well is the choice of Hyprland (financially) and Omarchy (marketing - heavy, heavy marketing). Even more odd, DHH again with Rails World with an alarming amount of money - five times what they gave to the Linux Foundation, double what they gave to Gnome, 2.5 times what they gave to the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, 50 times what they gave to the Open Hardware Summit, 12 times what they gave to KDE Akademy and DebConf…
Writing that out makes it feel even weirder. Rails World. How in the hell does Rails World even fit in with what Framework does?
It isn’t just supporting a few shitty people in a mix of other things, its far outsized support.
Oh, I guess I’ll look into it then. Thank you for writing it up!
https://frame.work/blog/framework-sponsorships
This is the blog post where you’ll see the money. DHH is Omarchy and Rails, Vaxry is Hyprland. Hyprland got, functionally, a pittance, and Vaxry (while on the right) I don’t personally see as being anywhere near as terrible as DHH.
If you want to know about DHH, rather than read articles, you can look at his blog directly. - https://world.hey.com/dhh. Scan the titles of posts and you’ll find his positions pretty quickly, and you can read the posts themselves where he references the white replacement conspiracy theory and more.
literally how fascists make their money
I don’t support the views of the endorsed projects, but surely a better reaction would be to suggest alternatives instead of just screaming for outright dismissal? I keep reading that “omarchy is just a bunch of scripts” and “hyperland is just one tiling window manager”. If that’s the case, there probably are better alternatives no? Or if it’s as easy as described why not fork it?
Complaining without an alternative or a solution is not productive, IMO
Complaining without an alternative or a solution is
not productivehow internet outrage operates, IMOFTFY
And yeah, Framework is one of the few manufacturers designing specifically for Linux compatibility and repairability, and omarchy/hyprland Devs are apparently shitty people. If you think they shouldn’t be associated, suggest a different project not run by (possibly) literal Nazis instead of foaming at the mouth and screaming incoherently… doesn’t seem that difficult.
This is the biggest issue with niche communities: purity tests. They can’t unite under one goal and have productive discussions. They are more focused on being correct (their interpretation of correct) and shutting out the incorrect than getting closer to a goal. Sometimes incorrect can be as little as choosing the wrong utility and other times it can be much bigger but they all spark the same amount of ire.
Is it a purity test to not financially support trans people being harassed by Hyprland mods? To not support a figure who supports ethnic cleaning in England?
It’s one thing for people to just not philosophically buy into people being trans, or even have opinions on trans sports, without mistreating other people, but active harassment shouldn’t be endorsed. And I don’t know how someone justifies ethnic cleansing.
Not everything is a purity test, and at this point, I feel that likening something to that just means there’s a good likelihood that the person hasn’t done their research or is dogwhistling. Either way, the Overton Window has now moved so far right that people don’t blink an eye at calling it “purity testing” to expect an organization not to financially support openly white supremacists.
Yep, here we go. I’m a nazi now 🙄 This is exactly how you edge people out. You’re just the another flavor of “everything I don’t like is wOkE” but instead “everything I don’t like jNaZi!”.
Nobody’s in the middle. There’s no nuance. You’re either on my side or you’re an enemy. Life’s just that simple.
I firmly believe there are ways of being a centrist without being a Nazi. Hell, I believe you can be a pre-Trump-era Republican without being a Nazi. But there are also fascists who self-identify in these factions, and they benefit from the smokescreen of the “Everyone I don’t like is a Nazi” fallacy of argument. There is nuance. I can’t help but feel that you’re projecting.
Ethnic cleansing and its supporters are definitionally fascists though, and I don’t believe organizations should support those people. And David Heinemeier Hansson, like the Nazis, is a fascist. And I find it suspect and disturbing that people are referring to that as purity-testing.
I firmly believe there are ways of being a centrist without being a Nazi.
If your default is equating “centrist” to “nazi”, then I wonder what kind of experiences you had but it’s so far from mine that it’s pointless to continue this.
Not my default, but okay, you’re clearly bad faith. I’m done. Goodbye.
I don’t think we should work with scum like DHH and vaxry just because some asshole lib might accuse us of purity tests
If “not working with people who are maniacs who want you dead” is a purity test I’m dusting off my Inquisition book
The entire ecosystem is full of purity tests. You don’t have a CoC? Must be a Nazi! Don’t use the right license? Probably a capitalist! You use systemd? Must be a Apple insider! You don’t use systemd? Fuck off you troglodyte. Oh my you said “no politics”? Definitely a lib! What’s that 🏳️🌈 flag? OMG what a woke commie.
Everyone draws the line somewhere else. Just because you draw it at DHH doesn’t mean you’re better.
People have opinions. More news at 11
The opinion being debated: “is transphobia bad?”
Can you link me to the transphobia? Is it this? https://world.hey.com/dhh/bad-therapy-08849dc9
