In case you haven’t heard the news, Framework went and publicly sponsored Hyprland (the most toxic part of Wayland by a country mile) and openly shilled Omarchy multiple times (the pet project of fascist shithead David Heinemeier Hansson) recently.
In response to well-justified backlash against this, founder Nirav Patel responded with FOSSbro platitudes about “[creating] a big tent" for open source”.
If you’ve got any more updates on this self-inflicted shitshow, put them here so they can be collected in one place.
(In retrospect, that AI-pilled Framework Desktop should’ve been a major red flag they were gonna pull this shit.)
EDIT (2): Found a solid summary of the situation, and a solid teardown of Nirav’s actions - recommend checking them out.
Is this the same Framework that develops very promising modular and repairable laptops, one of three companies to do so? If so… Fuck.
Who are the other companies?
- Shift, an ecoconscious, as-yet untainted tech brand from Germany
- I thought Lenovo, but I seem to be wrong - they were playing with concepts, nothing on the market yet.
- If you wish to buy from Shift you might need to enable a translator, as I believe their store is only in German.
- The only bone some people have picked at in terms of Shift’s ethical values is that they manufacture in China, but Shift maintain that their labour standards within the factory are kept high
These are expensive and not especially performant, though. Cool, but not the most practical choice on any kind of budget.
Agreed on pricing, but something this low-volume is always unfortunately going to struggle. The RockChip stuff is a current darling in the FOSS-compatible hardware scene, but I’m not super enthusiastic about it yet. If there isn’t an OS image you like, you’ve got to cobble one together with U-Boot and the DDR support blobs, which is a circa-1999 level of “fun”
This reply is worth quoting at length:
With all due respect, I think you profoundly misunderstand the nature of my concern here.
This is not a “I do not like this distribution” kind of argument.
This is a “the people you are sending my money to want me and my friends dead or deported” kind of argument.
The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others.
I have no problem with Fedora, Bluefin, Bazzite, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Linux Foundation, LVFS, Debian, KDE… What I have a problem is with Framework consistently, repeatedly encouraging and now sponsoring individuals that have shown to be absolutely destructive to the open source community.
Claiming that this “increasing the adoption of open source software” really misses the core part of the narrative here, which is that those people have been excluded from open source communities because they were so hateful, so destructive, that their mere presence was more harmful than beneficial.
DHH is a threat to the free software community as a whole at this point. The damage he ended up doing to the Ruby community might end up outweighing entirely his contributions to Rails, which is no small feat.
Vaxry (from hyprland) was banned from freedesktop.org, wrecking havoc in standardizing Wayland protocols that the whole community could have benefited from.
If you believe helping and sponsoring those people helps the open source community, we have quite divergent views on the best way forward and, perhaps, it is best if you concentrate on making hardware and leave the open source community alone.
In any case, thanks for your quick response, @nrp, and thanks for building those awesome products.
“[I]ncreasing the adoption of open source software” is such a bullshit argument here anyway, holy shit lol.
They’re not sponsoring Asahi Linux or FOSS Nvidia drivers but DHH’s fucking Arch setup and Ratpoison but worse and with rounded corners.
“[I]ncreasing the adoption of open source software” is such a bullshit argument here anyway, holy shit lol.
Not to mention, actively welcoming Nazis into the open source bar is gonna achieve the exact goddamn opposite of increasing adoption, by driving away marginalised users, introducing unnecessary security risks, actively rotting communities from the inside, and God-only-knows-what-else.
“We did not realize the ethics of the individuals that were behind these organizations; we’re sorry we should have investigated organizations better prior to donating to them. We will better research organizations in the future and we have stopped funding for these two groups”.
That. Is that so fucking difficult for them to say?
I’ve been checking the thread over the last couple days expecting something like that from them, but nope. Nothing yet.
At this point, I’m gonna stop extending benefit of the doubt - Framework’s choice to actively advance fascist interests, and double down when called out, is proof enough for me that they’re fascists themselves.
The absolute shitshow that’s been some of the most visible open source projects recently just reinforces my thoughts that one cannot establish trust (and therefore support) with any project leads unless they show their political affiliations upfront. The same way we demand to see a Foss license, we should expect to see what kind of person someone is before we use our community support to elevate them in any position of technical authority.
Yes this completely sucks. I assume most open source projects are run by leftists of some kind and hate finding out I’m wrong.
I have a framework 13 that I planned to use for years to come.
Really wish they would have at least corrected this shit when it was pointed out to them.
Guess I’m just going to run this thing until it breaks but they won’t be getting any more of my money.
Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said
Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.
They’re very based.
And if you click on the star (desktop only), the background becomes a pride flag :D
I’d love to use gleam but I don’t think it’s production-ready yet, so I’ll stick with elixir.
Nice, the language itself also looks pretty cool, which you love to see.
