This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
i do want to point out how hard it is to even find out about the views of these people, if you just look up the names of the projects and aren't specifically looking for this information there's no way you'll find anything about it
even looking up the name of David Heinemeier Hansson, the more vocally bad of these, i had to go to the 5th link to find anything even vaguely mentioning his views
Isn't that a good thing?
I don't know about you, but I don't really care what the views of the owners of a business are. It only becomes a problem if they make those views plain.
Well, I guess he has tried to make his views fairly plain on his blog. it's just a bit hard to find unless you're looking for it
This is unfortunate for sure. I want to give them a few days to respond for real, it's always possible they just didn't know about the issues here, but even in that thread they're brushing it off as though it doesn't matter. I'm not really sure what they get out of donating to these projects other than potential PR, anyway.
On a personal level I've recommended their laptops to people who have later bought them, and I was even looking at buying one myself to replace my aging macbook, but I don't think I can do that anymore while this is unaddressed.
I wonder a bit about how this leaves framework as a company, too. They were always the brand people went to because of their stance on the politics of repairability and environmentalism. If they don't have the politics on their side anymore, their laptops aren't a great value proposition compared to other laptops. Sure, you can upgrade a framework, but if it costs twice as much as a similar laptop you'd have to upgrade the internals twice before you've saved any money.
I think it's more about repair ability than it is about upgrading. At some point you're going to end up with hardware that needs a different motherboard and then you might as well just replace the whole thing. There really isn't anything that can be done about that.
To be honest I kind of think framework go a bit far on the modularity of the device, it's a nice to have but really I'd be perfectly fine with a laptop that just has a replaceable keyboard, screen and battery, as those pretty much exclusively tend to be the parts that go wrong. Hell you could strip it down even further and just have an easily replaceable battery and it would probably be fine for 90% of people.
I mean, there's no real reason laptops shouldn't like any desktop computer with parts that can be swapped out. Maybe when laptops were first coming on the market with a difficult form factor to work with, but it's been long enough that modularity should be easy and the default.
If you can swap out tiny little SIM cards in a phone, you should be able to slot in standardized, smaller form-factor components like RAM, SSDs, etc.
And by the way, people can and do swap out motherboards all the time for desktops. There is no good reason to need to buy all new components all the time.
Yeah but you can't put a non ATX motherboard in an ATX case it physically doesn't fit.
Unlike desktops where you can get oversized cases laptops are all designed towards the board the really isn't that much space in a framework laptop. Like I don't you could go up a couple of inches and get a bigger screen for example because the whole frame wouldn't fit it.
I really don't know if people actually mean fascism/nazism or is this just a term applied to xenophobic nationalism. I see this all around fedi and I genuinely can't tell which case it is.
For the same reason you compare things lightly to the holocaust. At some point the word looses the gravity of it's meaning.
Phew, for a second I thought Framework had actually done something bad. But its just supporting Hyprland which is somehow considered a far right racist project because an unpaid moderator was transphobic in a discord server. People are really trying to squeeze everything they can from this discord drama that happened years ago.
Or, you know, they are sponsoring a) a white supremacists who believes in the white replacement conspiracy theory who's in charge of omarchy and b) the project lead of (not just a discord mod) of hyperland. Two awful people that Framework absolutely deserve flack for supporting.
First, Omarchy doesn’t need funding or partners. It’s backed by a Nazi multimillionaire.
Second, the whole apolitical argument is bullshit. Everything is political. Support for a distro that doesn’t really need support by nature of being a child of a Nazi multimillionaire is a support for that Nazi multimillionaire.
“We didn’t support them because of that” means nothing. The support still sends a message. Just like artist loses control over interpretation of their art the moment they release it, people lose control over interpretation of their actions the moment they act. Does it sound fair? Maybe not, but it’s how reality works.
i dont think framework is big enough to factcheck every linux maniac
Yeah I don't think you get how this works. They had time to research the tool they are recommending but literally nothing about the backers or community? Framework will absolutely have a legal team whose job would include vetting these orgs.
But let's say you're right and framework is operating a company with no legal counsel (which is also a giant red flag): their response was "we are chill with terrible people in our space, we have a big tent". Not "you're right, we didn't do research on these guys thanks for bringing it to our attention we'll do some research". If they said that, this wouldn't be a thing. Instead, they said affirmatively "we don't care if they are white nationalists, we want to include white nationalists in our tent".
100% this. They support many many different open source project and I read people are bitching when they havent had mich time to even respond?
They immediately responded
I'm keeping a large distance to hyprland, I have not heard about Omarchy or dhh before, but it does seem very sus from these descriptions. It is disappointing to see Framework sponsor such projects, but we have to take a step back and realize that this is not as important as the 800+ forum replies make it out to be. These really are small details. We need to more often unite around smaller sets of shared values and not hold everything to the absolute highest standards, although having such standards is important in itself.
Anyone who read the thread will see that the OP pretty much dropped it after Nirav’s response. Framework is a tiny company without a PR machine for these occasions, and I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies. Let’s all take some deep breaths.
Their response was "we're ok with supporting white nationalists". It doesn't take a complex pr machine to accept that white nationalists are bad people.
