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Show transcript
Screenshot of a Mastodon toot by @ebassi@mastodon.social:
The whole open source community loves Milkshake Laptops, a lovely laptop company that has ethical values! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the laptop company stans fascists
From what I read, it sounds like they were supporting a bunch of different projects based on “oh hey this is kind of neat and could be useful” and didn’t really look in to the background of the relevant devs.
The thread on their forum reads like them wandering in to something, reading the objection as some obscure beef and running the standard PR approach without really realizing what a mess they just stuck their foot into.
Hopefully their cage will be rattled enough to look in to it and pull back.
Yeah the user who responds by saying:
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.
Kind of nails it I think. For what it's worth I don't think there's any malicious intent on Framework's part necessarily, I think maybe they've just naively stepped on a bit of a landmine? But still, not ideal.
Someone else struck an important chord:
Additional edit: I think it’s quite telling that a community response of “I’m not happy with this development, please consider changing your mind or I’m going to spend my money elsewhere” is now being met in this thread with responses including inflammatory fascist and racist talking points, transphobia, etc, while Framework says and does nothing about it. It shows exactly the sorts of things Framework is permitting in their “big tent” by rewarding right-wing extremists with money and sponsorship. What a way to tank a community that – a few years ago at least – seemed pretty welcoming and inclusive.
The community defense is riddled with typical far-right talking points. "What do you mean you don't want to include literal nazis in your community? What ever happened to tolerance?"
Intolerance will not be tolerated.
Well that's all very disappointing.
There truly is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
This is very in the weeds. They sponsor open source projects as a little side thing. One of the projects they sponsored is very bad, and they were publicly called out about it less than 24 hours ago. Not even enough time to make a proper response. I can't even find on their website where they list the open source projects they sponsor. Open source sponsorship was never a major part of their business.
This is very new news. Give them time and form your opinion on their response. Its likely that only a small subset of the team works on open source sponsorship, so most of those in charge of the company were likely unaware until now.
edit: fixed several undecillion minor typos
first of all, its two projects. second both got most promotion by them then other projects they sponsered. third their official people (not sure how high up but still) have responded in the thread badly. fourth the thread has no positive affirmation that they care about the fascism support but more "this specific case is probably not that", its not hard to say u dont support fascists
The assumption is that they believe a not-insignificant portion of their customers are fascist or fascist-adjacent.
If everyone upset about this boycotted and tanked their bottom line, they'd probably shift gears in a heartbeat.
But I suspect that the number of fascist/fascist-adjacent customers is high enough that they need both groups' money to survive.
Well being tolerant with fascists is a no no.
We're taking about being tolerant with a company that's tolerant of fascists.
If I'm tolerant of that, would you tolerate me? Where do we draw the line?
Not trolling, but I get that it sounds that way .
context: https://lemmy.world/post/37098894
so Hyprland is made by Facist, is this correct? never heard of that, but i wanted to use it at some point, guess i wont be doing that then, good to know
from what i’ve seen, hyprland’s community is highly toxic and rife with fascists. is the maintainer a fascist? idk, but you know what they say about nazi bars
the other project framework is under fire for supporting, omarchy, is proudly made by DHH, who is a known far-right racist. this one is not up for debate
I don't know who the creator is, but when I saw that in promotional materials for the distro, he uses Grok's website and there is even dedicated Grok's shortcut in the distro. I was like, I'm 89% sure this guy is maga nutjob.
That's why I'm concerned about the ladybird browser, because in the monthly updates, the guy almost always goes to the Grog's website.
this is the first i'm hearing about it and i'm a year or more into using hyprland, which is frustrating. i tend to avoid discord communities in favor of just reading documentation though.
if system76 turns out to be shitheads imma blow up the earth with a illudium q-36 explosive space modulator
they personally fucked me over years ago on a screen replacement i was willing to pay for.
they wanted to charge me 600 usd just for the panel that was available on aliexpress for 80
ended up doing it myself, and then spending 80k usd on a different company's hardware for the company i worked for that used linux desktops
I doubt system76 would make the mistake, primarily because they have no reason whatsoever to fund any other distro and DE other than Pop_OS and Cosmic.
That sounds like a fair and measured response. I approve.
I have a big tent too but you know who's not under it? Fascists
If the community reacts super strongly to this before framework even has the chance to properly investigate, respond, and react to this kind of issue, why would they ever want to risk investing in open source projects in the future? Come on, people. Give them time and if you have to hate on a company hate on the bigger ones that do these sorts of things on purpose and get away with it. I understand informing Framework and putting pressure on them to fix things, but there's such a thing as going too far.
They already made one (very poor) response and that's what's got most people doubling down to keep the pressure on them to change their stance. I really dont see how a bunch of forum posts could possibly be "too far".
If it weren’t for the out of touch, deeply offensive responses they already made, this likely would not have blown up. The fact that they responded in such a dismissive, disgusting way is the reason this is news.
I would have been happy with a corpo
"We will be reviewing our philanthropic practices going forward."
With pure neutral tone and no mention of the politics.
That's the corpo correct answer. And its concerning they didn't give that.
Here's hoping for a new official response that takes these concerns much more seriously and commits to a structure that doesnt allow for these types of issues to come up again. I had just finally decided on framework for my next laptop, but I'll happily spend my money elsewhere if this isnt resolved very differently from how they first hoped to sweep it away.
As another example of this sort of thing, shopify, cloudflare, futo, jetbrains are sponsoring ladybird, while Kling apparently shares DHH's views. It's definitely generally bad to support a project led by this sort of person, and now that they know about it I think they should stop, but idk if i'd condemn the whole company over it. Especially as it often requires quite a bit of research to find out about that sort of stuff unless you were there when the social media drama happened.
i don’t think unknowingly supporting shitty people is that bad. mistakes happen, after all.
knowingly supporting shitty people, and then saying it’s fine because you’re wanting to create a big tent that includes everyone, even fascists, is bad! very bad!
God damn it, Framework, cmon
Please don't keep this title if the post reaches the frontpages
It has only been 12h, and they only put up one (awful) placeholder response. Give them a bit of time to look into things before telling the headline-readers to never buy their stuff
i haven’t told anyone to do anything; but even then, shouldn’t it be goal to put pressure on them so they change course?
Maybe I'm being a bit too nervous, but companies like Fairphone or Framework rely on goodwill from technical people who are ready to pay more for less stuff to encourage their politics. If poeple categorize them as non-rule, they are not going to pay the premium. I think, for a lemmy user, that would set the odds of buying at near-0. again, maybe i'm being too dramatic
I agree that putting pressure this way is a good thing, but the pressure needs to be conditional. If you just mark them as dead before giving them a chance to correct course, they are better off reaching all the way for the customer base of "apolitical" users. The ebassi screen has a parodic tone that reduces the certainty and definitiveness (people will just put FW into question rather than fully discard it. i think), and avoids citing the name directly, limiting the damage to people who already have some understanding of the situation
anyways at this point I think there is enough threat to elicit a reaction on their part, and that we should wait for them before burning everything down. and I hope they can just have a quick fact check and everything will be fine and they will actually have money to donate because they won't if they keep up the vibe of the first response
I'm being way overinvested ok byeee
Anyone want to give some context here?
I dunno man, people being furious about a very loose potential fascist association in an open source project while using a platform whose lead developer is a tankie. Kinda wild yelling at framework while supporting people who deny China's human rights abuses.
Without arguing politics, the world is sliding very quickly towards facism and being on guard against it is incredibly important. I'm not buying a laptop and putting money in the pockets of someone who may then donate to or fund facism. None of that applies to a developer of a free open source software whose political ideal world is not rapidly approaching.