The answer is no. Framework is not putting money into far right causes. They are paying for open source software.
The politics of some of the contributors is questionable. But it's not illegal to have bad opinions and exercise free speech. And it's certainly not Frameworks job to morally vet every person they interact with.
I do not need to know about the political opinions of the people who grow my food, or change my tires, or build my tools. And I am getting growing tired of intersectional witch hunts, especially when we're getting to so many layers of abstraction.
Agreed. "Vetting" is real, painstaking work and online mobs are atrocious at it. They project, fabulate, distort and lie to stir up a moment's self-righteous anger, regardless of actual, grounded truth.
This is obviously true on the Right, but I've learned it's also true on the Left. People scream "1 nazi in your bar means you're a nazi" and yet Drew Devault remains an influential progressive, despite a history of lolicon/CP.
I’ve been eying for the bubblegum framework 12 for a bit now and almost pulled the trigger. Frameworks political stance of “hardware should be maintainable and replaceable” really resonated with me and I was excited to support them with my money.
This is not it though - “Big Tent” means nothing when you’re supporting people who directly call for “Britain to be white again” and use slurs against minorities. It creates a gross space where people (like someone earlier in that thread) feel empowered to outright call for my existence to be invalidated.
This literally happened a few days ago on RetroAcheivements & they handled it well. I really hope framework come out with a response to all this.
I want to support them. I actually bought their ai desktop with unified memory ( DOA and can't do RMA cuz they are out of stock...so returned it ). Anyway, my point is: we should be focusing on tech and whether it works for us not some moral alignment. At best, it is a distraction.
edit: And for the record, I know nothing about either party of this fake controversy AND have no intention of learning it. It does not matter since I just want to get hardware that works for my use case.
We're not talking about religion but fascism, you known the thing that killed millions during ww2 and our forfathers all vowed to avoid repeating at all costs, but now people seems to find trivial and not worth even discussing.
While it can certainly be difficult for anyone to be aware of intra-community drama (especially if it's in semi-transient media like Discord), the moment someone makes you aware of deeply problematic issues is the moment when you have to make a choice how to respond.
The fact that framework leadership responded to this by effectively downplaying the issues raised in the OP shows me that they are deeply misguided. Very disappointing.
When you run a business, you can’t realistically perform background checks on every partner or contributor. Many people will have said or believed evil things. If a company starts politically vetting everyone it interacts with, it risks alienating large parts of society and undermining its mission. The best thing you can do is have dialogue with those people; not cancel them.
It also seems like some of the criticism here reflects a very local Canadian political outlook being applied globally. That rarely works because the world’s values and politics differ widely, and enforcing one region’s standards everywhere just drives division and more polarization.
For instance, even within Canada, provinces have very different approaches to religion and immigration, and not all of them align neatly with international norms. These are complex issues, not simple moral tests. Quebec has restrictions on religious symbols in the public sector targetting muslims, prayer in public targeting muslims, and limits on legal immigration(you guessed it, targetting muslims). So it’s hard to take moral absolutism seriously when local politics themselves are complicated.
DHH's public views do overlap with Reform UK’s platform, which (if you believe polls) has substantial voter support right now. Whether one agrees or not, that makes them part of mainstream democratic debate, not fringe extremism. With the recent exodus of MPs from Conservatives to Reform, I would be shocked if they dont win.
I think Framework’s response handled this great. Focusing on open collaboration rather than ideological purity tests.
> When you run a business, you can’t realistically perform background checks on every partner or contributor
You can, and that depends on whether you want to or not. No one forces you to run a business. You're not absolved of the chore of having a look at your supply chain just because you're disinterested in it
One shouldn't sponsor because of how they see the world today. They should sponsor because of how they want the world to be tomorrow.
edit: And I'm pretty sure a minutely modified distro doesn't need this amount of donations at this point. It is not having a positive effect on the ecosystem to have so many donations to the most downstream project. All I can feel about this is, at its best, its buying attention through DHH's pre-existing influence. This does not seem to be a great thing to buy at this point.
What timing I was going to install Omarchy this weekend. I know very little about DHH so will have to do more research. My main concern is that if DHH is some kind of far right psycho how much of his beliefs will make it into the software he's building? Sure I can comb through the repo before installing but will I do that on every update? That's my main concern. However, I encourage everyone to DYOR before automatically jumping to conclusions.
It’s time we start ignoring the lunacy from the fringes of society. Nothing good comes from indulging the psychopathic lust for control on display from these types of people.
I'm referring to the far right ramblings of DHH supporting political figures who are associated solely with violence and intolerance.
I'm referring to the far left activists who have developed a habit of coercing individuals, organizations and communities, sometimes with threats of physical escalation, for perceived connections to other political fringes.
I'm referring to those using language along the lines of "they have hitler particles in them".
I'm referring to tech journalists who do nothing except whine about left wing politics, however benign.
It's mind melting.
---
Edit: To add colour to the final reference, the same journalist who attacked Framework for issuing Pride stickers is now coming to their defence. It's predictable, it's unproductive, and it should be filtered by anyone who values their time.
I'm getting an MNT Reform as my next PC, which is built by a small team of queer hackers in Germany prioritizing open hardware and software. It's not for everybody--it's friggin' huge and requires technical know-how. But it would work for a substantial subset of HN and it seems like it would work for me too.
probably torn between Lenovo, a state-owned chinese company that's empowering the Uyghur genocide, or maybe Apple, the american hyper-capitalist company that's siding with the US government and empowering/enabling ICE by removing ICE-tracking apps (besides exploiting slave labor in chinese foxconn factories for years).
You're also free to mischaracterize people and organizations based on your own perspectives and then act on those mischaracterizations, just like others are free to mischaracterize you and act on those mischaracterizations. That's the beauty of living in a free society; no one has to agree with you.
It is a false statement to claim that they are supporting Nazis.
Did you take exception to the company prior to this controversy? After all, they use manufacturing plants in a country which blends far right and far left political ideas concepts quite openly.
A tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance, lest it gets destroyed by it.
In other words: the far right and fascists are an existential threath to our current society and cannot be tolerated, no matter what.
We should call them out and fight them all the time, everywhere, for our childrens future, to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
A tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance, lest it gets destroyed by it. In other words: the far left and maoists are an existential threath to our current society and cannot be tolerated, no matter what. We should call them out and fight them all the time, everywhere, for our childrens future, to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Oh man... Technology has always been a refuge from politics for me. I know this is a childish view of the world, but still... Today the nerdiest of things are still filled with politics. Rust, nix, open source hardware... there is nowhere to "hide".
Everything is political, especially something like the open source world (explicitly). Trying to hide from politics is just naivety and gives space to bad actors.
This kind of attitude comes hand-to-hand with performative virtue signalling. Minimizing the extent of political involvement makes any hobby or interest infinitely more enjoyable and less toxic, and I find it regrettable that people are less able to engage in communities centered around technology without flaunting their political tribal allegiances.
That's not what either parent said, which you're well aware of. What you call "hate" others call "opinions" or is just completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Not everyone needs to care about what you care about in the same way. We're allowed to have differences and we're allowed to not care about those differences in some contexts in life.
I'm not opposed to people having different opinions. What I am opposed to is people making a space actively hostile to others and hiding behind their "freedom of opinion".
I enjoy when people show social conscious & tie it to their work. Trying to work within the framework of the world & communicating your aspirations & hopes is great.
> Minimizing the extent of political involvement makes any hobby or interest infinitely more enjoyable and less toxic,
Citation needed. Why? I don't feel this at all. It's great to see virtue sang forth, imo.
I know. Though I wish those popular, influential tech people would be less interested in politics, and less vocal about it. I wish I could afford to not care about any of it.
I regret to inform you that one of the largest contributors to the sheer magnitude of the Holocaust was a set of mainframe machines purchased from and continually maintained by IBM.
Technology is a force multiplier just like weapons are, and as such, it can never be extracted from politics.
It can, however, be really difficult to be aware of all the dirty laundry companies have, and cross-company deals like TFA deals with only make that harder. I definitely have a lot of sympathy for those who (admittedly like myself) don't spend their time investigating what every company in their life does behind the curtain.
Even once you know a particular company does something shady, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to find alternatives due to the massive consolidation of markets we've seen in past decades. Or, just as bad - you do have several options, but all of them engage in bad behavior, such that there's still not an obviously good option.
Normally, I'd expect governments to tamp down on this, but, well, even many western countries' governments are bribed to the gills explicitly not to, and I don't see that getting any better in my lifetime.
Politics is just the term to design how groups of people function, so as long as you will interact with other people in any way, you will do politics.
Everything is political. The way you dress, where you work, who are your friends, what you buy. Especially what you buy, maybe most of all in this society.
Anecdata - But I feel confident in it. If you join the Omarchy discord, people regularly cite buying either a Framework or a Beelink, with a lean towards the former, to put Omarchy on.
I tend to presume that the creator/consumer rule applies, and that for every one person that says it out loud, there are 9 others who are doing the same thing silently.
I'm making a claim that's only supported by my personal experience, the evidence I've seen (of people buying it), and the observation that Framework is pushing it for the very same reason.
Come on dude. In your initial comment you provided it as literal fact. Only after your unsupported claim got called out you admitted to making it up and branded it as anecdotal.
I didn't (and don't) believe that to be an exaggeration -- My confidence in that number may not be released sales reports, but I see a very clear pattern of people reporting buying Frameworks for the move to Omarchy (the server has also grown 5-10x in the last two months), and have seen the Framework team's reciprocal enthusiasm.
What's your estimate, if you think mine is exaggerated? 10? A material difference?
I don't need to estimate anything it's yours to provide the numbers because you made the statement. The growth numbers for their discord are true but mostly because the official release was made in the timeframe you provided. Ofc framework will use it in some tweets for marketing because it's trending that doesn't mean that sales are driven by it. They made tweets about other distros as well and nobody would use it to make a statement about Linux adoption or driving sales like you did. You did it because you liked the idea of it even without having any hard datapoints. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
If you’re simply trying to say “don’t make claims you don’t have hard data on”, say that - but you’re not making any better of an effective argument against the belief itself.
I’m not trying to sling wild hyperbole out there, in fact I thought it was relatively self-evident from pure observation which is why I made it so casually.
In fact, I’d contend you are arguing the counterpoint because you don’t like what it would imply, and have some resentment towards Omarchy or something else about what I’ve said.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by linking basic psych to support why that’s likely.
You have the burden of proof completely backward. It's not my job to argue against your "belief." You made the claim, so you're the one who has to provide something to back it up.
And trying to make this about my supposed "resentment" is a classic deflection. It's way easier to guess at my motives than to actually defend your own argument. You literally described your own confirmation bias ("I see a very clear pattern"). I'm not the one arguing based on feelings here.
Believe what you want. Speaking of feelings the only feeling I have about omarchy is that it's a bit performative with the over ricing but that's mainly about visual taste and personally I am for less animations in my wm/de but hey whatever floats your boat.
We're done here unless you have something more than just your feelings to bring to the table. I checked the discord just for fun and found about 40 framework related posts with sort of an intention to buy. What a humongous amount of sales for a company like framework...
In addition to all 40 mentions of framework (on page 1 of your discord search), Omarchy is being featured regularly (in tandem with frameworks) as the distro of choice of our lord and savior ThePrimeagen.
But, I'm just out here callin it like I see it - Did I make the wild claim of only hundreds of frameworks? I meant BILLIONS! BILLIONS!!!
>> Omarchy is literally resulting in the sale of hundreds of framework devices, and (love it or hate it) causing a number of people to finally switch to Linux - myself included.
Nice tweet but I have no idea who this influencer (your Lord and Savior LOL) is or what he has to do with framework sales. Despite your implications there is no mention of framework in the x thread either? Looking at his statements I can totally see why you would be a fan though. That Page 1 misdirection attempt is a bit sad but hilarious.
That hat starts to look comically large and seems to grow larger by the comment. I sadly still see no cattle though. Yee fucking haw.
You not knowing who ThePrimeagen is, or the size of his following/influence, is a 'you' problem, not a 'me' problem.
Belief perseverance together with confirmation bias (and maybe a dash of ego protection) does indeed make for a powerful combo.
Perhaps if I were to see a duck walking in the woods, instead of proclaiming that I see a duck, I should instead assert "I see something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but I lack the genetic evidence this animal is indeed a duck, therefore I must assert only that I have witnessed something duck-like"
I've provided plenty of evidence for you to at least admit my claim is eminently plausible, and I tend to believe that even if I were to go out and collect the hard data you so desperately desire, you would still fall back on a "Well, you shouldn't have made such an off-hand comment so confidently unless you had the hard data"
This seems less interested in actual evidence of whether hundreds of sales (such a huge, hyperbolic number for a company estimated to sell orders of magnitude more devices) were driven by the Omarchy+Framework hype train, and more attempting to win an internet debate about whether we can make claims based on our lived observations.
You provided nothing not even a smidge besides anecdotes. Your influencer friend is indeed not my problem but YOU linked a thread of him about omarchy which has nothing to do with our discussion. Omarchy is trending yes. But we are talking about your claim that omarchy is driving sales of hundreds of framework devices and for that you are still coming up empty handed.
You talk much but it's consistently without substance and filled with condescending deflections or misdirection. Exactly like whatever this rambling is.
You are absolutely right that at the moment I am more interested to see you wiggle around some more or admitting that you in fact did make an unsubstantiated claim. I bet when I come from my run I will see another deflectory essay with some more attacks against my character and all because you needed to make something up because it sounded good. Can't wait.
Before reading the rest of the article from there the paragraphs about native brits seems a bit weird regardless of the good or bad of what's implied with it.
'Why doesn't he say white brits instead of native brits.'
Because he doesn't mean that?
I know Belgians more pasty white than me.
wouldn't call them native flemish or native belgian.
They're culturally romanian and turkish and even selfidentify as such, champion their sports teams and talk about their cultural issues. They're not indigenous even if born here and retain strong ties to the respective relevant countries and communities.
They can't be subconsciously tied to a local area by dialect, name or cultural elements or the like.
If he had said indigenous i don't think the writer would have liked it any better tho.
Similarly many comments in the original thread who take great issue with the term who i don't expect to see reeling when native americans or palestinians, etc, etc are refered to.
Nothing in that article is evidence to the claim that DHH is far-right. Not wanting unlimited immigration is not a far-right stance. Nothing wrong with wanting a homeland with historical ties for indigienous people.
Bernie is clearly not someone who would be considered a fascist or nazi but his positions from 2016 expressed now would label him as such by the section of the population who jump straight to that nomenclature.
What I meant was: Why are you talking about Sanders polical views when the issue at hand is Framework's tonedeaf response to the OP's concerns.
Your comment about Sanders might be true (although I doubt that he would espouse the same views as articulated in DHH's blog post https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64) but it does not add anything to the discussion here, which is why I mentioned whataboutism.
EDIT: and now I re-read the post you were replying to which was indeed about political orientations and how they are viewed over time. My bad.
Still, I think this particular avenue of debate is not going to yield much progress for anybody.
But also, more recently, there are very loud voices labeling everything left of "far right" as "extreme radical leftist".
And, yeah, I'm with your second paragraph. I think much of the country thinks that illegal immigration is a problem, and also thinks that Trump's enforcement of it has been unreasonably brutal and cruel. And a bunch of them think that trans people don't belong on womens' sports teams and that kids shouldn't transition, and also think that trans people don't deserve to be beaten and killed for being trans. And a bunch of them think that wealth inequality is a real problem, and also are deeply skeptical of the proposed solutions. And so on.
Many people are not really sold on the entirety of either party's platform. Unfortunately, all they get to do is vote every two years. One bit of feedback every two years. So Trump thinks he's got a mandate for everything he wants to do, but what he really has is a vote that the country wasn't happy with the way things were going under Biden.
(Now, true, there are also lots of people who are completely bought in to one side or the other. But since such people tend to be more vocal than the not-really-sold-on-either-side types, it makes it easy to overestimate how many people are zealots.
Re: Illegal immigration - republicans voted against their own reforms.
But also this is insane “both sides…”ing. One side is “Trans people should be able to do xyz” and the other side… deploys troops into American cities? Takes citizens out of their homes and trashes them? Like “We want this transperson to play soccer” vs “We gotta get rid of democrats”.
Where "do xyz" means "gain access to opposite-sex spaces without consent of those for whom these spaces are intended". This is an important issue for women and girls in particular, as female spaces are necessary for privacy, dignity and safety - and in the case of competitive sports (e.g. "play soccer"), fairness.
If we're being real, telling males they can use women's and girls' spaces is very unpopular policy.
Sure I see that. But if you think this issue, which was manufactured (https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/no-link-between-tran..., https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/12/07/anti-trans-group-bath...) and not particularly thought out (you want a dude with a beard walking into the women’s bathrooms instead?) but if you are like “I care so much about this minor social issue that affects basically no one that has been going on for decades with zero incidents that I will turn a blind eye to a military force getting more funding than the NIH to roll around in masks, unmarked and take American citizens without due process and deport them illegally just as the one of many easily shown crimes (even before the gross Epstein stuff) then yeah sorry, you are on the wrong side of this. There is nothing to debate there. Like I don’t like a lot of democrat policies but I dislike authoritarian governments more and it boggles the mind that people equate the two. But then you remember how minority groups have been used forever to give governments the ability to control people through fear and prejudice and it all makes sense again. Pick the weakest group and make them the target. The most banal of playbooks.
Women prisoners have been sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by males who were transferred in to the female prison estate as a direct result of gender identity policies introduced by Democrats. These are some of the most vulnerable women in society and they've been sacrificed on the altar of authoritatian trans absurdity. They are a minority group that Democrat politicians happily discard and abuse and ignore.
This might just feel a minor social issue to you, but many people - including ones who usually vote Democrat - are looking at outcomes like this and wondering why on earth they should trust this party with anything.
That's not to say the Republicans are any better. There are two wrong sides here.
> Women prisoners have been sexually assaulted, raped and impregnated by males who were transferred in to the female prison estate
Those occurrences are terrible, no doubt about it.
When designing policy, we need to look at both directions: How many trans people get raped because they don't get transferred? So far all the data I have seen indicates that trans people are far more likely to be assaulted than to assault.
It seems to me that we should choose the option that results in the fewest assaults.
The option that results in the fewest incidents of violence is segregation within the male prison estate. Which is already done for protection of vulnerable male prisoners incarcerated there. Pedophiles, ex-cops, gang informants, etc.
Democrat policy that enabled males to voluntarily transfer into women's prisons wasn't driven by analyzing data on male-on-male violence, but from the absurd belief that if a man says he's a woman then he is a woman.
That implementing this belief might have horrendous outcomes for female prisoners wasn't even a consideration. Even though this was pointed out to them many times over, by feminist groups and others. They just did it regardless.
> I have yet to see evidence DHH is a far-right racist
You haven't seen that because there is none.
But the right left will label anybody that has even a slight disagreement as far right.
Nowadays a bunch of things (not all of them, of course) labeled as far right are perfectly fine, so much so that it's the stuff that democrats from 15-20 years ago would have advocated for.
Today Nazi == "Someone I don't like." It's overused so much it literally has no meaning.
DHH's only sin was creating Ruby on Rails, not his politics (same with Brendan Eich who I hope one day apologies to the world for inventing JavaScript).
Most reasonable people left Hackernews a long time ago when they banned the balance. Almost all that's left on here is echo-chamber.
The politics of some of the contributors is questionable. But it's not illegal to have bad opinions and exercise free speech. And it's certainly not Frameworks job to morally vet every person they interact with.
I do not need to know about the political opinions of the people who grow my food, or change my tires, or build my tools. And I am getting growing tired of intersectional witch hunts, especially when we're getting to so many layers of abstraction.