Framework supporting far-right racists? | Hacker News Reader

Framework supporting far-right racists?

community.frame.work

60 pointswapasta82 comments

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.

Sanity is the most rebellious thing one can commit these days.

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.

This is why I find the whole, “avoid Chinese products” doctrine to be silly as well.

It's hard for me to not see giving money to a small project run by a very few people as an endorsement of those people & what they support.

I really don't think it's possible to entirely cleanly separate the art from the artist.

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.

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.

At the same time, you cannot fix everything, and you cannot always take a stance on any topic.

Also, depending on your own sensibility, anything can be extremist far right or extremist far left.

So yeah... Cut the framework people some slack.

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.

I'm in agreement. This is a good response. Too bad it's getting voted down.

Are they really, really, doing so many donations, that they don't even know who they are donating to?

> 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.

Using his software contributes to making it popular and giving him a platform to propagate putrid ideas

Bummer, searching for alternative to my dying mbp continues.

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.

What are you referring to here? The starters of the linked discussion? Or the subjects of that discussion?

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.

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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.

They're free to support Nazis, I'm free to not buy their product.

Just make sure your favorite employer's IT department is aware of this before they make a purchase order.

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.

Which ethical laptop would you recommend?

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).

So many options!

Dude, you're getting a Dell.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

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.

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.

Just when you think not everything good comes from the right, another good thing gets political and right wing?

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.

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.

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.

I agree that if people were able to keep their hate out of these spaces they would be much more pleasant for people to engage in.

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.

> Everything is political

Nah, everything has been made political. And that's a big issue.

Free software (that some people call "open-source") is exactly about your freedoms, i.e., it's inherently political.

It's about end-users' freedom though, in a technological sense, not really under other points of view.

It's a way for the users to fight for their freedoms, against the power of developers and corporations over their computing.

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.

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