Six days ago, upgradeable laptop maker Framework tried to convince its fractious user community to live in a “big tent” after a Debian developer objected to the company’s sponsorship of Hyprland and its social media promotion of Omarchy, with both projects associated with politically polarizing viewpoints.
Antoine Beaupré, aka anarcat, demanded that Framework clarify its political position with regard to these two projects.
Hyprland, a Wayland compositor, is led by a “toxic and hateful community,” Beaupré observed, and Omarchy, a Linux distribution, comes from David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH), a controversial figure in the Ruby and Linux communities.
The problem here isn’t that Framework failed to keep track of the ideology espoused by every major developer on the projects they contributed to or endorsed, which, to be honest, isn’t something I’d expect of them. The problem (as usual for a corporation) is how they handled complaints. Trying to sweep stuff under the rug in the Internet age just results in someone setting the rug on fire. If instead, Framework’s response had been “We’re sorry, we didn’t know, we won’t give money or free advertising to any projects this guy is involved with from now on,” the whole mess would have died down by now except for a few people grumbling about how they should do more research before sending money out.
It was a yellow flag when Framework invested heavily into an affordable non-repairable, non-upgradable desktop designed for AI developers. “Let them make money,” they said, as Framework positioned itself as a Trojan Horse to the ubiquitization of harmful AI.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I was saving up for a Framework 16, but I’ll just stick with my Thinkpad and get the next Steam Deck for gaming. It’s really a shame that such an important company would support transphobia and white supremacy, not just rhetorically but financially, as Hyperland gets ₤600 a month from them and DHH gets ₤24,000 via Rails.
I know this will be a controversial take since Framework is so beloved, but that is just how I personally will choose to spend my money.
I agree with your conclusion and I abhor Framework promoting either of these two projects.
But the APU in the desktop has, I suspect, a real reason for having nonreplaceable RAM. If I understand correctly, they can’t achieve 8000 mt/s memory speed or the wider memory bus with replaceable RAM. And since that memory is shared with the GPU, that speed becomes important for gaming or other GPU tasks. Hence why 6400 mt/s seems to be the max memory speed for a lot of the zen5 desktop chips, at least in prebuilts
I have that chip in my laptop (the “AI” Max Pro 395+) and I don’t ever use it for LLM shit. It’s a very performant and efficient CPU, and shockingly good for gaming too.
So even tho I hate the “ai” branding it’s actually a very very good CPU and GPU
Framework tried to design a version that worked with SODIMM with AMD but the performance was seriously hampered, and the plan was dropped.
yeah, like… They genuinely tried.
I got several beefs with framework, but this isn’t one of them.
I’ll admit I’m not up to date on the hyprland/vaxry lore – but I don’t understand the level of outrage based on this article…
I’m also not sure why the sponsorship of a software project is necessarily being treated as a 100% endorsement of both the maintainers and their alleged views.
I’m also not sure if infighting and purity testing will help the movement(s) right now. Once it’s the norm, sure, but it’s still a relatively fringe movement within the industry.
Edit (2025-10-15@20:14): At the time of writing my comment, I was both unaware (and uninformed) on the DHH side of this topic. While I still think the level of outrage is maybe a melodramatic, the push back seems more warranted than it initially seemed to me. I still don’t know much about DHH beyond Rails (and even then, not much); but from what I’ve seen since my comment, the response is more understandable.
if I dip a pH strip in my drinking water and it indicates my water is acidic, am I not entitled to stop drinking from that source because it failed my purity test?
Let’s not confuse “entitled” with “justified”. Of course you are legally entitled to boycott whatever you want, nobody seems to question that. The issue is whether or not you can be legitimately criticism for it.
Suppose that you had 20 glasses, you tested 4 of them and found that 2 were “too acidic”. Are you then justified in drinking the other 18 glasses?
The reality is that you have probably personally supported people who are far more egregious than the subjects here. Abusers, murderers, rapists, etc… Is your support of them an endorsement of their actions? Is your/societies providing medical care to these people an endorsement of their actions?
No. We can parse between what actions we endorse and what actions we don’t, because we are rational beings. Or rather some of us are.
it just sounds like you’re bending over backwards to make trans and racialized people drink polluted water. and you’re trying to convince the rest of us that the water is just fine actually because you have a reverse osmosis system installed (being cis or white)
Most of the discourse was about Omarchy/DHH, not just Hyprland, though that was a part of it. It is not purity testing to block people who don’t work well with others or are hateful like DHH from a community. If you want to bring people who want us dead into a community then everyone else is going to leave
The main problem is
- Np contributed to and glazes Omarchy
- People wonder why DHH was sponsored with hardware
- Generic response about “big tent” ideology to include everyone - including racists and transphobes like DHH
- People are upset because they don’t want to be in a Nazi Bar
- NP makes twitter post about how people want to ascribe values to him he doesn’t hold, that he’s pro immigrant and pro lgbt
- Np responds in forum thread that they reviewed hyprland and determined that theyd improved their moderation and were ok to sponsor (monetarily)
- Framework responds they’ll make a blog post clarifying their sponsorships
- Blog post coincidentally excludes omarchy
- People question it and basically just get a “we will get that updated” response
- I still dont see it there
You cant claim to be pro immigrant and pro lgbt when you actively invite white supremacists and transphobes into the community and then try to avoid responsibility for that by not commenting or not retracting support or not clarifying how you’d avoid it going forward
The project may not be political (it is) but the people who use and support the project definitely are. If you want to kick out the community by inviting Nazis, then all that will be left once those people leave will be nazis. And if you knowingly collaborate with Nazis, you are a nazi.
I still dont see it there
Because the “update” to the blog post was:
Note that this list does not include products sent for marketing use or R&D use
As a way to not talk about DHH/Omarchy directly, or the promotion they were doing (which was many times more than anything else they were talking about).
If we deleted everything written by insufficiently pure developers, we wouldn’t have a Linux desktop. Especially if we count the ones that were smart enough to not bring up anything political in public.
Not a fan of DHH, but then you delete Rails then there’s no GitHub, GitLab, Mastodon, and many many other things given how popular Rails is, and that’s just that one guy.
If you include all the sketchy stuff that happens in the supply chain mining the minerals, processing, assembly all the way up to the final computer product, you just can’t morally justify supporting any manufacturer either.
This really doesn’t do anything useful other than feeling good to not support one of those guys. If anything it just adds extra political drama that feeds into a much bigger worldwide division problem.
@Max_P @stewie410 This is just wrong. Taking a stand against things like this causes change for the better in the long run. Rails will survive without DHH, like Linux survived without Reiserfs and MySQL survived after Larry Ellison. There may be some pain involved, but we owe it to ourselves to tread the better path, and make bad people just socially unacceptable.
See also: javascript and Eich
Ah, to live in a world without JavaScript and weird, Nazi crypto dipshits 🥰
The people who pretend that they can keep politics out of their life are always the people who are benefiting from the current political system. Nobody else in the world is so ignorant.
The developers of those projects would have just chosen a different language if Rails never existed.
Þe comments devolved into flamewars, but it boils down to: if you take money I spend wiþ you and give it to people who want to oppress me, I’m going to stop buying your product.
Þe issue isn’t Framework using Hyprland or Omarchy; it’s þat þey’re giving computers and money - material support - and moral support by talking þose projects up in social media (especially Omarchy).
Þere’s a big difference between using FOSS led by a politically controversial figure, and sending the figure money. Especially when þat money derives from customers said figure openly claims to want to oppress.
Yeah, sometimes its not practical avoiding certain projects (see fucking JavaScript), but promoting and funding is a major barrier and red flag…
Offtopic, but whats up with the cyrilic looking character you are using? Is it to fuck with bots or something else entirely?
Using thorn in English is a pathetic bid to appear smart.
This definitely had a negative impact on my view of framework, can’t say I’d buy from them again.
Same. Considering sending an email to tell them this.
Already have, along with my concerns about the outsized money going to essentially DHH events.
Might even sell my FW, I don’t think I want to be associated with the brand at all.
TL;DR for just updates since the initial story: Basically say that they believe Hyprland cleaned up after having an initial problem and totally ignores all the stuff about DHH, despite that seeming to be the biggest problem people had with what they’ve been doing.
I’m amazed that they haven’t backtracked this yet. They’re just cool losing all those customers.
idk, looking at twitter, there seems to be a pretty good number of fascist techbros who are congratulating framework on this
i guess framework doesn’t mind the change in audience…
I mean, its twitter. Its almost entirely fascist tech bros there.
Bots pretending to be tech bros*
Twitter is basically millions of Groks in a trenchcoat at this point.
I don’t believe any kind of analysis that depends on measuring sentiment on social media given that it’s trivially easy to run hundreds or thousands of accounts on a 5 year old graphics card and some vibe coding.
I love how they always portray projects like this as “politically polarizing”. You look inside and it’s always just plain old not-polarizing misogyny. Really shows where this “news” outlets stand.
The media has been complicit in all of this by sanewashing all of the insane shit that’s constantly happening.
Kindof amusing to see people call “purity testing” on people who object to someone who’s quoted as being upset by checks notes a lack racial or ethnic purity.
[Sarcasm] C’mon everyone, can’t we just get along and hold hands with racists and other people who consider the rest of us subhuman? As long as what they’re doing doesn’t bother me personally you’re all overreacting and fragmenting this
nazi barcommunity!Edits: fiddling with phrasing :-\
People here complaining about purity testing even though really it’s just poison testing.
The standard isn’t even if it’s pure in ideology it’s to test is not poisonous.
being antifascist could only ever be “polarizing” if the person getting offended is an anti-antifascist aka a Nazi
I think it depends very much on what you think is fascism.
Lemmy users sometimes think using harch language is “fascism” because they are young and dont know what real fascism was like.
That being said, I havent read about what the Hyprland devs have been saying or doing, so sure, maybe they are bad people. I will go read about it now.
Edit: I looked into it and its not fascism, as usual. It seems to be the usual stuff that is being called fascism when its not. Its all about how they moderate their forum and how they talk to people there. This is not fascism. Treating people rudely is not fascism. Making bad jokes is not fascism either.
They may be dousches but we wont have another Stalin on our hands from this direction, dont worry. :)
FW is giving an openly racist and fascist person money for a project
That’s what people care about. Not the moderation behavior of the project
Yeah but like I wrote, the definition of racist and fascist here is probably very stretched into silly levels. As usual on Lemmy and I guess other social media.
Just read the blog of DHH. It’s not stretched at all
“Probably very stretched.” “I guess”
Why not support right-wing goons as a default position when reading takes time and effort? Umberto who?
Tech companies and preventable controversies: name a more iconic duo.
The weird thing for me is the financial support coming from Framework to Hyprland. It would be one thing if Framework was working with Hyprland to test compatibility and functionality on their machines and do specialized bug testing. They could kind of justify that from a purely technical stance.
But the fact that they picked a very niche project for no apparent reason to support with a significant monthly financial contribution is so strange. There are numerous other niche distros/projects that aren’t mired in controversy that Framework could have worked with, (Alpine, Void, ElementaryOS, etc.) so why Hyprland/Omarchy?
Very disappointed. I’ve been pushing Framework computers very strongly for friends and family over the last year, plus I’ve been planning on getting one to replace my aging Thinkpad. Now I am going to hold off until the dust settles on this.
Omarchy uses Hyprland, so I guess they started by promoting Omarchy and maybe DHH asked them to sponsor Hyprland
Supporting Hyprland definitely looks like a mistake, they weren’t aware of what went on around there.
They probably should have gone with supporting Niri and maybe Cosmic instead.
I agree, but then why would they not retracted their support? If it really was an honest mistake and they weren’t aware of the situation, I would think they would apologize, explain that they didn’t know, pull their support, and issue a statement about the kinds of values they want to promote in the FOSS world.
But instead, they have doubled down, the CEO himself. It’s very strange and concerning.
Sort of.
They basically said they didn’t know about the issues with hyprland, they recently looked into them and to them in looks like hyprland has changed enough to be supported.
But, they were silent on the DHH. That part is the serious concern.
