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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
I cannot understand why Nirav, the head of the company, would weigh in here instead of having the PR/Marketing team ~~of~~ or someone come up with an answer for this. Made it so much worse and I have such a bad feeling about them now.
Maybe some Ben Franklin will help them “It takes many good deeds to build a reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” “Never ruin an apology with an excuse.”
Just get an old ThinkPad like me, problem solved!
IBM huh?
No, it's Lenovo, but the kind that still has a CPU socket and a removable battery, one of which could have been a nice addition to framework if they didn't insist on "modern design sensibilities"...
“modern design sensibilities”
How I dislike laptops not having trackpad buttons! No matter how good modern trackpads are, I still just want buttons. And lots of keys, and switches... and screws. Don't care how clean and sleek modern laptops look, they are a tool for me.
- Bonus points for the trackpoint!
BRING BACK THE CLIT STICK
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?"
Well that's all very disappointing.
There truly is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
Intolerance will not be tolerated.
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
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!
Also, if you have semi-plausible deniability that you didn't know, but you had an inkling and you didn't want to find out... That's not great either.
Not knowing isn't a full excuse if you actively try to not find out.
"let's sit Nazis at our table so we get all viewpoints!"
while Kling apparently shares DHH's views
Who are those people and why are their views important?
kling is the creator/head of the ladybird browser. dhh is the creator of ruby on rails, but he's now working on omarchy, which is basically just a collection of dotfiles for arch but people love for some reaso (personal rant).
the reason that their views are important is because a lot of tech companies, even ones that were previously reputable like framework, have been pouring a lot of money into these. this is especially relevant for omarchy, since afaik dhh is the only person working on it, making donations to omarchy basically be direct donations to dhh himself.
while kling has done some questionable things, dhh is basically just a straight up fascist, which really puts the principles of the companies giving money and promotion to him (like framework) into question
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.
I have a big tent too but you know who's not under it? Fascists
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