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.
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.
You’re right, we should let it build up fascist momentum and then change it from within later
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)
No, I pointing out that the filters don’t actually work.
Transphobic and racist behaviour isn’t going to disappear just because you boycott it.
The consequences of bigotry aren’t reading mean tweets, it’s going to a job interview and having the prospective employer think “eww… I don’t like this candidate”. Boycotting is not going to fix that, because your purity test can’t even detect it.
I don’t purity test people because the reality is that most/all people have some harmful notions, it’s not productive or good for anyone to ostracize them so long as we can promote the good they do, and mitigate the harm.
Shunning/shaming is a type of social boycott. You spent the entire discussion describing boycotting without using the term.
But it’s nice to see that you object to boycotting and instead plan to murder people.
One thing I can take solace in is the fact that extremists tend to be too stupid, lazy and drug-addicted to even do the most basic revolutionary activities.
if we’re doing criticisms now, you’re failing to do the most basic of revolutionary activities by deep-throating the Aryan boot instead of simply polishing it like a normal quisling should
I would never ever advocate for murdering people because Nazis aren’t considered people. they decided to abandon their right to life by advocating for taking mine away
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
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’ll admit, I only vaguely know of DHH by name and Rails, vaguely remember the Omarchy announcement, and that’s about it. I seem to recall Prime referencing DHH’s controversial opinions, but I can’t say I’ve gone any deeper than that.
If the discourse really is primarily focused on DHH/Omarchy, then I guess I just misunderstood this post/title & the article…or just don’t have the full context regardless.
Because the “update” to the blog post was:
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).
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?
It’s the thorn character
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Bonus: In printing, the Y character was often used as a stand in instead of creating a dedicated thorn printing plate. So places named ‘Ye Old Shoppe’ the ‘Ye’ is actually ‘The’
Þis is one of my favorite TIL for þis past year, and it’s all þanks to thorn!
If I’m mot mistaken, it’s a cool character English USED to have for the “th” sound. Would be neat if it came back, if that’s the goal 👀
Using thorn in English is a pathetic bid to appear smart.
I dunno, personally I þink it’s just fun to use. :3
– Frost
Weird way to say that you haven’t heard of yinglets.
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.
The developers of those projects would have just chosen a different language if Rails never existed.
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.
Definitely, but there’s a middle ground between “let’s pretend politics doesn’t exist”, and “you must 100% agree with my views or I’ll cancel you”.
Sure, but maybe that middle ground is pretty far from supporting people who believe things like the problem with Britain is that it is no longer sufficiently white and active steps should be taken to fix this?
@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.
As I added in another comment, I misunderstood the DHH element of the discourse as I, admittedly, don’t know much of anything about him – I’ve heard some references here and there, but that’s about it.
That’s also fine, and I generally agree. My concern basically boils down to killing momentum by sinking a company with (probably?) sane views on right-to-repair & libre as topics.
If the goal of a boycott is to starve the company until it goes under, because they made a move we don’t like – then that I don’t really like in this context. If the goal is to force their hand towards at least transparency, or maybe force NP to step down; then I’d support that.
See also: javascript and Eich
Ah, to live in a world without JavaScript and weird, Nazi crypto dipshits 🥰