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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]f Framework keeps not only proposing and enabling toxic communities to its users but even sponsoring them, I'm afraid that not only will I have to stop buying and recommending Framework but that perhaps a more widespread boycott would be in order," he wrote in his post.
Framework founder Nirav Patel attempted to defuse the situation in a reply to the community discussion thread.
"We support open source software (and hardware), and partner with developers and maintainers across the ecosystem," Patel wrote. "We deliberately create a big tent, because we want open source software to win. We don't partner based on individuals' or organizations' beliefs, values, or political stances outside of their alignment with us on increasing the adoption of open source software."
Beaupré was not satisfied with that response. "The 'big tent' argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding," he replied. "Stuff like codes of conduct, 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."
Patel tried to extricate Framework from the debate, thanking Beaupré for his concern while expressing doubt that agreement can be reached in a community thread. That seemed to satisfy Beaupré. But that was not the end of it.
Since then, the big tent has become a keyboard-warrior brawl, eliciting more than 1,500 replies over the past week. Responses run the gamut from applauding Patel for trying to appear apolitical while insisting there's no racism to be seen to condemnations of Patel for moral cowardice.
"I do hope you'll reconsider your approach to funding projects going forward," wrote developer Alex Reid. "It is not a neutral act to fund those with utter disregard for the human rights of huge groups of people. This is not a matter of normal political disagreement. I would not be concerned by Framework funding something run by political conservatives. I am concerned by Framework funding people who want to ethnically cleanse my country."
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Invited to comment, DHH referred The Register to a blog post he published last month, accusing "the last loonies on tech's woke island" of calling everyone "a nazi" as an excuse to do violence – this was in the weeks following the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.
Bradley M. Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, in a series of Mastodon posts, noted that a question he posted two weeks ago about whether he should buy a new Linux laptop from Framework or MNT Research had been overtaken by the forum flame war.
Kuhn said that, while it isn't clear to him whether a boycott is warranted, Framework has acted like a typical VC-funded tech startup by making foolish policy decisions.
He wrote, "The easy politically savvy response for [Framework] would have been (esp. b/c it is probably true): 'We didn't vet our grantees as well as we should. We apologize but we also can't logistically or legally claw back these already made grants. We are now rethinking our entire grant program.' Instead a clumsy snap-response from the CEO of: 'We are making a big tent.'"
Beaupré told The Register that he's disinclined to comment further and expressed concern about how heated the debate has become. He said he believes Framework intends to respond further, perhaps today.
Framework did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But the company on Tuesday did publish a blog post to clarify its sponsorships and to seek community feedback.
"We're sharing this not just for visibility, but also because we want your help in identifying other organizations we can sponsor to help support open source software and hardware development among a broader base of developers and makers and to amplify our mission," wrote Patel, without addressing the fractious forum thread.
Hyprland is receiving 600 Euros a month from Framework.
In conjunction with that post, Patel published a follow-up comment to the community thread that argues those involved in Hyprland have addressed past problematic behavior.
On Hyprland specifically, we were aware that there was past toxicity and controversy in their community, so we did research into it before deciding if we could sponsor the project. What we found was that there were past failures in moderation early in the creation of the project that had resulted in a toxic community, that the project lead vaxry had overhauled moderation years ago as a result, and that the community as it currently stands does not represent the one in which the issues occurred. Over the last few days, we've gotten additional outreach from others in the community who were initially concerned about our sponsorship of Hyprland who did their own research and came to a similar conclusion to what we did.Patel said the plan is to involve the Framework community more in the sponsorship process. ®
