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Screenshot of a Mastodon toot by @[email protected]:
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
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Anyone want to give some context here?
I dunno man, people being furious about a very loose potential fascist association in an open source project while using a platform whose lead developer is a tankie. Kinda wild yelling at framework while supporting people who deny China’s human rights abuses.
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
The assumption is that they believe a not-insignificant portion of their customers are fascist or fascist-adjacent.
If everyone upset about this boycotted and tanked their bottom line, they’d probably shift gears in a heartbeat.
But I suspect that the number of fascist/fascist-adjacent customers is high enough that they need both groups’ money to survive.
Well being tolerant with fascists is a no no.
We’re taking about being tolerant with a company that’s tolerant of fascists.
If I’m tolerant of that, would you tolerate me? Where do we draw the line?
Not trolling, but I get that it sounds that way .
If I’m tolerant of that, would you tolerate me? Where do we draw the line?
You have to tolerate everyone until they are actively intolerant. If you jump the gun on not tolerating someone or something too early, then you’re being intolerant.
You have to tolerate everyone until they are actively intolerant
We’re talking about fascists, them being intolerant is literally part of their description.
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?”
