Comment on Framework supporting far-right racists?
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
See…when it comes to open source, it’s a little different for me:
I don’t support or condone any of these pricks, but I can mentally divorce, somewhat, the open source code contributions from the person, because their contributions are useful. If this was a closed source solution, it’d be different, because the code wouldn’t be released into the community. There are a lot of weird, closet-dwelling shut ins that fall into the extremist margins.
A lot of early medical knowledge, for example, was acquired from…less than morally clear ways. So do you just take that information and throw it away on principal? Does that make the death and pain of those people for nothing? Or do you use it and don’t condone the person or their actions? This is a difficult moral choice to make that is heavily debated by philosophy, media, etc. There are entire SciFi TV episodes, movies, and books written about just such a debate.
That said, I don’t know the usefulness of Hyprland. I’ve never used it and I feel like it’s pretty niche, so I’m surprised Framework aren’t telling this person to fuck off.
I agree. Just as a little reminder. Methadone was initially invented by literal Nazis. It was designed to Combat Opium shortage in field hospitals.
Nobody would say: hey, let us not use this extremely helpful drug because Nazis contributed a lot to it.
On the other side: I would never give a Nazi company money to produce it. Two different scenarios
The issue with that is the toxic/racist/homophobic/transphobic people will by their behavior push out people who would otherwise contribute to development of projects. To have a big tent you can’t tacitly accept bigotry.
It’d be one thing if the projects being supported were good and lead by devs with questionable ideals but I’m more upset that Framework decided to support a couple of really shitty projects lead by shitty people. I mean one dudes dotfiles and anothers very buggy WM that you can pay $5 to get “premium” for it? Cool Framework, that doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence in what YOU produce now.
I mean hell I got some killer dotfiles for Arch using River and Sway, where’s my money?
I’m more upset that Framework decided to support a couple of really shitty projects
The thread being centered around this would be 100% more productive than what it has devolved into. Instead people are swearing off the most notable computer company that is fervently pushing for Right to Repair and supporting open source projects.
That’s fair and I knew someone would make this argument. My example was a bit of an extreme, though. These people are assholes spreading asshole-ry. Not murderers.
I would recommend actually talking with (I forget the fancy term) medical philosophers.
Yes, a LOT of modern medicine was created on the backs of torture and vile human experimentation. But a shockingly small amount of the data collected by Nazis et al were actually useful because so much of it was compromised by virtue of the “control” in those experiments generally being a torture victim who was in five other experiments in the past month. And a lot of said innovations boil down to “We all kind of suspected it but couldn’t think of an ethical way to confirm it”
But the key thing to understand: There is a big difference between “Okay… that was REALLY fucking evil but Unit 731 created a lot of data we can sift through and it already exists…” and “Okay, hear me out. We COULD send in Seal Team Eight… or we could wait a few weeks to see if they make a better smallpox first”
And that is the thing here. I am 100% for taking advantage of what has already been done in the world of software development… although rewrites are a thing for a reason. But I am firmly opposed to funding or supporting ongoing work by those chuds. They should be ostracized and vilified at every turn.
“Ethicist” maybe?
Also megacorps doing shit like this (sponsoring) vs tiny companies focused on foss (without mega PR, mass propaganda, takeover budgets, etc) is very much not the same thing.
If Google was a tiny corp barely getting by I would morally consider it a lesser transgression using their services (lesser bcs I would still be helping/supporting a business practice that at some future date leads to current Google fuckeries).
I don’t even know what the fuck Hyprland is because I am firmly in the Ubuntu ecosystem
aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 day ago
To put it in terms of your analogy, it’s one thing to use Mengele’s research after he’s been stopped. It’s another entirely to give his research funding when he’s actively running the program.
One is making use of knowledge that comes out of terrible things, the other is complicit behavior that borders on active encouragement or collaboration.
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That is fair. My example was extreme, though. These people are just assholes. Do you throw away the code of an asshole because they’re an asshole?
lama@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You don’t fund them, that’s for sure
aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 day ago
To use another example, a musician might be known to be an asshole during their lifetime. Then they die. Is it harmful to listen to their music if you’re not contributing anything to their estate or their estate isn’t run by similar assholes? It’s debatable and a gray area, but I’d probably say no in most circumstances.
How about if they’re known to be an asshole and you buy their albums anyway, you go to their concerts, and you loudly pronounce on social media how you support them and that their work is great? That’s a much easier case to make to say, yes, you’re being harmful.
You’re supporting someone who is an asshole, and you’re doing–at least–two types of harm:
(1) you’re demonstrating tolerance for shitty behavior which does not provide a good negative reinforcement to correct the shitty behavior, and
(2) you’re positively reinforcing the shitty behavior through your support
It might be more nuanced if there were higher stakes involved, such as if the good belying this debate was of crucial need to help along a much larger good cause. But that’s where particulars matter. These contributions these assholes are making are not solving world hunger. They’re nerdy little Linux bits.
Use the bullshit all you want, but for fuck’s sake stop materially supporting and going on a promotional tour with the villains that made it.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think yous do bed to factor in how prominent that person is on the project.
If an asshole contributes some code to a project, ok. If an asshole is the public face of the project, well, there are plenty of alternatives to use/fund instead.
Damage@feddit.it 12 hours ago
Yeah sure so you’ve destroyed your car, stopped buying fuel, gave up sigarettes, stopped buying stuff from Amazon, gave up the supermarket, single use plastics, gave up Windows and let’s be honest, any other computer manufacturer aside from super niche ones? Because I guarantee you that the money you spend in that stuff is magnitudes more damaging than whatever tiny bit of a framework computer’s value is going towards these two developers, let alone the fraction that they may actually invest in nefarious deeds.
People need to learn to pick their battles.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
A key difference here is that Framework is trying to build a “community”. At least some of their value depends upon community if you think about it for a bit (e.g., if nobody uses the marketplaces, they’d be empty of goods and a lot of the point is lost).
If they center assholes as being representative of what the community is about, they naturally exclude others by doing so.
It’s easy to take the “can’t we all just get along?” stance with this, but some things require a little more reasoning and philosophy than platitudes.
What good is a big tent if most normal people left the tent because you let someone stand on stage at the tent’s center and go on long, racist tirades?