In 2025, Framework did some things that made people mad.

Pause right here - already some people reading this are getting ready to say, “just SOME things? They promoted a nazi! They donated to a fascist!”

I’m writing this as an anarchist that cares deeply about leftism, anti-fascism, trans liberation, the safety of minorities, and the dissolution of all hierarchies.

So to make it perfectly clear: I’m an anarchist, trans rights are human rights, black and brown lives matter, dissolve all borders, dissolve all states, dissolve capitalism and currency and private property, and obliterate fascism.

In this post I want to analyze the ideas of moral contagion and moral absolutism; how no matter what Framework does, it will never be forgiven by the community of online leftists; how this tendency of ours to engage like this is not only not pragmatic, it’s contrary to our ideology and goals.

Table of Contents

What Framework Did

  1. Donated to date around 14,400€ to Hyprland (continuing in 2026)
  2. Has sent at least two laptops to the Omarchy project, meaning, to DHH (ongoing)
  3. Has a yearly booth at Rails World as well as engages in sponsorship, potentially up to $48,000 (continuing in 2026)

This is bad because DHH is racist and transphobic, and Hyprland is led by one of those “we don’t need a CoC just grow thicker skin” guys that likes to throw the r-word around (but would “never say the n word” /eyeroll) (they do have a CoC now though).

So, Framework was big cancelled.

Here’s where my confusion began. My confusions were:

  1. Omarchy is just a dumb collection of dot files maintained by an asshole, yet its popularity is bringing a ton of normies into linux world. Normies who have no idea who DHH is and almost definitely don’t share his beliefs. Why do we throw that consideration away?
  2. Framework does a lot of good. It donates tens of thousands of dollars every year to various distros, desktop environments, and hackathons like NixOS, Arch, KDE, and Debian. It’s basically the only professional-grade, linux-compatible laptop that is provably highly repairable and committed to right to repair. If we didn’t include the Omarchy thing, is there a more ethical professional-grade laptop manufacturer existent today? (MNT: no, it’s not a realistically good enough tool to enable me to sell my labor to capitalists; system76: no, they had a massive data leak and can’t be trusted with my PII, isn’t as repairable, and doesn’t actively contribute to upstream linux and right to repair) So, why is nobody considering weighing this good against the bad it’s done?
  3. Considering the options on the table: Dell provides servers to the IDF, HP contracts with ICE, and Apple’s Tim Cook gifted Trump an obscene trophy with a 24-karat gold base. Why is it acceptable to boycott Framework and then immediately turn to buy from a company that’s done far more measurable and material harm to people? Why do we not say to every iphone user, “Tim Cook donated to a fascist!” ?
  4. On that note, what’s all this hullabaloo about Framework when we all quietly pay AWS every month to host our apps despite the fact that it’s the cloud infra provider for ICE and Amazon forces its workers to work next to the corpse of their recently deceased coworker? There are other hosting options! Repeat per all the other atrocious and awful things the companies we give money to do: why do we let them get away with it, but Framework for some reason commits far less serious crimes but gets the greater punishment?
  5. Rails World is the only remaining Rails conference - where else is Framework supposed to go if it wants to reach Rails community? In any case, DHH as chairman of the board of Rails World receives no compensation from the organization, so like, why do we care?
  6. Why don’t other FOSS organizations get heat for partnering with e.g. AWS? Example: GNOME for gushing about its partnership with AWS.

What Other People Have Said

I’ve asked these questions to many people, in good faith, trying to understand. The Framework forum thread mentioned above has a pretty good collection of the various viewpoints, which I’ll summarize.

The answers to my confusion range, but generally fall into a couple categories:

  1. Any sort of support of fascism or racism or nazism whatsoever is completely intolerable.

  2. Framework was supposed to be “one of us,” and its actions represent a betrayal.

  3. The other bad companies we deal with every day are expected to be bad.

  4. Frameworks actions alienate a portion of the community and make people participating feel “unpleasant or unsafe.” My misunderstanding is an example of treating minority harm as the cost of doing business.

What I’ve Learned

The accusation that I’m treating minority harm as “the cost of doing business” stings, so I started reading.

First, I understand better now that an apparent uplifting of a racist like DHH can make people feel like any future conflicts won’t be aligned in their favor, and make them feel like vigilance is necessary for safe participation.

Second, I needed to tease apart my understand of material harm, symbolic endorsement, and community governance effects. I had a tendency to subconsciously rate everything on a theoretical utilitarian ledger, which isn’t aligned with my values. I was focusing more on the ideas of recruitment and radicalization - “DHH may suck, but Omarchy brings in a lot of normies, and so the suck is mitigated by this” - and not enough on community as a place for safe participation.

Where I Push Back

Wanting Framework to be better makes sense - there’s plausible hope of influencing Framework, there’s not any hope in influencing Dell. Framework is after all supposed to “be one of the good guys.” Criticism makes sense, we hold them to a higher standard.

My concern comes from the fact that the CEO of Framework, Nirav, came out and explicitly outlined his values: “pro-immigrant and pro-LGBTQ.” Framework already had been, and continues to, strictly enforcing on its forums its moderation policy of tolerating not even an ounce of right wing bullshit. The company and Nirav do seem interested in making their community safe, and the forums are, genuinely, safe. However, condemnation persists, and expands - on the forum, people started poking around Framework’s partners, wondering if they do good labor practices or where else moral contagion might be found. The response is disproportionate considering our tolerance of materially worse actors, and there’s no clear path of what redemption would look like for Framework.

This is proximity-based moral reasoning and represents a pattern of asymmetric moral attention. Framework didn’t just do a bad thing, it underwent moral contagion, and we suffered expectation betrayal.

Framework has undergone moral contagion - any association with DHH, who is morally repugnant, “taints” Framework with this contagion. This is deontological override of consequential reasoning to the extreme. Within this framing, DHH and Framework are indistinguishable. For that matter, potentially so is anyone that buys a Framework, or attends DHH’s Rails World conference, or perhaps even contributes code to Omarchy - if you don’t think so, great, but others I’ve talked to do think this way.

I think it’s important to be able to differentiate between actors, even bad ones. I think this allows us to establish theories of rehabilitation and proportionality, and have clear paths to reformation. If we don’t, realistically, all available options for a given decision fall to baseline harmful choices. Framework becomes indistinguishable from Dell (who provides servers to a genocidal army, as opposed to Framework, who sent two laptops to a piece of shit that says racist stuff on his blog). In doing so we don’t reduce harm by enforcing a safe community or moral goodness in computing, we instead redistribute support towards materially worse choices.

Leave aside utilitarian considerations or measures of harm, and think more of Framework as a values-driven company, and the purchase of one of their laptops a values-driven action. You support right to repair and Free Software so you buy the Framework, have its logo display to everyone around you when you open the lid. In this case, symbolic alignment matters. What does Framework endorse? If it doesn’t feel safe, people won’t participate.

I think this is a case of proximity-based moral reasoning. Framework sends DHH a laptop which feels like endorsement, therefore, buying a Framework is itself and endorsement of that action. I push back on this because this lets others get away with diffuse complicity. If sending a laptop to a racist is endorsement of racist values, what does it mean to directly provide servers to a genocidal regime? What does it mean to provide computers to storm troopers?

To be clear, I’m not trying to make a “yet you live in a society, curious” argument. I am saying that we’re not giving grace to otherwise good actors. People criticize Framework more than Dell, HP, AWS, or whatever other corporations we “endorse” with our money because those other companies are structural necessities. We accept the structural necessity of AWS, but we reject the structural necessity of Framework going to the only existent Rails conference, which happens to be chaired by DHH. We reject the structural necessity of capitalist participation when Framework attempts to cash in on the huge bump in popularity Omarchy got last year, but we grant the structural necessity of capitalist participation by people who sell their labor to bad companies, or take flights instead of trains, or drive instead of bike. My issue is that the intensity of the response doesn’t follow the scale of harm or the degree of our leverage. Framework is one of the only actors that’s relatively better and meaningfully influencable. Yet it undergoes total moral rejection, while more harmful but more faceless background systems are treated as just par for the course things we can’t do anything about.

Total moral rejection means we don’t even have the relatively better option once we kill it for failing to maintain moral purity. And make no mistake, the alternatives you’re thinking of - System76, MNT - are one slip up away from moral contagion. DHH has apparently been in talks about Omarchy compatibility on System76 machines, for example.

We want accountability - any number of ways for Framework to repent - but in practice we really seem to operate under irreversible contamination protocols. Perception of fraternization with taboo figures leads to all prior good being wiped off the table, and corrective action is interpreted as insufficient or manipulative, and materially worse alternatives become acceptable so long as they were never perceived as morally clean in the first place. My fear is that in the end if we keep on this path, that’s all we’ll be left with - materially worse alternatives.

The reality is, Framework had a choice to simply not send a laptop to DHH, and didn’t make the right choice there. Instead they went with the capitalistically motivated choice to try to take advantage of the growing popularity of Omarchy to sell some laptops. “Just don’t engage with bad people” feels like a pretty easy rule to follow, but reality is messy, in this case, yes, they should simply not have done it, but it’s one of the few instances where such a clear cut can be made. Linux as an ecosystem is deeply interconnected and full of people with shit politics - Linus Torvalds himself was until recently an unrepentant monster, unacceptably verbally abusive. Avoiding all association with repugnant people or institutions quickly becomes impossible without withdrawing entirely.

Furthermore this is another example of absolutist deontology - it treats collaboration on a project, enabling support for users, and endorsing someone’s politics as equal. The claim isn’t really “just don’t engage with bad people,” it’s an argument that any interaction with a bad person is an endorsement of the totality of that person.

Absolutist thinking means that the secondary effects of a choice can’t be interrogated - if failing to avoid all the bad people in the FOSS ecosystem leads to moral contagion, we’re not only eliminating harm but also pathways for growth, migration, and influence. If we apply this rule consistently, that any controversial figure means no engagement, any adjacent project is suspect, any collaboration chain means contamination, then we create asymmetric pressure on actors who are trying to be good. The simplistic rule, “just don’t engage with bad people” is too coarse to handle the real-world FOSS ecosystem.

That asymmetric pressure is my final point: we’re selecting against acting good.

Good actors like Framework aren’t granted grace for engaging in structural necessity (or are heavily, asymmetrically punished for slipups), bad actors like Dell are granted grace for being bad. So where’s the incentive to be good? You won’t even get support from the very community you’re trying to be a part of, trying to work within the values of, trying to make the world better through. Better to just be bad, then everyone will let you do whatever you want, and buy your products too!

TLDR

Actors perceived as “good” are held to high, identity-level standards.

Any violation is treated as betrayal and leads to moral contamination, which triggers strong and persistent punishment with no clear path to redemption (if one exists at all).

Meanwhile bad actors are held to low or no expectations.

Which results in good actors facing continuous risk of disqualification, and bad actors facing no additional penalties.

Over time, it becomes harder to sustain the category of “acceptable but imperfect actors.” And over time, our selection against good actors results in the obvious conclusion: only bad actors remain.