alt Hacker News> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.
I've been thinking about this for a while, ever since The Framework DHH incident.
Basically, framework sent DHH a free laptop and funded his ruby conference and "arch distro." DHH meanwhile has some white supremacist musings on his blog. The Framework community flips out, talks about betrayal. There's people in the forums talking about how they were about to buy a fleet of machines but now will have to go back to Dell or whoever.
I was in the thread trying to understand - ok, we're doing ethical math here, right? We liked Framework because ostensibly buying from them reduced our e waste in the long run, and maybe is long run cheaper since we can do our own repairs on easily available parts. Meanwhile, Framework turns around and gives maybe 10k to someone who is prominently pulling a shitload of people into Linux world with Omarchy, who happens to have some disgusting opinions on his blog. I feel like switching to the main companies like Dell or HP or whoever, comes with way darker ethical implications. I mean one of these companies are the ones that provision the IDF, some of them have donated to Trump's ballroom wayyy more than the Ruby conf donation, they all have horrifying supply chains, and not to mention, don't come with any of the environmental benefits of a Framework machine.
So, why is Framework examined under a more critical lense?
My takeaway was twofold: first, people seem ok to dip their toes in activist progressivism to a degree, but are basically primed to throw their hands up and say, "I knew it, default capitalism really is insurmountable, oh well, back to the devil I know, no point in trying ANYTHING!" Second, people seem deeply focused on aesthetics rather than practical outcomes. Framework's far larger contributions to Linux space are instantly nullified by one relatively small donation to a guy who himself has massive contributions to FOSS but also a couple of really gross blog posts. It's not ok to cut away the gross bits: the entire thing is polluted.
I tried to point out the dangerous game being played since I can guarantee I can find a more ethically pure environmental anarchist than any supposed progressive on the forum - after all, the more environmental decision isn't to buy a Framework, it's to rescue a Thinkpad from a landfill, and by the way, anybody here still driving to work instead of taking the bus? And so on. People were, politely, shutting me down. "It's not the same, all framework has to do is apologize for the DHH thing and it'll all be ok." Sure, until it gets out that the CEO was at Trump's inauguration, or that the local Taiwanese office works with super shady parts suppliers, or... Seems to me the best thing to do is try to make a rough ethical calculation based on practicalities rather than purity testing, but nah.
So, if you're going to do something good in this society, you need to not just be much more ethical than the heteronormative capitalist participants, you need to be unimpeachable.
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It's because, I think, these people need moral plausible deniability.
I think maybe they truly, deep down, want to use dell - for their convenience, availability, sleekness, and mainstream appeal. But they can't just do that. They need to find the right place to jump from their moral high ground. So they basically search for any excuse at all to ditch.
I know people who were so upset, supposedly, with Mozilla that they switched to chrome. Fucking chrome, dude.
I don't care how much you think pocket is advertisement. Chrome is basically 3 ads in a trenchcoat. Can we please be for real?
I think it’s also related to bike shedding. No one wants to do the hard work of understanding the nuance of ethics and timing, and it’s easier to argue about this single event must equal evil.
See also how the left in American politics is known to eat its own. IMO, this led to the rise of MAGA and Trump.
I'm by no means defending throwing the baby out with the bathwater - which is what's happening when someone abandons a less-aligned company for a completely unaligned one - but I have a somewhat different perspective on what, exactly, ticks these people off so much with Framework but not Dell, even though Dell is ostensibly worse (from their perspective), and it's not all that unreasonable emotionally, but it leads to bad outcomes, and it is very much not rational.
For them, it's a problem of (perceived) hypocrisy. You see, Dell never claimed to be good. Nor did HP. They're big corporations, they've got contracts with the military, IDF, what have you. Their appeal, as it were, is the product/service itself. Their only ideal is the Capital, and they never pretended otherwise.
In comes Framework; claiming to be sustainable, different from the others, caring about society/the world/etc., instead of just in it for the Capital, like all the others - regardless of whether they really claimed this or not, it is how they're perceived by these people - and then they go and "do something like that", so they go back to Dell/HP, because at least those didn't lie about who they were. This is exactly what happens with Mozilla vs Google/Microsoft.
This is very much a reflection of a fair few Leftist political spaces. Two people may agree on pretty much everything in how a society should be ran, but one of them believes that private property is inherently theft, and another one would like to maintain private property. That singular difference, one that could be set aside until all other goals are achieved - if ever - will cause endless debate, drama, and ultimately a schism which will leave both sides weaker.