Framework is a not a huge organisation. This sponsorship consists of a few laptops and committing to a $250 monthly donation. There’s no contradiction here. CachyOS is also not a huge project.
I don't think that carries the weight it used to carry, if it even used to carry any weight. Measuring things by popularity tends to give poor results anyways, you want to sponsor and contribute to good things, regardless of their popularity.
Even if Framework were to dismiss or overlook the controversy surrounding Omarchys creator, which is ultimately their call, surely there are better ways to allocate OSS funding than sponsoring a multi-millionaire executives pet project. He can afford to bankroll it himself.
But it's anathema to the cosmopolitan multiculturalism we practice and appreciate in most of the anglosphere and parts of western Europe. Of which much of the tech world / HN posters are part of.
I'm a European immigrant to Canada, in a suburb of Vancouver which is plurality Chinese with Europeans at about 30% and its totally cool and normal.
But I'm also typing this from vacation in Japan where they famously don't welcome immigration much. But people don't seem as upset by Asian nativism compared to European. And I don't have a diplomatic way of explaining the difference - it's the "bigotry of low expectations."
This naturally ends up being controversial, especially in tech, when some of our brightest minds are from other cultures. It doesn't help his case that he's not even from the places he complains about, so he's another outsider complaining about outsiders, which always looks bad.
dhh always been "controversial", initially it was mostly about strongly held opinions about software, engineering and such, presented in a very vocal way that got a lot of attention at the time. Then at one point Basecamp had some drama about employees calling customers names, which spiraled into a debate about racism and company culture, and ultimately leading to Basecamp banning "discussions about society and politics" or similar. More recently he started sharing opinions about London having too many foreigners, immigrant communities having gangs of groomers or something, and a bunch of Ruby community members have written publicly about what they think about him.
The air around dhh always been dramatic for various reasons, not sure that particular theme is new. But I think is new is that currently people are re-evaluating if they want a prominent community leader to have views that could be seen as "against" members of the community they're supposedly leaders over.
