Why Framework’s ‘Right to Repair’ Ethos Is Gaining Fans
SEATTLE — Chances are, if you’ve lived through a few innovation cycles, you’ve got too many old computers — and their cables — cluttering your house. Do you think that if you had the right to repair your devices, to swap out obsolete components for more performant ones, you wouldn’t keep piling up castoff electronics?
So does Matt Hartley, guest on this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at Open Source Summit North America in April.
“We want to bring back that environment,” said Harley, Linux support lead at Framework, which offers modular laptop computers.
“We want the TVs to be repairable again, we want all these things. We want to see all these industries rally with us and participate in that.”
Hartley, interviewed in this Makers outing by Chris Pirillo, described how Framework’s machines can be customized and repaired, helping avoid the landfill-bound heap of obsolete computers and cables that Pirillo calls in this episode “a different kind of technical debt.”
The “right to repair” movement, which seeks to secure the right of consumers to repair their own consumer products, has gained momentum in recent years, a backlash against the environmental damage caused by product disposability and by some manufacturer’s insistence on fully controlling the repair of their products (such as the “black box” nature of Apple products).
The Repair Association tracks “right to repair” legislation and communities in the U.S. and around the globe
Without the ability to repair one’s own computer, Hartley told Pirillo on this episode of Makers, “otherwise, you end up like us or end up like me, who has an ASUS Eee that he just refuses to get rid of. It has absolutely no value other than it flattens paper for me right now. But I’m going to use it someday I swear, as soon as I find the power adapter and a reason to care.”
Fostering a DIY Community
At Framework, Hartley said, “My job is to identify the most likely distributions that we want to focus on providing support for efficiently and also then looking to outreach with community-based support as well … and actually beginning to build those bridges.”
As the Linux support lead, he works “crazy close” with maintainers of the Fedora Linux operating system. “We literally talk every day, we have a Matrix chat that I just keep open all the time, and complain and whine when something doesn’t go my way.
“Otherwise, I’m coming up with various scripts and whatnot to try and make this more user-friendly and make this an easier experience. Because we are seeing a lot of folks coming from [Apple] OS 10, and a lot of folks coming from Windows.”
Framework has found that a community is growing around it, contributing features. For example, Hartley said, “We have LED modules. And we have a binary of basically a program that we can run to interact with those modules. It does really interesting stuff, but it’s not really functional. And for a while I’ve been saying, ‘Wouldn’t be cool, if … [it] showed system resources or something useful.’ Someone apparently released that! I found it in our Reddit today.
“So we’re beginning to see that pattern. We’re also seeing people developing hardware that interacts with our laptops as well, which is incredibly cool.”
Check out the full episode to learn more about Framework and its “right to repair” approach.
