Personally, I don’t think they have ill intentions - I just think they have no tact until literally thousands of people explain a given problem to them in plain English. (see: “Glorious Holy Pandas”)
Not that they don’t understand - but that the understanding isn’t enough on its own is disappointing. I retain pretty mixed impressions of the company and would be interested to know more about the individuals behind it.
Oh boy, I know I’ll receive a lot of flak for this one, but in all seriousness, I really don’t care 
It seems to me that there are more and more people that are trying to go out of their way just to find something to be offended by…
GMMK was born out of a meme and that’s it.
Calling them racist and anti-Semitic is… well, it’s a stretch at best 
If anyone happens to find any connections between GMMK and KKK, neonazis etc, then it would be entirely justifiable and I would be right behind you.
But since that doesn’t seems to be the case…
But I digress - this is a KB forum, not a political one.
It would be great if we could leave things to that…
Agreed 
I’ll be honest and say I don’t think they have any bad intentions at all with their name as it started from a meme, and the representation that they care about PC gaming.
At the same time, I understand why their name and branding may be very cringeworthy for some as it is “very loud”.
But most importantly, let’s talk about the keyboard at hand here. I think there are a lot of good points they have going for the GMMK Pro that interest me.
Personally I’m not a huge fan of knobs on keyboards at all. I don’t think they look good and I think their function is pretty unnesseray, but one thing I do recognize is that knobs don’t have any easy implementation in QMK or VIA at the current moment. As far as I know, if you have a keyboard with a knob, you better know C in order to get into the code and program it how you want. With the GMMK Pro working with VIA out of the box, and PCGR often selling their products to a much more mainstream audience than ours, I think it makes sense that they would try their best to make the knob implementation as easy to program as possible. This interests me because that means they’ll have professionally paid devs working with the VIA & QMK teams on this implementation and this could lead to a quality of life increase for all knob keyboards in the future. There is no easy “make my knob control this” option in config.qmk or VIA at the moment, but if this is a board that helps open it up, that would be amazing for our community. This means they might be dedicating actual resources to this aspect of the project as opposed to how knobs have been done in the past; they’ve been done in an open source manner by people who aren’t as incentivized to make it easy to use for the rest of us.
Yeah, Knob quality of life increase.
In addition, I think a board like the GMMK Pro demonstrates they actually pay attention to community trends in a very interesting way. Think of it. Without the past two years of gaskets taking off in the community, they would have never even considered making the GMMK Pro a gasket mounted keyboard. This is an observation I’m confident the large OEMs (think razer, logitech, etc) would never take a gamble on, or probably they’d never even recognize our community trends. GMMK isn’t as big as the biggest OEMs, but I respect them for paying attention to a community trend and putting faith to bring one of those trends into large scale production.
The biggest surprise to be, is that since they’ve been paying attention to community trends, how the heck did this not end up as a 65% 
Function keys too important in gaming, perhaps? i.e. F1-4 for League is why i swap out my 65% that i’m using to break in creams with my Realforce
I’d also definitely imagine that they’re using the 75% form factor to distinguish themselves in a segment where the NK65, DZ65, etc are so popular. I’d imagine anyone who already owns one of those boards would find the 75% of this board a unique attribute that would make picking one up more enticing.
Afaik they are not working with anyone in via or QMK. It’s a complete mystery as to what MCU they’ve used and/or what other technical decisions they’ve made. QMK has a pretty active discord and it would be pretty easy to reach out.
I wonder if they’re just not at that phase yet, or are underestimating the integration. I can understand companies wanting to keep their work to them, but I wonder how the final implementation will be, or how they’ll reach out (if they haven’t already).
Under the terms of the QMK license, GPL, they are required to release source code. They are not legally obligated to make it good or anything that can be upstreamed however. Any company can claim they are QMK powered, it’s quite another thing to actually work with the community.
this blows my mind. I added a knob to recent project of mine (garbage truck) and whipped up some code for my configurator to make programming the knob easy. It’s not complicated and certainly doesn’t require a full dev team to get support for.
You only have to support a limited number of keyboards. There are over 500 in the QMK repo. Making it generic requires a bit more effort.
it’s already supported generically, the configurators are just a ui on top. Anything I implement in my configurator I do in a way that it can be reused. I’ve recently open sourced my configurator and PRs are accepted for adding additional boards.
It may be for you, but there are few more moving parts in the QMK API. I’m sure if you were to contribute to that, we would all be appreciative.
I’ve tried before. My pr stayed open for months after I made the requested changes.
Yeah. The perils of volunteer driven organizations. Not going to defend it, but that’s the way things are.
yeah I understand that. I just have too much going on for me to be constantly pushing for things to get merged in.
That’s definitely part of open source unfortunately. Patience of the buddha.
To be fair, that’s what it feels like haha.
And remember, you were able to whip up the code yourself. Imagine a simpleton like myself 
that was my point. I dislike coding my layouts so much so that I created a configurator. Adding a ui to existing configurators for rotary encoders is not a complicated task. I’m really surprised it has yet to be added to the current options. Coding shouldn’t be a pre-req for using a custom mapping