I recently discovered that Digital Ocean - the platform this website is hosted on - has promised to donate $3 million dollars over the next three years to Omarchy. They have joined the project as a “founding corporate patron” according to Omarchy’s press release. I will not be linking to their website here, but this announcement is easily reachable if you need to read it. This comittment from Digital Ocean is not acceptable to me. Omarchy is run by the virulent racist DHH, and I will not be supporting them indirectly by continuing to use Digital Ocean’s platform. I will be migrating from Digital Ocean to a different platform as soon as I am able to do so.

The news of Digital Ocean’s treachery comes almost right after the announcement that 1Password is also donating money to DHH and the Omarchy project (The Verge link). These two companies aren’t alone. In donating, they are joining a growing list of companies choosing to sponsor the project in some way including Cloudflare, Dropbox, Shopify, Stripe, Notion, Meta, and others. Brennan Day has written up a thorough list of companies choosing to sponsor DHH.

DHH being a racist piece of shit is not a new development. Jake Lazaroff wrote a piece on DHH’s racist and fascist views around this time last year. DHH has also been a long established more general piece of shit in the Ruby community for quite a while. See this article written by Tekin Süleyman about the Rails community and its relation to DHH.

Why are companies choosing to support this person, their project, and by extension their politics? Being involved in a popular software project like Rails, or starting a nonsense linux “distro” like Omarchy should not insulate a rat like DHH from consequences. DHH is quickly becoming anathema. Companies that sponsor him will become the same. I am joining a growing group of people in tech and people that use tech who are refusing to associate with people like DHH, and any company - or companies - they keep. It is important that we all loudly and publicly say “no” to people like DHH and companies who choose to associate with him and his toxic and warped view of the world. Doing so gives others permission and assurance to do the same.

I will never understand why a company like Digital Ocean or 1Password and etc would voluntarily choose to tarnish their reputations in this way. I can only assume they are buying something with their money that isn’t Omarchy itself. Omarchy isn’t anything special. It is a linux distro. It innovates nothing and offers very little over established and mature existing projects. They seemingly just slapped the word “agentic” on Arch. This is not the future of Linux. This is not a valuable product. It is a pointless little project by a weird little guy in tech.

I’m migrating this site off of Digital Ocean to another provider as soon as I can evaluate some options and write whatever terraform I need to write to make the move happen. I’m also moving off 1Password asap. It is really difficult to move away from bad companies who cast large shadows. It takes effort and diligence. It is worth the short term discomfort. The difficulty in divesting from bad actors is what those bad actors are betting on. I urge you reading this to take the time to become informed, and to divest yourself from bad people and bad companies. Please spread the word.