The Omarchy Problem
Over the last two weeks, two companies I rely on every day have made major financial contributions to a project run by an individual whose views I increasingly disagree with.
If you don’t know, and apologies if you do, here’s the gist.
1Password and DigitalOcean have each pledged money to the Omacom Foundation, the organisation behind David Heinemeier Hansson’s Omarchy Linux distro. Since starting a few months ago, the Omacom Foundation has received pledges from several well-known companies and patrons, bringing the total backing to $18.5 million. A startling pace of pledges for any Linux-related project.
I mention this because I use both 1Password and DigitalOcean. I’ve used 1Password every day for years. I’ve never used another password manager. I have several DigitalOcean droplets that run my own website and a few others. These aren’t just brand names to me; they are companies I’ve built tools, habits, and workflows around. That, and a fair amount of trust.
So, seeing these same two companies make substantial pledges to an organisation run by an individual whose views I don’t agree with is uncomfortable in a way I have found hard to act on. Where I keep coming back
It would be easy to say to boycott these companies like others have already said before me, but that’s not where I find myself.
The truth is, switching password managers isn’t a small thing. It’s more than an inconvenience; it’s a massive change involving family accounts, shared vaults, years of logins, and a process that has only now become second nature to my family.
Switching from DigitalOcean isn’t straightforward either. It’s servers, databases, file storage, DNS, and a handful of integrations I would need to build elsewhere.
The honest version of this post isn’t outrage. I understand why others feel that. I’m uneasy about the pledges, but this post is about something closer to friction. It’s the feeling of thinking I should do something about this, then wondering whether it’s actually worth it once I try to work out a plan to switch to alternatives.
Trying to separate the company from the founder
What makes this messier than the typical “company does a bad thing, boycott company” story is that the pledges don’t actually go to David Heinemeier Hansson. Omarchy isn’t a 1Password or DigitalOcean product. It’s a third-party product they have chosen to fund. On its own, this would usually be admirable.
But it’s hard to look past that DigitalOcean reportedly ended a modest, roughly $50-a-month sponsorship of GNOME and Flathub not long before pledging $3 million to Omarchy. That’s not “we don’t fund open source” — it’s a choice about which open source gets funded, and at what scale. GNOME is the desktop environment millions of Linux users rely on every day, quietly, without a headline-grabbing founder attached to it. Omarchy is only a few months old.
The complaint isn’t that they have funded open source; it’s that they have chosen to fund a project, a specific project, at a very specific time. It’s not that 1Password or DigitalOcean haven’t said anything themselves. It’s that they have picked a project with a loud and polarising founder, at a time when his politics are most visible.
Where does that leave me?
I’ll be honest, I don’t have a clean ending here. Not the one you’re probably expecting. I’m not migrating my 1Password account to another password manager today, or even next week. Probably never. I’m not migrating away from DigitalOcean either. It’s not what I want to do, but it’s the decision I have reluctantly made.
What I am taking from this is what I suspect a lot of people are quietly doing. Paying closer attention when my subscription renewals come up, keeping a better eye on alternatives I haven’t bothered to research before, and finally being honest that convenience does a lot of the work in keeping me as a customer.
It’s not the conclusion that many will be hoping for, but it is the honest one.
