Stop Omarchy

The Facts:

• Omarchy is a Linux distribution created by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). It is a spin of Arch Linux marketed as "beautiful, fun & agentic Linux for the age of agents".^[1][2] To fund and promote it, DHH launched the Omacom Foundation, a nonprofit that has since raised millions in pledges from major tech executives and companies.^[3]
• DHH—creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO at 37signals, and Shopify board member—has published white-nationalist essays. He called a Tommy Robinson "remigration" march "heartwarming,"^[4][5][6][7] and wrote another comparing Roma people to wolves to be shot and deported.^[8][9] Anthropic's own model refused to translate it, calling it dehumanizing.^[10]
• DHH also invoked the far-right "grooming gangs" narrative, a claim official child sexual abuse data does not support.^[4][11]
• The Omarchy Doctrine is a public, fascist creed: heritage as duty, hold the line, the will to power. It matches Roger Griffin's palingenetic populist ultranationalism and Robert Paxton's first stage of fascism: a creed, a leader, followers. And there's $21.7 million already pledged for the next stage.^[12][13]
• Despite this, more than a dozen top tech executives and corporations have pledged millions to the Omarchy / Omacom Foundation.^[14][15] They include the CEOs of Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Cloudflare, Block, Dropbox, Coinbase, and others, as listed on Omarchy's patrons page.^[16]
• Corporations including 1Password, DigitalOcean, and Alibaba Cloud are also contributing to Omarchy's funding, with DigitalOcean and Alibaba Cloud each pledging $1 million a year for three years.^[17][13]
• Alibaba Cloud is helping build "Omarchy China," a local CDN, hosting, website, and meetup network—and collaborating to make Omarchy the "ideal agentic operating system" for Alibaba's upcoming Qwen Book computer.^[13]
• No other Linux or FOSS project ever gets this kind of funding. You should be suspicious of it, not celebrate it. You have been tricked into playing defense for millionaires that don't give a shit about you.
• Omarchy's patron page shows hundreds of smaller backers alongside famous names, laundering mainstream support for an extremist project.^[16]
• This money is going into marketing and reputation-washing to make far-right politics look like normal open-source community building as well as attempts at centralization in FOSS.^[18]
• Omarchy funds projects with toxic leadership. Omacom solely bankrolls Hyprland, whose developer was banned by Freedesktop.org after harassment of trans members (a user's display name changed from "they/them" to "who/cares" in his Discord server by a moderator)^{[15][19][20][21]}; Ladybird, whose founder Andreas Kling rejected gender-neutral docs as "personal politics," barred "societal politics" from contributing guidelines, and posted support for Charlie Kirk^{[22][23][24][25]}; Xlibre, forked over a supposed "RedHat DEI" conspiracy with a code of conduct that reads "404"^[26]; FUTO, run by a friend and platformer of Curtis Yarvin^[27][28]; and Brave's Brendan Eich, who gave a payment method to Kiwi Farms, a harassment forum linked to multiple suicides.^[29][30]
• After 37signals banned "societal and political discussions" and a third of staff resigned, DHH was uninvited from RailsConf and founded Rails World. Omarchy is backed by Cloudflare and (previously) Framework^[31][32][33]; the GNOME OS team has distanced itself from Framework over the partnership. Meanwhile, Shopify and Ruby Central have consolidated control over Ruby infrastructure.^[34][7]
• The same infrastructure companies bankrolling Omarchy are also the backbone of U.S. deportation violence, including Amazon AWS, Palantir, and Salesforce contracts with ICE.^[35][36][37]
• This is not a niche internet drama. This is the normalization of fascism in open source and tech, and it requires a united response.
• Omarchy is also inherently insecure, a predictable result of vibecoded development practices: it shipped with a default configuration that let any user process escalate to root through the Docker socket,^[38][39] alongside issues like video-title bash injection and notifications able to run arbitrary bash.^[40]
• Omarchy is bloated, too: its installer ISO weighs in at just under 6 GB—more than four times the size of the Arch Linux ISO (~1.4 GB) it is built on, and larger than Ubuntu Desktop's full image (~5.7 GB), which ships an entire office suite.^[41]
• If you're new to Linux, know that Omarchy is just one distro among hundreds of others. Omarchy has co-opted and hijacked decades of work by Arch Linux developers and maintainers—Arch itself refused DHH's money and support.^[42]

NOTE: An asterisk (*) marks names listed on Omarchy's official patrons page, people and companies directly funding the project.

Omarchy's Patrons:

Because 21.7 million dollars isn't enough for some people, below the executives and corporate sponsors is a much longer list of supporters. Omarchy's open patron program lists hundreds of smaller backers alongside executives. Open patronage doubled in ten days to more than $120,000 across 826 patrons.^[44] For example:

• 9538-7874 Quebec inc.* (unnamed Canadian shell company)
• Axel Fontaine*, creator of Flyway, is a funder and hands-on Omarchy contributor.^[45][46][47]
• Bertrand Janin*, a longtime open-source developer (ex-Ramp, ex-Truveris).^[48]
• Marc Köhlbrugge*, founder of WIP and BetaList, fixtures of the indie-hacker scene Omarchy courts.^[49][50][51]
• Pagecord* creator Olly.^[52][53]
• ServiceStack*, an established .NET web-services vendor backing the project as a company.^[54]
• Vincent Ritter*, founder of Tinylytics and Scribbles, has a documented pattern of bigoted posting, including being annoyed at pronouns in games, and praising Elon Musk even after his Nazi salutes.^{[55][56][57][58][59][60]}

See Omarchy's patrons page for the full backer list. I've attempted to include any and all prominent figures and developers, mostly to demonstrate how Omarchy has been normalized, not cherry-pick.

What You Can Do:

• Be aware of who is involved. Omarchy makes it easy: omarchy.org/patrons/.
• Inform others and be vocal about it. Normalize talking about how fucked up this is.
• We can't even begin to respond when so many people don't know or understand what's going on, or who just see Omarchy as just another Linux distro. The money DHH has raised is explicitly going into marketing and reputation-washing.^[18]
• If you use any services or products by these companies, stop and write to them (write to them even if you don't use their services). Boycott.
• Go out of your way to use and support ethical alternatives. If your job uses these products or services, speak up and let your higher-ups know and try to get that changed.
• For open-source maintainers, don't accept bug reports that arise on Omarchy systems.
• If you live in the cities where these companies are headquartered, you can take direct action and plan in-person protests.
• Individuals have a lot of power that can be exercised, especially if they are willing to make personal sacrifice.