Omarchy should not matter. But sadly it does. As a power grab.
If you don’t know what Omarchy is here’s the short summary. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of RubyOnRails, owner of a software business and millionaire, decided a few months ago to go all in on Linux and – because that’s just his MO – thought that turning his setup into a project made sense. Omarchy is just that: A pretty standard Arch Linux distribution with a handful of configuration files, that Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH as he is often called) wrote, or vibed or whatever. There is nothing wrong with this, custom, opinionated special purpose distributions have been part of the Linux culture for a long time and provide a lot of value and experimentation that sometimes even flows back to the original project. In a way Ubuntu Linux is just that to the basis Debian.
There’s also nothing wrong in more opinionated software – quite the opposite. I do think that RubyOnRails and similar frameworks gained traction especially because they do have a clear idea of how they see the respective problem domain. There’s even the statement “There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it” in the Zen of Python. Having a strong point of view is not a bad thing in software or in general. The problem is the kind of points of view DHH has.
I don’t want to go into all the gritty details here, Brennan Kenneth Brown did a great job with their article “Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH“, but here’s the short version. DHH is a racist and a fascist. He recently wrote articles on how there are [Content Warning: massive racism] too many brown people in London these days. In July he wrote an [Content Warning: Racism, anti-romanism] article comparing Roma communities (using a slur for them) to “wolves” that should be “shot”. His X account is also know to be “edgy” in a similar way. A few days ago he posted sort of a manifesto for his set of config files:
There’s even a longer version on the website. Even without a strong background in antifascist literature or history this reads like a fascist creed. About unity and identity. About “holding the line” (against codes of conduct and the rights of marginalized people as the website explains). About how there always needs to be a strong leader who makes the decisions. Given DHH’s other writing this is not a misguided joke, this is how he thinks about the world.
I began this text writing “Omarchy should not matter” but I have not explained why it does. It’s surely not about user numbers (it’s a clunky distro aimed at people who love to cosplay hackers). But it is about power.
DHH has used his connection to CEO’s of tech corporations and his position as influencer to collect up to now above 18 million dollars of funding for Omarchy. He uses that money not for himself (he has enough of that) but to fund certain pieces of Software he uses in his distribution. Like for example the window manager hyprland whose main developer the Omarchy money now funds. What is “Vaxry” known for outside of a niche window manager? He runs a community based around LGBTQ discrimination and participates in that (see the short summary on Drew DeVault’s “Weird Little Guys of FOSS” list). His bigotry is so consistent that he was banned from participating in the Freedesktop.org community where all the other developers of window managers and the free software desktop stack collaborate. And it was long before DHH funded him.
One could see a world where a CEO using his connections to drum up some funding for free software projects would be a good thing. But that’s not the world we live in I am afraid. DHH got 3 million USD from Digital Ocean (a cloud provider) for Omarchy. Basically at the same time where Digital Ocean cancelled their support of Flathub and GNOME that amounted to a value of 50 USD per month.
DHH is using his position and his influence to accumulate donations that he then can distribute to projects that align with his fascist worldview and ambitions. And in a time where many important projects and infrastructures are strapped for cash running just on the goodwill of a handful of people that is increasingly dangerous. Not because its corporate money – a lot of funding for open source comes from corporations, they are after all who are sucking up all the surplus from people’s labor. It’s because this amount of money gives him power.
The Omarchy foundation will be where projects in desperate need of funding will be pointed. And will a project focused on human rights and social justice get funding from our fascist overlord? What kind of pressure can that exert on projects who have to decide to either die due to lack of funding or kill their code of conduct?
An open fascist is building one of the bigger sources of funding for open source fully under his individual control and sucks up a lot of money that otherwise might have gone to liberatory projects. Community projects. Antifascist projects.
And that is why Omarchy matters. Sadly. Not because of its technical merit (even though those fascists love to use the “merit” argument to fight human rights) but because of its leader, his connections and his ability to accumulate financial power. Without anyone in that ecosystem saying anything about how that leader operates and talks. And you might know the saying: If there’s a Nazi and 10 folks sitting together at a table and nobody says and does anything? There’s 11 Nazis at that table.
Omarchy got a lot of recognition recently. Not only by corporate donors but by Youtubers and other tech influencers who kept praising it and nudged people (who might not know about DHH’s exploits) towards testing it. To become “a hardcore linux user/dev” or whatever other chauvinist argument they made. This makes it dangerous.
Running Omarchy means contributing to this dynamic. It means willingly integrating oneself into a fascist community. Legitimizing it. Supporting it. Omarchy is a fascist project that normalizes fascist thinking for everyone entering that community (even unknowingly). The baseline has to be not to use that system. And as people who believe in human rights and dignity, in community and a tech world that can be better we need to oppose Omarchy. Need to make sure it gets no seat at any table. Support projects who actively refuse to collaborate. Support projects who care about human rights and flourishing. And do not do business with the companies who willingly support fascists.
Siamo tutti antifascisti!
(Share this message about Omarchy [or some other similar post] around in the tech circles you frequent. Tell people about the background of this hyped Linux distribution and its fascist leader. Quit your 1password or Digital Ocean accounts and mention that it is because the support fascists.)
One thing I haven’t really figured out yet, and it may be because there isn’t an answer, is why some of these companies could plausibly be genuinely sending money to Omarchy.
Like, Digital Ocean. They’re a headless server company. So… why are they donating anything to a desktop distro? There’s nothing Digital Oceany about Omarchy as far as I understand.
It feels like someone was like “Guys, I made open source chicken feed” and Linode was like “son of a bitch I’m in”, I just don’t get it.
Ignoring the part where they just like the vibes and want to spend their money on… favour? I don’t even know that the company pretends to get out of it… Like, how would one pitch this expense to shareholders? We use company money to fund projects we don’t use, that have nothing to do with our business, because the guy running the project we don’t use is mean to people who aren’t white enough for him? And that’s what we’re spending your money on?
“Gee, why would these corporations be into fascism? I’ve never read a book before.”
😛
It’s not that that’s confusing me, I think I’m just surprised at the nakedness. Like, yeah, big business supports fascism, but often still have a pretense. Like, oh I’m investing in the industry, and the industry produces tanks, and there happens to be a conflict on the horizon, and you can pretend it’s just an investment in business. Or whatever.
But this feels like a dude, who isn’t in government or anything, put up a sign that says “I’m a prick”, and then a bunch of companies fell over themselves to give him money for… nothing in return. It’s like the business equivalent of sending all your money to a megachurch televangelist or something!
Again, if I were on the board of one of those companies, or a shareholder in it, I might be like “wait, why did we send this guy 30 million dollars? Even if I’m pro fascism… what does that money… get us? What did we spend it on?”
Timeless quote:
If there’s a Nazi and 10 folks sitting together at a table and nobody says and does anything? There’s 11 Nazis at that table.
Everything is Nazis!
what do you call people who give millions to nazis out of their own accord?
I don’t think there’s a special word for that.
You might be saying that giving money to someone who says and does bad things is morally equivalent to saying and doing those bad things, but it doesn’t follow that you have the same beliefs or motivations.
Let me put this in simple terms - if you give money to an organisation that successfully lobbies to ban gender affirming care, and then a trans person jumps off a bridge because they couldn’t get the care they need, as far as I am concerned, you pushed that person off the bridge.
Better a bridge-pusher than a Nazi!
Before moving the goal posts, let’s stick with the original premise of the people at the table.
So if that first person left, and someone else joins that table, is that person then also a nazi? Because by that logic, yeah - everyone is a nazi, you included.
let’s stick with the original premise
Buddy, the original premise of the article WAS donating to Nazis.
Fair enough, I phrased that ambiguously.
My issue was with the recursive definition of “nazi” - you are one if you associate with one or if you associate with someone who associate with one. That would mean petty much everyone alive, excluding some uncontacted tribes.
To me, that kind of self-referential logic is utter bullshit. From what I can tell, David Hansson is absolutely a racist xenophobic piece of shit. But the actual nazis were way worse than that. And devaluing it to someone who n degrees away once had dinner with someone is utter insanity, and pissing on the graves of all that died in the second world war.
David Hansson is absolutely a racist xenophobic piece of shit.
Yeah, that’s what a Nazi is. Acting like it’s not akin to Nazism is what’s actually pissing on the graves of people who died in the war. “Erm, actually someone is only a Nazi if they were a member of the National Socialist Party in Germany during WWII” is doing them a favor. Don’t let them hide.
Coming from someone who was raised in the southeast US, a huge part of the Lost Cause of the South movement wasn’t to erase what the Confederacy did, but to just paint them in a slightly more positive light. Rebranding, so to speak. Acting like some specific breed of ultranationalism isn’t technically “a Nazi” is just the same shit. In the minds of many people that live near me, there is absolutely nothing odd about celebrating under the world’s largest Confederate monument with fireworks. Despite the fact that it was finished in response to Brown v. Board of Education. Despite the fact that Stone Mountain has historically been and still is associated with the literal KKK. It’s the same shit.
Being pedantic about the terms helps them.
Well, I chose to preserve that term to those who are more on the physical side of the spectrum - which, I do admit, David Hansson is crouching up close to.
But this bullshit about everyone who associates with him to whatever degree being just as bad (orcgirl was up to three, but if you follow the logic, it’s infinite) is absolutely devaluing the meaning of the word.
That, if anything, is helping the actual nazis just as badly.
From what I can tell, David Hansson is absolutely a racist xenophobic piece of shit. But the actual nazis were way worse than that.
“actual nazis” were able to “be worse”, thanks to millions that silently did nothing or waited for their neighbours demise to go get their stuff.
how many “racist xenophobic piece of shit” millionaires/billionaires do we need? They feed your “actual nazis”.
So is omarchy just Nazi SCO?
What is sco in this context?
SCO was a UNIX company that tried to destroy Linux through lawsuits in the early 2000s. This was a huge saga in the tech world for years.
I agree for the most part, except for the use of the terms “fascist” and “racist.” Those terms are used far too quickly and far too often. This weakens and normalizes them.
Not everyone who criticizes migration is automatically a racist. Not everyone who loves capitalism and liberalism is automatically a fascist.
That’s no justification for DHH and his supporters. My point is simply that these days, people are far too quick to throw around extreme terms online without thinking things through, just because someone has a different opinion. Just as, for the right wing, everything is always immediately labeled as socialism and/or communism.
As a result, the lines of conflict keep drifting further apart, making dialogue impossible—and that only strengthens the true extremists.
that sounds exactly like what gentle racists say nowadays :
London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
Copenhagen, by comparison, was about eighty-five percent native Danes in 2000, and is still three-quarters today. Enough of a foreign presence to feel cosmopolitan, but still distinctly Danish in all of its ways. Equally statistically evident on streets and bike lanes.
But I think, what would Copenhagen feel like, if only a third of it was Danish, like London? It would feel completely foreign, of course. Alien, even. So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country.
i’ve heard these before. An hour later, after a beer or two, it turns into blatant racism.
read the rest of his archived post linked in the article, if you want to hear the rest of the stereotypical racist rant. Next he will be writing about the “great replacement”. Fuck dhh and fuck his omarchy too.
Can we please stop posting about Omarchy? It’s annoying.
Let people discuss stuff they want and need to discuss. You do not have to click the topic and read it. People have concerns and they want to discuss it, we should not try to mute because there is a huge interest by many.
“Negative attention is also attention”. In the Linux community where we are in, the fascist DHH was already discussed at least once (in fact multiple times) in the last weeks.
I think suppressing this topic until they run out of money is a better strategy than every time trying to do holy wars. Of course the situation is different if you notice that the person whom you’re speaking with may not yet know. That is not really the case in https://lemmy.ml/c/linux
This is not about attention, this is about enlightenment. And even if its negative attention in addition, people want to discuss and they should. Just because it gets attention should not be a reason to silence opinions and their need to talk about it with others.
Meanwhile the other day a post here asking “What actually is the deal with Omarchy?” got deleted.
I feel this is more about people signaling they dislike he who should not be named (other than initials) than, you know, what is actually wrong with the product.
The same thing happened with the technology communities and Trump / Musk. I sincerely do not care about these people or their opinions. I’m here for the tech news, not a circlejerk about whom the Internet considers a nazi. I guess I will just have to add a few more keywords to filter now.
whom the Internet considers a nazi
The guy is wildly bigoted and he advocates for ethnic cleansing lol what else do you need
Stupid fearmongering.
Instead of focusing so much on hating something highlight things you love like Archlinux and stop reporting on things you don’t like. Reporting on them does the opposite of what you want.
