There is no ethics complication. That is an imaginary problem imagined by those who wish to force their politics on others. Open source should have no politics left or right.
Every proverb can be justified: in this case "looking a gift horse in the mouth."
The guy's giving away tons of work freely, and people are whining about his views. Instead of complaining about the free download, maybe they should stop paying for his real products? (But that won't happen because they haven't bought anything off him.)
> do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics?
It's not about trying to interfere with projects because you don't like the author's beliefs.
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
> The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
This includes persons and fields that the author considers harmful or distasteful. And forking and redistributing are core rights granted by the license.
Same thing with XLibre.
There are, apparently, people out there who think that their decision to use something that was provided et gratis et libre should depend on the beliefs of the thing's creator, as if doing so should somehow endorse those beliefs or cause them to rub off on the user. I can't understand this line of thought, however. Quite frankly I don't think that even applies to paid proprietary software. My moral intuition doesn't allow for that kind of transfer of guilt, which seems to be what people mean nowadays when they talk about "complicity".
Shouldn't the "no discrimination" part also apply to the community?
How would you feel about a project with an official policy that pull requests from people with a certain skin color will not be accepted - is that still in the spirit of F/LOSS? If a specific maintainer in an otherwise friendly community refuses to merge pull requests from developers with a certain skin color, how should the community handle that?
If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS, or are they suddenly "needlessly introducing politics" and "distracting from development"? If the latter, why would the actions of that one toxic maintainer not fall under the same?
If you notice that your community is rapidly losing core members because they keep getting insulted by that one toxic maintainer, what do you propose one should do? Do you take action, or do you let the project die?
> How would you feel about a project with an official policy that pull requests from people with a certain skin color will not be accepted - is that still in the spirit of F/LOSS?
No, but this is irrelevant to any of the currently discussed situations.
> If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS
To have this argument requires accepting your framing around "toxic maintainers" which is probably not very productive. But of course forking projects to do your own thing is entirely in the spirit.
Regardless, though, that is not what people are objecting to. For example, an XLibre project wiki was defaced with disparaging comments, including by Jordan Petridis (deeply involved with both GNOME and Xorg) (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/346#issuecomment-...). This was highly unprofessional and XLibre should not have to deal with it regardless of what you think about the politics of anyone involved.
Absolutely not. DHH is someone I will never support, and I like knowing what projects he works on so that I can avoid them. Everything is political, whether we like it or not. Especially OSS.
His views are not just differences in tax policy, I find them grotesque, and I am glad people are aware of who is behind Omarchy and Hyprland so they can make informed decisions about whether to use them or not.
why is Hyprland being thrown in next to Omarchy? They're completely different levels of bad. The lead dev of Hyprland is in trouble for something minor his unpaid discord mod did and he has apologized years ago.
They're automatically a piece of shit too. Their software projects are also banned. Any forges hosting their software: be prepared to be @'d in unkind tweets. Any CPU executing such software is by extension also a bigot.
> Well, dhh considers torrents outdated (I’m not kidding, check the tweet), so it’s only officially being offered as a single download from a Cloudflare server. Which sounds cool until you’re on a weak-ass connection in constant danger of dropping halfway through the download.
That has nothing to do with bittorrent vs http; use a download manager instead of a browser.
> But Omarchy is a reminder that we live in a world where software isn’t just software, but the people who make it.
I get people are totally within their rights to ban movies/software/sports, etc. for creators whose beliefs they disagree with. However, software is the people who make it? I rarely, if ever, know the authors who create software or what they believe in.
Even putting the "ethics" of it aside, I think Omarchy is destined to go the way of LARBS. Many Linux distros are r/unixporn on the outside and a complete trainwreck on the inside. Regolith, Archlabs, Manjaro, dozens of distros have tried the "i3 but it's not like having teeth pulled" gimmick and it never works.
Much like LARBS, if I ever see you using Omarchy I just have to assume you don't know what you're doing. You can install Arch and rice i3wm in literally 10 minutes if your SSD and WiFi is fast enough.
For me, it's not about ricing. I find Omarchy to be an incredibly productive setup, from the launchers for webapps to the focus on TUIs.
I'm conflicted about the drama and still learning more about it, so not ready to draw a conclusion yet. But Omarchy is definitely a very, very fun experience for me.
Granted, I've heavily customized it and am using hy3 for i3-like capabilities, so whatever path out of this for me is likely to i3wm or sway.
And, fwiw, I've been running linux since the late 90s, and most of that as my primary OS (with a decade-ish period of macOS I'd rather forget). I know what I'm doing.
It's performative to it's core. In the next release they will probably add a matrix screensaver, burning windows and hack a gibson in the release video.
Saying people who use Omarchy don't know what they're doing feels elitist. If you agree with DHH's opinions it's just fine, some people don't want to fuck with shit, they just want to get to work.
Read his blog and stop acting like it's all made up. He has himself said a ton of vile far-right stuff, and if you're actually acting in good faith, which I doubt, it's easy to find this stuff.
Opinions and speech have consequences, and while he is able to say what he wants, everyone else is just as able to denounce what he says and avoid his projects.
As to whether this DHH person has said any 'vile far-right stuff' I do not know since I don't know the character, am not interested in this distribution - plain Debian + Xmonad does just fine for me - and do not want my operating system to dictate my politics in any way. But... there is always that but, isn't there?
For years, nay decades by now it has been practice to label those who do not toe the Party line and follow whatever diktat handed down from on high on any number of subjects as 'Nazi', 'Fascist', "${identity_group}phobe" (this needs double quotes for expansion to work), to throw bucketfuls of epithets at those who refuse to obey the order to put black squares on their web things, who dare to insist that war X was in fact started by party Y, that a hulking man with a bulge in his pants is in fact just that and not a woman, etcetera.
...and hardly anybody, here or elsewhere in 'polite society' dared to say anything about it for fear of being labelled themselves, here on this site for fear of being greyed out or shadow-banned. So DHH says nasty things? That is quite possible. If it is so he is just like all the others who say nasty things like I described above. He may even aim his remarks at some of the same people, quite possibly so because those who think for themselves are often disliked by those who want to do their thinking for them.
I've been reading the latest few pages of his blog (especially the touchy stuff) and it's opinions largely in line with mainstream conservatism in most of the developed world: not everyone is a Nazi, take pride in your flag and nation, have kids, "woke" / DEI / affirmative action is bad, migration in Europe is a crisis.
These are not taboo or even uncommon topics and many have majority support depending on where you're from (the national flag is less controversial in Canada than the UK; woke is dying faster in the UK than Canada.)
I don't agree with all of it, but I've not seen anything "beyond the pale" - simply someone voicing political opinions in a civilized way. And I'm not sure what else I would expect. My own wife doesn't share all of my political beliefs, yet this is the expectation for people who contribute to FLOSS, and other parts of our lives?
I quite enjoy living in a pluralistic liberal democracy where I can interact with, befriend, and live side by side with people whom see the world differently than I do. And I especially appreciate that this extends even to the strongest topics and religion. People shouldn't avoid code for its creator's beliefs any more than they should boycott a coffee shop because the barista is of a different religion.
There is no ethics complication. That is an imaginary problem imagined by those who wish to force their politics on others. Open source should have no politics left or right.
Every proverb can be justified: in this case "looking a gift horse in the mouth."
The guy's giving away tons of work freely, and people are whining about his views. Instead of complaining about the free download, maybe they should stop paying for his real products? (But that won't happen because they haven't bought anything off him.)
this makes no sense
and even on a basic level, do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics?
> do you not think open source/free software is about the ethics?
It's not about trying to interfere with projects because you don't like the author's beliefs.
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
> The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
This includes persons and fields that the author considers harmful or distasteful. And forking and redistributing are core rights granted by the license.
Same thing with XLibre.
There are, apparently, people out there who think that their decision to use something that was provided et gratis et libre should depend on the beliefs of the thing's creator, as if doing so should somehow endorse those beliefs or cause them to rub off on the user. I can't understand this line of thought, however. Quite frankly I don't think that even applies to paid proprietary software. My moral intuition doesn't allow for that kind of transfer of guilt, which seems to be what people mean nowadays when they talk about "complicity".
Shouldn't the "no discrimination" part also apply to the community?
How would you feel about a project with an official policy that pull requests from people with a certain skin color will not be accepted - is that still in the spirit of F/LOSS? If a specific maintainer in an otherwise friendly community refuses to merge pull requests from developers with a certain skin color, how should the community handle that?
If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS, or are they suddenly "needlessly introducing politics" and "distracting from development"? If the latter, why would the actions of that one toxic maintainer not fall under the same?
If you notice that your community is rapidly losing core members because they keep getting insulted by that one toxic maintainer, what do you propose one should do? Do you take action, or do you let the project die?
> How would you feel about a project with an official policy that pull requests from people with a certain skin color will not be accepted - is that still in the spirit of F/LOSS?
No, but this is irrelevant to any of the currently discussed situations.
> If the other maintainers fork the project and continue without that one toxic maintainer, are they following the spirit of F/LOSS
To have this argument requires accepting your framing around "toxic maintainers" which is probably not very productive. But of course forking projects to do your own thing is entirely in the spirit.
Regardless, though, that is not what people are objecting to. For example, an XLibre project wiki was defaced with disparaging comments, including by Jordan Petridis (deeply involved with both GNOME and Xorg) (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/346#issuecomment-...). This was highly unprofessional and XLibre should not have to deal with it regardless of what you think about the politics of anyone involved.
This is S-tier rage bait, I commend you.
Cognitive dissonance creates pain, pain creates anger.
Thank you, dollar store Yoda
This is like people suddenly getting mad at the band Rage Against the Machine for being political after listening to them for years
Absolutely not. DHH is someone I will never support, and I like knowing what projects he works on so that I can avoid them. Everything is political, whether we like it or not. Especially OSS.
His views are not just differences in tax policy, I find them grotesque, and I am glad people are aware of who is behind Omarchy and Hyprland so they can make informed decisions about whether to use them or not.
why is Hyprland being thrown in next to Omarchy? They're completely different levels of bad. The lead dev of Hyprland is in trouble for something minor his unpaid discord mod did and he has apologized years ago.
So what happens if someone is "informed" but chooses to use this software anyways?
They're automatically a piece of shit too. Their software projects are also banned. Any forges hosting their software: be prepared to be @'d in unkind tweets. Any CPU executing such software is by extension also a bigot.
Would you mind elaborating, for those of us uninformed.
https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and...
> US politics has been pretty fascist lately.
It's gonna be a waste of time for anyone who doesn't already agree with this statement to continue past this first sentence.
> Well, dhh considers torrents outdated (I’m not kidding, check the tweet), so it’s only officially being offered as a single download from a Cloudflare server. Which sounds cool until you’re on a weak-ass connection in constant danger of dropping halfway through the download.
That has nothing to do with bittorrent vs http; use a download manager instead of a browser.
> But Omarchy is a reminder that we live in a world where software isn’t just software, but the people who make it.
I get people are totally within their rights to ban movies/software/sports, etc. for creators whose beliefs they disagree with. However, software is the people who make it? I rarely, if ever, know the authors who create software or what they believe in.
Even putting the "ethics" of it aside, I think Omarchy is destined to go the way of LARBS. Many Linux distros are r/unixporn on the outside and a complete trainwreck on the inside. Regolith, Archlabs, Manjaro, dozens of distros have tried the "i3 but it's not like having teeth pulled" gimmick and it never works.
Much like LARBS, if I ever see you using Omarchy I just have to assume you don't know what you're doing. You can install Arch and rice i3wm in literally 10 minutes if your SSD and WiFi is fast enough.
For me, it's not about ricing. I find Omarchy to be an incredibly productive setup, from the launchers for webapps to the focus on TUIs.
I'm conflicted about the drama and still learning more about it, so not ready to draw a conclusion yet. But Omarchy is definitely a very, very fun experience for me.
Granted, I've heavily customized it and am using hy3 for i3-like capabilities, so whatever path out of this for me is likely to i3wm or sway.
And, fwiw, I've been running linux since the late 90s, and most of that as my primary OS (with a decade-ish period of macOS I'd rather forget). I know what I'm doing.
It's performative to it's core. In the next release they will probably add a matrix screensaver, burning windows and hack a gibson in the release video.
Nerds having fun playing around sounds really terrible. To the guillotine.
you do realize it already comes with a matrix screensaver, right?
Saying people who use Omarchy don't know what they're doing feels elitist. If you agree with DHH's opinions it's just fine, some people don't want to fuck with shit, they just want to get to work.
[flagged]
Read his blog and stop acting like it's all made up. He has himself said a ton of vile far-right stuff, and if you're actually acting in good faith, which I doubt, it's easy to find this stuff.
Opinions and speech have consequences, and while he is able to say what he wants, everyone else is just as able to denounce what he says and avoid his projects.
Have you got some examples? Because it seems like people can on cherry pick things that when reading his blog turn out to be not true.
As to whether this DHH person has said any 'vile far-right stuff' I do not know since I don't know the character, am not interested in this distribution - plain Debian + Xmonad does just fine for me - and do not want my operating system to dictate my politics in any way. But... there is always that but, isn't there?
For years, nay decades by now it has been practice to label those who do not toe the Party line and follow whatever diktat handed down from on high on any number of subjects as 'Nazi', 'Fascist', "${identity_group}phobe" (this needs double quotes for expansion to work), to throw bucketfuls of epithets at those who refuse to obey the order to put black squares on their web things, who dare to insist that war X was in fact started by party Y, that a hulking man with a bulge in his pants is in fact just that and not a woman, etcetera.
...and hardly anybody, here or elsewhere in 'polite society' dared to say anything about it for fear of being labelled themselves, here on this site for fear of being greyed out or shadow-banned. So DHH says nasty things? That is quite possible. If it is so he is just like all the others who say nasty things like I described above. He may even aim his remarks at some of the same people, quite possibly so because those who think for themselves are often disliked by those who want to do their thinking for them.
Think for yourself, don't leave that to others.
Read his blog, thought for myself, he's said vile stuff. Not sure where all this "party line" stuff is coming from.
I've been reading the latest few pages of his blog (especially the touchy stuff) and it's opinions largely in line with mainstream conservatism in most of the developed world: not everyone is a Nazi, take pride in your flag and nation, have kids, "woke" / DEI / affirmative action is bad, migration in Europe is a crisis.
These are not taboo or even uncommon topics and many have majority support depending on where you're from (the national flag is less controversial in Canada than the UK; woke is dying faster in the UK than Canada.)
I don't agree with all of it, but I've not seen anything "beyond the pale" - simply someone voicing political opinions in a civilized way. And I'm not sure what else I would expect. My own wife doesn't share all of my political beliefs, yet this is the expectation for people who contribute to FLOSS, and other parts of our lives?
I quite enjoy living in a pluralistic liberal democracy where I can interact with, befriend, and live side by side with people whom see the world differently than I do. And I especially appreciate that this extends even to the strongest topics and religion. People shouldn't avoid code for its creator's beliefs any more than they should boycott a coffee shop because the barista is of a different religion.
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