Ask HN: How can DigitalOcean not afford $50, but can afford $3M to Omarchy?

Posted by dpmartinez 3 hours ago

For the life of me, I don't understand how DigitalOcean can't afford a $50 a month sponsorship to GNOME and Flatpak but can afford $3M to Omarchy. [0]

Not only that, DigitalOcean cancelled their $50 a month sponsorship to GNOME and Flatpak.

To put this in perspective, it would take 5,000 years for GNOME and Flatpak to reach the $3M figure DigitalOcean has given to Omarchy.

How does this make any sense?

[0] https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/117241534134006167

Comments

Comment by db48x 2 hours ago

It has nothing to do with what they can afford. Just because someone can afford an expense does not mean that they are obligated to spend the money. They simply decided not to donate to GNOME any more.

Comment by dpmartinez 33 minutes ago

This is what is wrong with the world today.

Comment by skrtskrt 1 hour ago

Same reason Framework donates to far-right devs. Ideological alignment.

Comment by orsorna 2 hours ago

All signs point to these donations being strictly ideologically motivated, and not because of the alleged merits Omarchy totes. I could further argue how sad it is that efforts like these receive tons of money versus struggling FOSS projects, all for a strictly non-technical reason.

Comment by grepex 2 hours ago

What signs point to these donations being strictly ideologically motivated? It seems more like it is about Omarchy's reach. It has clout right now. All donors stand to benefit from it by supporting it. Digital ocean especially. For an OS that aims to empower users with agents, they're going to need to host their projects somewhere. Gnome has no clout. It's boring and stable. I say this as someone who loves GNOME and uses it.

Comment by atmosx 1 hour ago

Some data: https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=popularity

CachyOS is No1 the last three months and is LLM friendly. Debian is the underlying OS for a bunch of distros and its more popular.

The donations are 100% budy-budy and rich kids rubbing shoulders. Nothing else / more than that.

That said, it’s their money. They use it as they please. At the same time, trying to see everything through capitalistic lenses is sort of myopic IMO.

Comment by viraptor 1 hour ago

1. That theme over the distro didn't need funding as such. It's not providing anything not easily achievable without it. It doesn't need to hire highly paid full time engineers either.

2. Companies, or rather mostly CEOs donating are the usual circle of questionable characters where you can just search for "why is (name) problematic".

They're basically buddies donating to DHH not the project. The only ones that make sense are the tokens from AI companies to be used in actual development.

Gnome has lots of issues that still need to be fixed. Even if you're happy with it, you could find something on the bugtracker that you'd really like addressed. It's basically like seeing a house being built by a big crew, then someone completely unrelated painting the front doors and getting paid more than all of them and credited for the house as a whole.