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

2 points by dpmartinez ↗ HN
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.

How does this make any sense?

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

17 comments

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db48x
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.
dpmartinez
This is what is wrong with the world today.
db48x
You object to other people deciding how to spend their own money? In that case I object to how you’re spending your money. I now obligate you to donate $50 a month of your own money to GNOME. You can afford it, so you cannot object.
soraminazuki
It is perfectly reasonable to object to the social causes that large powerful companies decide to support. It's telling that a company decides to fund millions of dollars to an ideologically motivated right wing influence campaign targeting open source communities, which by the way mainly profits off other people's work, while pulling far more smaller amounts of funding from projects that do the actual work.
KetoManx64
The only thing wrong in the world is leftists believing they should be financially supported for vomiting their ideologies all over their projects. The day that GNOME goes bankrupt could not come fast enough.
orsorna
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.
grepex
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.
atmosx
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.

KetoManx64
> CachyOS is No1 the last three months and is LLM friendly.

I have not seen a single post of anyone from CachyOS talking about how to drive your install with agents.

CachyOS also openly supports parents transitioning their kids and bans anyone that says a peep otherwise.

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

Means that you haven't been looking. Your 100% figure is incorrect for the mere fact of Omarchy having hundreds of ordinary people as patrons. https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/omarchy-patronage

soraminazuki
The most heavily astroturfed distro on earth right now gathering hundreds of small donations have zero bearing on the bigger picture.
viraptor
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.

skrtskrt
Same reason Framework donates to far-right devs. Ideological alignment.
KetoManx64
> Ideological Alignment

I too align and want to do business with people who's entire online existance is NOT centered around "Everyone who politically disagrees with me is a racist fascist and I want people to cause harm to them and I will ban them from my forums if they disagree at me at all about my politics"

skrtskrt
Sweeping Nazi shit under the rug is one thing, sending them free money is even more pathetic.
npn
People do love auditing everyone else’s donations.
nerdyadventurer
May be it is because of DHH. Not sure why did they canceled measly $50 for Gnome.