CSS-Tricks in Limbo While DigitalOcean Funds Omarchy: Patronage Politics in OSS
The story is still on the front page (182 points, 69 comments), and drilling the thread this cycle added three concrete developments:
Geoff Graham confirmed staff saw none of the acquisition money. When oefrha argued "Got acquired => got paid... If and how the money was divided between the people involved doesn't seem be public info," CSS-Tricks' lead editor replied with three words: "It wasn't divided." — first-hand confirmation that the ~$4M DigitalOcean paid for CSS-Tricks in 2022 went entirely to the previous owner, not to the people who built and wrote the site.
The Omarchy patronage pool is bigger than DO's $3M. sevenseacat points out Shopify — whose CEO is "like BFFs" with DHH — is a founding member of the Omacom Foundation, "donating a million dollars." Corporate patronage of Omarchy is consolidating into a foundation with multiple big-name backers.
The reputational cost is showing up as customer flight. micromacrofoot asks "what are people using instead of digital ocean now?" — the replies are a wall of Hetzner (one: "I don't want to rely on US hosting for my business"), plus Vultr and a Hetzner+Coolify+BunnyCDN stack explicitly moving off Vercel/AWS.
The core grievance remains boredpudding's: "One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding? You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up." The sharpest statement of the counter-position is draw_down's sarcasm: "I would have been okay with this state of affairs if the Omarchy guy had good politics. But he has the bad politics so I'm outraged." — which kicked off a long subthread on whether DHH's politics should color judgment of the funding (latexr: his reach "gives him the power to contribute to the normalisation of certain topics"; IslandRebel calls that "borderline delusional").
DigitalOcean itself remains publicly silent — the sale/revival/silence question stays open.