1Password and 37signals are each putting $100,000 a year for the next three years into the Omacom Foundation, the nonprofit David Heinemeier Hansson set up to back his Omarchy Linux distribution. The two companies are the foundation’s first “Distinguished Corporate Patrons,” and their pledges take its funding to $12.6 million, Hansson announced on the Omarchy site.
Both have history with the project. Hansson, the Ruby on Rails creator and 37signals co-founder known as DHH, wrote that 1Password “has been part of Omarchy from day one” and is the first thing he installs on a new machine, “which is about three times a week these days!” Along with Dropbox, he called it one of the tools behind his “no backup, no cry” approach to setting up computers.
37signals, he wrote, “has been the incubation station for Omarchy since before it had a name.” The company has moved its whole technical team onto Omarchy and has been paying various bills on the way to the upcoming Quattro release. “Now the support is formal, through the foundation, on the same terms as everyone else.”
Hansson was explicit that the money doesn’t buy influence. “Corporate money and individual money all buy the same thing: recognition for being part of the mission. There’s no quid pro quo here,” he wrote, adding that Omarchy will keep making decisions based on “what makes for the very best malleable OS in the world.”
From $8 million to $12.6 million
The foundation launched earlier in August with $1 million each from eight patrons: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Dell Technologies chairman and CEO Michael Dell, Block chairman Jack Dorsey, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, 37signals CEO Jason Fried and Hansson himself, NERDS.xyz reported. “We’re going to make the prophecy of The Year of Linux on the Desktop come true,” Hansson said at the time. “All the pieces are now in place. Time to go all in!”
The nonprofit will hold Omarchy’s trademarks, pay for infrastructure and hosting, promote the project and fund the open source developers it depends on. Its first outside commitment is an exclusive three-year sponsorship, with an option for two more, of Vaxry, the developer of the Hyprland Wayland compositor that Omarchy’s desktop runs on, starting Oct. 10. Hyprland’s €5-a-month Hyprperks subscription will end and its perks will become free, It’s FOSS reported. The foundation has also become a premier sponsor of Quickshell, which Omarchy uses to build much of its interface.
Omarchy is built on Arch Linux and is unapologetically keyboard-driven, with tiled windows and launchers for command-line AI coding tools such as Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Gemini CLI. Companies that want to join 1Password and 37signals as patrons are asked to write to [email protected].
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