1Password faces customer and staff backlash over $300,000 Omarchy pledge

A donation that landed badly

1Password is weathering a customer revolt after pledging $300,000 to the nonprofit behind Omarchy, an Arch-based Linux distribution built by David Heinemeier Hansson, the Ruby on Rails creator and 37signals co-founder widely known as DHH. According to The Verge, the password manager is now listed as a "distinguished corporate patron" of the Omacom Foundation, the organization that stewards Omarchy.

The backlash came fast. A widely shared post by Andrew Lilley Brinker, titled to accuse 1Password of supporting the ethnic cleansing of Europe, went viral, and users across social media began asking for replacement password managers. Writing on birchtree.me, a longtime customer described emailing the company to say he was looking for an alternative, while admitting that 1Password's polish on the Mac, and Apple Passwords' lack of Android support, makes switching harder than it sounds.

Why the reaction was predictable

As The Verge notes, DHH's rhetoric is not new. In 2023, Duke University Libraries dropped Basecamp, citing harms it attributed to the leadership of parent company 37signals, DHH's attacks on DEI programs, and The Verge's own reporting on Basecamp's ban on political and societal discussion at work.

This year the posts have escalated. In a July entry titled "Wolves, sheep, and gypsies," DHH likened immigrants to wolves and wrote that when Roma people occupy public spaces, they should be deported — language The Verge characterizes as appearing to call for ethnic cleansing in Europe.

Inside 1Password

The unhappiness is not only external. The Verge has learned that employees pushed back internally, and both CEO David Faugno and co-founder Roustem Karimov posted messages to staff about concerns raised by the "polarizing" nature of DHH.

Their tones differed. In a Slack message obtained by The Verge, Karimov downplayed the racist writings, telling staff that people hold different personal opinions and that some colleagues are afraid to speak up for fear of being personally attacked. Faugno instead tried to reassure employees that the company rejects hateful, dehumanizing or exclusionary views, including those DHH has expressed publicly, and stressed that the contribution went to the Omacom Foundation rather than an individual — while acknowledging that Omarchy is associated with its founder and that the donation is not an endorsement of him.

Emoji reactions on the internal threads suggested staff were unconvinced, and an all-hands meeting is planned. The Verge says it asked 1Password for comment twice, on August 31 and again on the day of publication, and received no reply in time.

The business logic on display

The motivation appears partly commercial. Faugno told staff that Omarchy has grown to be the second most used Linux distribution among 1Password customers, and The Verge describes it as one of the company's significant customer environments.

1Password is also a small fish in this particular pond. The Omacom Foundation counts 12 founding patrons who each contributed $1 million, among them Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey and Shopify's Tobias Lütke — who, as The Verge points out, recently endorsed the idea that wealthy Canadians should have more voting power than poorer ones. DHH himself also put in $1 million.

Why it matters

Two things make this more than a routine sponsorship flare-up. First, 1Password sells trust: it is a security vendor holding customers' most sensitive data, and a $300,000 pledge that many users read as a seal of approval for a figure who has called for deporting minorities cuts directly against that brand. Second, the "we funded the foundation, not the person" defense exposes a real tension in open source: when a distribution is explicitly the personal, opinionated project of its founder, customers struggle to accept the separation. With password managers largely interchangeable on features, goodwill is a moat — and both paying customers and 1Password's own employees are signalling that it is being spent.