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A leadership crisis in the Nix community

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Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#111

Post by eduction »

> In short, Dolstra is acting as "the effective Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL)" of the project, even though the NixOS Foundation's charter doesn't grant anyone that authority.

This is silly - authority in a software community doesn’t come from a nonprofit charter. Being founder is also no guarantee of authority, but it is more relevant because it’s rooted in actions and outcomes.

The more I observe from the sidelines of open source the less attention I pay to these sorts of disputes. In the end they are all adjudicated by delivering useful software and updates quickly to end users. Whoever does that better “wins.”

Sometimes this is the founder of the project and sometimes not. In general I think it’s a mistake to think anyone cares all the much about anything beyond the license, capabilities of the software, and how quickly the community/maintainers fix bugs. They may say they do but people who are taking software for free are in no position to dictate much and at the end of the day they know and accept it (especially something like who sponsors a conference, who is the keynote speaker (Rails incident) etc)

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#112

Post by ParetoOptimal »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #74
Laaas wrote: post #11

I think it’s important to make clear that the letter is mostly bogus and almost libelous. Check into any one claim, and you’ll find it’s not the entire story. This however is true: > The Foundation board has unrepresentative composition relative to the community because, due to our count, all current members are cisgender, white-passing, men, one of whom has done military service, and one other (Eelco) likely relies…

> one other (Eelco) likely relies on undisclosed military-tech work. While this may be technically true, the framing seems disingenuous, unless I am missing something. I have not been following the situation closely. My understanding is that Eelco's company, Determinate Systems, _may_ have contracts with customers connected to the military-industrial complex, but I dislike the implication as it renders Eelco as a bad…

> My understanding is that Eelco's company, Determinate Systems, _may_ have contracts with customers connected to the military-industrial complex, but I dislike the implication as it renders Eelco as a bad-faith actor.

As chair of the foundation, Eelco should do what he can to avoid even the appearance of malfeasance, including declaring or denying conflicts of interest.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#113

Post by steve1977 »

People seem to forget that a lot if not most of IT has some form of military background/funding behind it.

Be it the first computers, the Internet, RISC CPUs, BSD UNIX and much much more.

You’re free not to like this fact of course, but then using the technologies anyway is a bit of a double standard.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#114

Post by dwb »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #79
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" Is targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" a bad thing?

Based on how these things have historically tuned out, yes. This is very problematic. The root of the problem is that it is basically impossible to defend yourself against the accusation that you are secretly a fascist. If you say yes, you admit to being a fascist, if you say no, you're a lying fascist. If you question why the accusation is levied against someone else, you're defending a fascist, if you speak out aga…

I don't get how this follows; no-one needs to be a secret anything, and the aim isn't even personal. Targeting "ideas rooted in fascism and bigotry" means to oppose the discursive ideas and concepts as they are put forth in the community, and the resulting concrete actions, that come from fascism and bigotry – specifically not the people or private thoughts.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#115

Post by nalllar »

HideousKojima wrote: post #66
danhor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that exactly what the free software movement is based upon? You can only use our software if you agree to share your source code modifications with the binary (death to proprietary software, very ideological) and you can only contribute if you agree if that.

>I've stated above some parts of my views about certain political issues unrelated to the issue of free software—about which of those activities are or aren't unjust. Your views about them might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs b…

People want them not to be advertised at official Nix events, not to bar them from using it. That wauld be impossible due to licensing so isn't on the table.

Would you require the FSF to accept a sponsorship from anyone and to advertise them in return?

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#116

Post by ndriscoll »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #38
danhor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that exactly what the free software movement is based upon? You can only use our software if you agree to share your source code modifications with the binary (death to proprietary software, very ideological) and you can only contribute if you agree if that.

> Isn't that exactly what the free software movement is based upon? You can only use our software if you agree to share your source code modifications with the binary (death to proprietary software, very ideological) and you can only contribute if you agree if that. "Well, you see... just keep all politics out of FOSS except for the important FOSS ones I agree with" ;)

Yes, when you scope a movement to just the thing it's about, you'll get a greater intersection of people who can agree on those ideals (i.e. actual intersectionality). If you check https://stallman.org/ you'll see that he's very opinionated on politics, probably moreso than almost all people (he has multiple things he writes about across the world every single day going back decades and maintains a list of assorted topics that mostly have nothing to do with software where he thinks we should change the law[0]. He's encouraged many boycotts over the years, and goes way further than most people to stick to them), but he wisely kept that movement focused on the thing it was supposed to be about, and in doing so was able to actually accomplish something.

[0] https://stallman.org/there-ought-to-be-a-law.html

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#117

Post by tripdout »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #62
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" Is targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" a bad thing?

When, for people pushing this targeting, fascism/bigotry means having a branch in your repo names master I absolutely believe targeting ideas rooted in fascism/bigotry is a bad thing.

On one hand, I struggle to think that people might actually care about switching "master" to "main", as opposed to making wider improvements to inclusivity.

On the other hand, I don't have a strong attachment at all to naming a branch "master" and can easily rename it without a second thought.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#118

Post by duped »

bin_bash wrote: post #107
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You really should not be in open source if you believe it is your purview to ideologically police the usage and contribution to your software. The issue here is one of sponsorship. Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised. If Anduril donated but wasn't listed as a sponsor and didn't have a booth, I bet many wouldn't have an issue.

What's the issue people have with Anduril? Is it just that they make defense equipment? My (possibly wrong) interpretation is that people feel we shouldn't make weapons. That we should just stop fighting entirely. This is clearly an extremist position, I don't think many people in the west think that we should (for example), completely blockade Ukraine from even buying weapons. Even if you believe we should stop manu…

> What's the issue people have with Anduril? Is it just that they make defense equipment?

It's that they sell surveillance equipment that's used at the US's southern border, the crisis at which is a hot political issue today.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#119

Post by hamandcheese »

aredox wrote: post #9

The main reason for the persistence of Nix despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives. Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense. *For example, wh…

I think the main reason actually is that nix supports more than just Linux - notably macOS.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#120

Post by ParetoOptimal »

busterarm wrote: post #61
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NO one wants to admit that the tyranny of leadership is probably a good thing for a projects success. I don't disagree, but it needs to be communicated upfront and transparent without some guise of it being anything else so that potential contributors can decide if it's right for them from the outset.

The very people decrying the lack of leadership transparency on the moderation team do their work behind closed doors, don't operate with transparency or consistency and disallow all meta discussion of their moderation work. Oh and ban anyone that openly disagrees with their values.

> The very people decrying the lack of leadership transparency on the moderation team do their work behind closed doors, don't operate with transparency or consistency and disallow all meta discussion of their moderation work.

This just isn't true. See "Transparency about jonringers suspension"[0] and also notice it's a suspension and not a ban. Note that Jon's post to reddit titled it a "ban".

Which side seems to be trying to stir things up here?

Also, before that discourse post there has always been a public moderation log here:

https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/c0f7744701cba40f0...

0: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-was-jon-ringer-banned-from...

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