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A leadership crisis in the Nix community

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Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#121

Post by pantsforbirds »

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #40

> Anduril, a military contractor that uses NixOS, has repeatedly attempted to become a sponsor of NixCon, which did not go over well with the community Something similar happened in the Haskell community, where some people called for Anduril job postings to be removed. Nix is a software project, not a social movement. The goals of Nix are entirely separate from how the software is used. I really like Coinbase's state…

It's wild to see how much hate Anduril gets from the same people who have statements supporting Ukraine in their READMEs or have licenses preventing Russians from using their software.

How can you demand support for Ukraine, but then get upset by the people who are meeting actual needs for the war effort?

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#122

Post by pantsforbirds »

freedomben wrote: post #57

This is a meta comment, but the (apparent) style of using a different color (red) to indicate direct quotes is interesting. At first I found it confusing and a little distracting, but on the second pass where my goal was to cleanly separate the author's opinion from the sources, it was extremely helpful.

I wonder if the inspiration for this comes from Bibles? It's a common practice to have direct quotes from Jesus in red.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#123

Post by saulrh »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #23

Dolstra nailed it: > It is my opinion that it is not for us, as open source software developers, to decide whose views are valid and whose are not, and to allow or disallow project or conference participation as a result. 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. That notion is incompatible with the spirit of the ende…

It's like he didn't even read the letter. It's fact after fact, sourced and linked and screenshotted, demonstrating that Dolstra, the Foundation, and Anduril are engaged in toxic leadership that are concretely limiting the Nix Project's ability to build good software. It's not even about Anduril's business, it's about how they're at the center of a web of conflicts of interest that are producing poor software engineering decisions and driving away good contributors. The letter's authorship clearly understood that the obvious response was going to involve tone policing and complaints about "ideology" and went well out of their way to write the letter to address that avenue of attack - the whole first paragraph is about how it's not about ideology, the first sentence is that it's not about ideology, there are dozens of points about how it's not about ideology. It's all about observed cultural dynamics and results.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#124

Post by rgrmrts »

cycomanic wrote: post #109
rgrmrts wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the software licensing explicitly allows your work being used by anyone (as long as they adhere to the license). If you don't want your work to be used by entities you disagree with you can not contribute to the project or advocate for use of a different license.

The software licencing is also completely irrelevant here, nobody said that Anduril can't use Nix. The issue was that the community largely did not want them as sponsors. There is a very big difference to allowing someone (or some company) to use your software and wanting to participate in a conference where the same company is a sponsor.

I honestly don't understand what objecting to them as a sponsor does. Sponsorship benefits the project for everyone. Is the objection to both the sponsorship and their presence in the conference? Folks who don't want to engage with them at the conference can simply not engage with them.

Also AFAIK one of the conferences objected to their presence, so they weren't able to have a booth there. Individual participants are in their right to make these decisions and act on them (like that one conference did). What exactly is the outcome people want?

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#125

Post by HideousKojima »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #34
ordinaryradical wrote: post #23

Dolstra nailed it: > It is my opinion that it is not for us, as open source software developers, to decide whose views are valid and whose are not, and to allow or disallow project or conference participation as a result. 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. That notion is incompatible with the spirit of the ende…

It's very reasonable to not want your work used by arms dealers, and it is in fact your purview to "ideologically police" the uses your work is applied to. "If you don't want to help create war machines you can't contribute" is your solution, not mine. Historically the conventions of open source has been that use is completely without restriction, but there has always been conflict about that. The domain is new enoug…

>It's very reasonable to not want your work used by arms dealers

One man's arms dealer is another man's defense against death and destruction. I'm no fan of defense contractors for many reasons, but there is a simple reality that you need weapons, and lots of them, to defend yourself and your nation against aggressors, and someone has to build them. Imagine how much worse the war would be going for Ukraine if they didn't have advanced weaponry being provided to them by defense contractors.

If you don't want arms dealers using your work, then don't release it under an open source license.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#127

Post by ParetoOptimal »

tripdout wrote: post #117
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".

After that I changed my mind and name all of my branches main and give a little push to projects I'm part of to do the same.

Plus, words do have power:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51USLgPWhgc

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#128

Post by [deleted] »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #23

Dolstra nailed it: > It is my opinion that it is not for us, as open source software developers, to decide whose views are valid and whose are not, and to allow or disallow project or conference participation as a result. 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. That notion is incompatible with the spirit of the ende…

[deleted]

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#129

Post by bee_rider »

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…

Contributors to open source projects aren’t asking the question “should the thing be done,” they are asking the question “should I do the thing.” I think lots of people fall into the general bucket of “sure, the military is necessary for a country, but I don’t personally want to work on it.”

It is a weird sort of diffused understanding of responsibility (we all pay taxes and our representatives vote on whether or not we’ll do war, after all), but I think it is not that uncommon. Lots of people don’t seem to want to be unusually personally responsible for military applications, compared to their peers, I guess?

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#130

Post by colinsane »

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #40

> Anduril, a military contractor that uses NixOS, has repeatedly attempted to become a sponsor of NixCon, which did not go over well with the community Something similar happened in the Haskell community, where some people called for Anduril job postings to be removed. Nix is a software project, not a social movement. The goals of Nix are entirely separate from how the software is used. I really like Coinbase's state…

> Nix is a software project, not a social movement.

everyone loves to assert that Nix is this or that. whatever label you fight to place it under, it's a product of some thousands of people. whatever it actually is, it's underpinned by something social.

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