A leadership crisis in the Nix community • Hacker News Board

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#221

Post by zer00eyz » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 12:34 AM UTC

Zetaphor wrote: post #211

zer00eyz wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master". Master craftsman? Master mold? Master copy? Head Master... Just because this word was used in relation to slavery doesn't curtail its use in language, removing it only serves to focus its "power". Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have…

> Master craftsman? Master mold? Master copy? Head Master... Just because this word was used in relation to slavery doesn't curtail its use in language, removing it only serves to focus its "power". Except none of those examples are relevant comparisons. It's well documented that the reason the default branch name was master traces back to Bitkeeper, which was using the master/slave nomenclature. > Also, thats not ho…

[flagged]

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#222

Post by soraminazuki » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 2:15 AM UTC

dwb wrote: post #114

marginalia_nu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the GP nailed it. The thing is, no one in the community has been promoting fascism and bigotry. There are, however, plenty of insinuations. That's why there's strong opposition to this kind of thing.

Any other topic would've equally been as problematic. Is it a bad thing to target "terrorism" as well? How about "human trafficking?" Can't you please think of the children!

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#223

Post by soraminazuki » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 2:31 AM UTC

dwb wrote: post #168

Macha wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eelco here is not accused of behaving in a facist or bigoted manner though. The accusation is two steps away already, specifically not being sufficiently supportive of the means of a process which has prevention of facist or bigoted behaviour as one of its goals.

Indeed. Is that not a valid complaint?

Not every policy claiming to prevent (insert something heinous here) is a good one.

The PATRIOT Act is a terrible law. Opposing it doesn't make you a terrorist. But you would've been accused of being one nonetheless if you opposed it in 2001.

It's easy to see why many people wouldn't want to actively get into such a controversy. But even that is being used as grounds for kicking someone out.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#224

Post by someplaceguy » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 2:43 AM UTC

jijijijij wrote: post #213

jonringer117 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the activity around changing the status quo was done in a github issue [1]. Which sat around for many months after proposing the Apache Software Foundation's sponsorship policy of "state of nexus". Which didn't give a basis in which to exclude Anduril from sponsoring again. Obviously there's the "people were angry last time, they will likely be angry this time". But that's projecting personal/political views in…

Well, you should know, since you have been involved with both Nix and Anduril, right?! No MIC sponsoring would have been the right course of action. No matter your sympathies, or alliances in your case. To even think of the sponsorship as a valid idea is US centric ignorance. Outside the US people don't get the "Thank you for your service" indoctrination and are way, way more reluctant to work with the MIC. If you kn…

> In particular the civil clause demands that members of the university reject research projects and funding which could serve weapon technology.

Wait, what? Are you saying German universities are forbidden from contributing to Nix/NixOS, which is used by Anduril?

Or say, the RISC-V ecosystem, which may be used as chips driving military weapons?

... or the Linux kernel? Heck, any OS at all?

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#225

Post by someplaceguy » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 3:18 AM UTC

ohwellhere wrote: post #54

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.

This is a great point, and perhaps we do need a new popular license or set of variants that exclude certain industries. "MIT-Peaceful" perhaps. I know very many people who would refuse to work for certain companies and in certain industries — and have rejected certain projects — but would happily contribute to something MIT licensed that would end up in those systems anyway!

> perhaps we do need a new popular license or set of variants that exclude certain industries.

Such a license would not be considered open source or Free Software.

Someone else posted this link about a similar situation in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Software_lic...

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#226

Post by oivey » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 3:20 AM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #187

fabrice_d wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I believe it's acceptable to be upset at any company that undermines democracy. That very likely includes most big tech companies, and absolutely includes Google and Facebook.

I suppose what's interesting to me is why is no one (except maybe you) upset over e.g. this sponsorship list for LinuxCon: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/archive/2022/open-source-... with Google right there as a diamond sponsor and Meta as a platinum sponsor. IBM is also a diamond sponsor, and we've all heard about them and the literal Nazis (and the time they got a license exception for JSLint to be able to use…

An even bigger irony is that one of major community moderators who is mad is an “ethical software engineer” working at Google.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#227

Post by indrora » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:01 AM UTC

pantsforbirds wrote: post #122

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.

Something like that.

It's specifically for quotations that come from other sources and are presented verbatim; In the LWN UI settings: "These preferences affect how text that is quoted from other sources (press articles or whatever) in LWN news articles is rendered in your browser."

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#228

Post by steve1977 » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 4:29 AM UTC

colinsane wrote: post #208

steve1977 wrote: post #113

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.

i'm fascinated by this because a lot of my involvement in open source is a pretty direct reaction against state actors like NSA who undermine my privacy. and if i wanted to i could point out that the military took other things away from our field too, like Alan Turing. but ultimately, i think the argument is just that any institution which dumps a lot of money into a space deserves loyalty for that alone, but where's…

> then it's completely reasonable, arguably expected, for you to act on principles higher than money.

Well that was kind of my point. I see people act on principles of morality when it doesn't negatively affect their convenience and at the same time ignore those principles when it affects their convenience. For me that is the definition of a double standard.

That's it. I'm not saying we should put these people in jail ;)

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#229

Post by solatic » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 5:06 AM UTC

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #35

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…

> 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.

> Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.

It's a non-sequitur, why have a problem with Anduril being advertised but not have a problem with Anduril using the software (i.e. because it's FOSS)? Anduril also gets much more value out of, and furthers their mission much more by, using the software than they do from advertising. And if you have a problem with software being used for military purposes, why are you contributing to a project with an LGPL license instead of one which forbids military purposes?

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#230

Post by steve1977 » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 5:54 AM UTC

myaccountonhn wrote: post #163

steve1977 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a lot of the technologies were explicitly designed with military use in mind. It’s not like some unintended and unplanned side effect. So a better analogy would be swords that can also be used to cut fruit instead of killing maybe.

But we’re in a thread about leadership crisis of nix here. Was nix designed explicitly for military in mind?

I don't know. The designer and founder of nix at least does not seem to explicitly exclude military use.

From what I understand, this is actually the root cause of the conflict here; the founder of the project seems to be fine with military use, some other members of the community are not.