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A leadership crisis in the Nix community

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Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#261

Post by steve1977 »

_cenw wrote: post #207
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.

This is missing the point in the same way that anti-capitalists sometimes get told to just not use money. Or critics of colonialism to just live somewhere else. There are things too essential to boycott - whether we personally like them or their history. It's also a lazy retort that doesn't quite interact with the substance of the critique.

> This is missing the point in the same way that anti-capitalists sometimes get told to just not use money.

Except that's not what I'm doing. It's more like I'm telling anti-capitalists not to trade stock options in order to buy Porsches.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#262

Post by steve1977 »

davidgerard wrote: post #253
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.

Yet you participate in society. Curious!

Straw man

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#263

Post by colinsane »

steve1977 wrote: post #258
colinsane wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't disagree with this. it takes care to figure out how to actually share the commons. despite my very obvious (at this point) anti-state motivations for being involved in open source, i've actually kept that discourse away from the NixOS spaces for two years. it's only after Anduril is reshaping those spaces to be pro-military that i bring my own world views into this space overtly. i'm not certain of the ideal…

I think these are very fundamental issues with open source in general. Or even with "open anything" probably, including societies. If you want something to be open, you have to accept it will also be open to entities and ideas you don't like. If you don't want that, you don't actually want "open". One way out of this specific situation would probably be a fork, which I suspect is what will happen. But forking is inte…

> If you want something to be open, you have to accept it will also be open to entities and ideas you don't like. If you don't want that, you don't actually want "open".

sure, but i worry people see a single label like "open source" and derive a book-long prescriptivist explanation for the thing instead of seeing that it's just an incomplete, fuzzy short-hand. i don't care about "open source". i care (among other things) that when my environment isn't the way i like it, i have the power to improve it -- and in the digital space being able to access/modify the code is how i do that. if one were to bring that interpretation to a physical space, people would apply a much different label to it, even if it meant the same thing to everyone involved. "open source" is just a label: not a map.

> One way out of this specific situation would probably be a fork, which I suspect is what will happen.

one final thing from me: i believe hyprland (mentioned earlier) is a fork of sway, and despite the lead devs of the two being rather at odds with each other... the projects in fact still collaborate, just at a distance, on a common upstream (wlroots). alternately, `rofi` is very adamant to remain X11-only, and there's a sustained fork of it for wayland. but because it's plugin-based, a very large amount of contributions happen in areas completely unaffected by this split.

"forking", in the colloquial duplicate-the-codebase sense is just the most callous manner by which to provide separate spaces for those who can't share a space. plenty of projects out there are full of the same type of disagreements we see in NixOS, and have effectively forked (i.e. provided separate spaces or brands where there otherwise would be only one) but either did so very early on (by adopting something like a plugin model) or did so in a behind-the-scenes manner (by splitting components into separate spaces). i hope that's not too wishy-washy: i believe the technical structures and the social structure of NixOS will eventually settle into some convergent equilibrium, and i believe the result will be better if we're intentional in that process.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#264

Post by jijijijij »

someplaceguy wrote: post #256
jijijijij wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sponsorship with the attached advertisement is very different than "used by". Don't be silly. Are you even aware, I am referencing the issue of a Nix conference hosted at a German university, or are you in political autopilot drive-by mode? I linked a Wikipedia article, read it, if you're genuinely interested and not debating in bad faith.

> Sponsorship with the attached advertisement is very different than "used by". Don't be silly. Sure, but what does that have to do with the Civil clause that you mentioned? It doesn't say anything about sponsorship, but it does say about "used by": "Any participation of science and research with military use or purpose must be rejected". Obviously, this cannot be true, since it can be applied to anything that is use…

Damn you got Germany good. It's all collapsing now, mensa shoot-outs, marching bands playing on public radio, students getting lectured by ICMBs.

I was just giving an example of a wider sentiment on MIC involvement outside the US. The specifics don't matter at all. In much of Europe working for or with MIC is not widely accepted and makes many people uneasy.

To point is cultural ignorance in an international project.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#265

Post by someplaceguy »

jijijijij wrote: post #264
someplaceguy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sponsorship with the attached advertisement is very different than "used by". Don't be silly. Sure, but what does that have to do with the Civil clause that you mentioned? It doesn't say anything about sponsorship, but it does say about "used by": "Any participation of science and research with military use or purpose must be rejected". Obviously, this cannot be true, since it can be applied to anything that is use…

Damn you got Germany good. It's all collapsing now, mensa shoot-outs, marching bands playing on public radio, students getting lectured by ICMBs. I was just giving an example of a wider sentiment on MIC involvement outside the US. The specifics don't matter at all. In much of Europe working for or with MIC is not widely accepted and makes many people uneasy. To point is cultural ignorance in an international project.

I've lived in 3 EU countries and visited and known people from many more and while it's true most people would be against most wars, I don't think most people would be against a MIC sponsorship for an open source conference.

Airbus alone employs 40,000 people in the defense sector and there are many, many more MIC companies in Europe where many people are happy to work at (for the record, I'm not one of them). Also, all European countries have a military and buy weapons, and probably all of them also manufacture some weapons or others (microstates being the exception). Some of them even have mandatory drafts, I think.

As an example, I'd be shocked if an Airbus sponsorship would ever be rejected in Europe (perhaps Germany being the exception now that I'm familiar with the Civil clause).

Honestly, you sound like someone with a heavy anti-US and anti-MIC bias (and admittedly, I'm also known to take pleasure in anti-US and anti-MIC prejudices, but my concerns don't intersect this particular scenario at all).

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#266

Post by jijijijij »

someplaceguy wrote: post #265
jijijijij wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn you got Germany good. It's all collapsing now, mensa shoot-outs, marching bands playing on public radio, students getting lectured by ICMBs. I was just giving an example of a wider sentiment on MIC involvement outside the US. The specifics don't matter at all. In much of Europe working for or with MIC is not widely accepted and makes many people uneasy. To point is cultural ignorance in an international project.

I've lived in 3 EU countries and visited and known people from many more and while it's true most people would be against most wars, I don't think most people would be against a MIC sponsorship for an open source conference. Airbus alone employs 40,000 people in the defense sector and there are many, many more MIC companies in Europe where many people are happy to work at (for the record, I'm not one of them). Also,…

There is still a massive difference between gigacorp Airbus, Siemens, SpaceX, ... or whoever does defense stuff as a side hustle, and a pure defense company like Anduril or Rheinmetall to plaster their logo onto things, or recruit at events. There is no plausible deniability with these companies' intentions and product consequences.

To me at least, there is even a difference between the military and private companies profiting off war and suffering. I would rather have the Bundeswehr around than Anduril. Just because it's something of a necessary evil, doesn't mean I respect the people who seek this career, who want to engineer and sell death.

My stance on the issue is irrelevant. The devision caused in the Nix community was predictable. It was objectively an idiotic idea considering cultural and consequential differences. Even a pro-MIC person should realize this.

And let's not forget the conflict of interest of Nix's VIPs here in this particular matter, greatly shading any presumption of good-faith arguments. It's been wildly stupid.

And lastly, FYI, these sponsorships do have strings attached, especially when money matters:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1338390/darpa-pulls-fu...

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#267

Post by ndriscoll »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #239
oivey wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Be the change you want to see within companies. Of course, these companies can - and have - fire the activist employees as well if they become too obstructing, like the ones that were protesting Google Cloud doing business with Israel: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133700/google-fires-28-...

An employee isn't going to change Google to exit the mass surveillance and mass propaganda businesses any sooner than they're going to change Raytheon to exit the missile business. It's fundamental to what the company does.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#268

Post by zer00eyz »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #242
zer00eyz wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that rational: Do you eat food, drink coffee, chocolate. Do you avail yourself of modern pharmacology. Everything you do upholds a status quo of human suffering. You posting on HN is a political statement, from a place of privilege, by that rational. It's a software project, dont make it political and it will be successful.

Yet you participate in society. Curious.

Yes from a place of massive privilege, just like you, fellow hacker news user.

One that comes at the expense of 1000's of years of marginalized and disenfranchised groups. One that comes at the elimination of entire branches of the family tree.

It's a coin toss that you have neanderthal and densoivan DNA. Those ancestors that we raped and murdered off the face of the earth. And then did that to each other for 1000's of years...

Regardless of what political or social values you believe the reality is that no matter how you envision the world working we're going to have to get in line. Be that for food or iPhones. And a line means there is someone at the back.

It's poor form to complain about the millions of people in front of you when there are billons of them looking at your asshole.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#269

Post by hamandcheese »

_cenw wrote: post #206
hamandcheese wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The quality of Nix packages for Darwin is quite bad compared to Linux though, I don't think there's a core maintainer that runs Nix on Darwin.

By quality do you mean quantity? Sure some packages are missing on Darwin, but those that aren't don't seem "worse" in any way.
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