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A leadership crisis in the Nix community

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Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#271

Post by pxc »

ndriscoll wrote: post #161
fabrice_d wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anduril started by building tech to hunt poor people crossing the southern border of the US. Their CEO is a right wing extremist. How you can say this is the same as supporting Ukraine against Russia aggression is obviously telling more about you than about anyone else.

Of all the things to be upset with a "defense" company over, actual literal defense (as in border monitoring and sensors) is a funny one. That stood out to me in the open letter as well. Why not the weapons systems that are apparently "somewhere between an autonomous drone and a reusable missile"? Would people be as upset at Boeing as a sponsor, or would that just be boring? Would people be as upset if Google or Face…

Because people die crossing the border, and the whole enterprise of militarizing the border and criminalizing unauthorized crossings of individuals is a historical extreme which has only recently emerged.

When its naming was honest, the Department of Defense was called the Department of War. It's that notion of 'defense' we should have in mind when we ask whether the 'defense' industry should have a role in policing the border.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#272

Post by pxc »

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…

> The LWN article indicates 24 maintainers have removed themselves, which appears to be ~0.7% of the maintainer list. Were these people particularly impactful? Is there an actual crisis here?

Maybe a handful of them. One of them was an extremely prolific (#3 contributor to Nixpkgs) and active contributor that no doubt everyone will miss. There's at least one other name I recognize on the list. But most of them are pretty small-time maintainers so far.

> I also don't really get it; are they going to use a different (worse) OS because of this?

They're saying they're going to fork. There's one fork emerging already, but idk if it'll be the one. I hope a productive and usable fork does arise (and that eventually it can rejoin Nix) but I'm pessimistic that any will survive.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#273

Post by pxc »

ndriscoll wrote: post #267
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The relevant comment is misinformed. The person they're referring to without naming is Irene Knapp, who left Google (presumably over her qualms). She's named in some press articles about the Google walkouts in 2020, e.g.: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/18/magazine/goog...

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#274

Post by pxc »

fabrice_d wrote: post #204
busterarm wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of people die preventable deaths every year trying to cross that border. Exposure, dehydration, drowning, etc. If you don't know anything about where these people are you can't do anything to help them. Even if you support open borders, this technology is essential.

How many of them were helped thanks to Anduril products?

The way this actually works is that militarization occurs most heavily in geographically favorable parts of the border, so that the least surveilled parts are the most physically dangerous to cross. In this way, increased technological sophistication at the border increases the number of deaths in border crossings.

Border Patrol isn't out there rescuing thirsty migrants. In fact, they're known for destroying life-saving water caches and brutalizing activists who try to provide water or medical aid to people wandering that part of the desert.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#275

Post by fabrice_d »

hagbard_c wrote: post #260
fabrice_d wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anduril started by building tech to hunt poor people crossing the southern border of the US. Their CEO is a right wing extremist. How you can say this is the same as supporting Ukraine against Russia aggression is obviously telling more about you than about anyone else.

You seem to have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker. Not every non-'democrat' is a 'right-wing extremist', they are just... not 'democrats'. As to the use of their products on the border that mostly speaks against those products given the 7+ million who have made it across those borders in the last 3 years - or maybe they are not used to 'hunt poor people crossing the southern border

People who donate to Trump are not just non-democrats. Stop your bullshit.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#276

Post by jbboehr »

brabel wrote: post #135
ddellacosta wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit hidden in their about page: GNU Guix provides state-of-the-art package management features such as transactional upgrades and roll-backs, reproducible build environments, unprivileged package management, and per-user profiles. It uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, but packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language—which makes it nicely hackable. h…

If I understand correctly, they're saying that the low level stuff works the way it works in Nix, not that they use Nix for that. I am aware Guix did fork Nix but from what I've read, there's almost nothing left in Guix that still uses the initial Nix code?

I am extremely out of the loop, but I believe until somewhat recently it still used nix-daemon and the corresponding drv format, but it may have since been rewritten.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#277

Post by hagbard_c »

fabrice_d wrote: post #275
hagbard_c wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker. Not every non-'democrat' is a 'right-wing extremist', they are just... not 'democrats'. As to the use of their products on the border that mostly speaks against those products given the 7+ million who have made it across those borders in the last 3 years - or maybe they are not used to 'hunt poor people crossing the southern border

People who donate to Trump are not just non-democrats. Stop your bullshit.

First: shouting insults does not make your argument stronger, it merely suggests a lack of content.

People who donate to Trump are mostly people who are fed up with the way the USofA is being run by the current incumbent, i.e. they are people who are fed up with the bullshit. The mere fact that you don't like Trump as a person does not make those people non-'democrats' (you forgot the quotes around that word, 'democrats'). The type of rhetoric you're spouting polarises the discourse and does nothing for the democratic (sans quotes) process. May the best candidate win, granted the choice goes between two sub-optimal candidates [1] but that seems to be the way things go in that/your(?) country.

As an aside, can you tell me what irks you so much about Trump's policies - not Trump as a person, his policies - which makes you think so bad of people who support him? I think it safe to assume those people support him because they liked his policies, not because they are enamoured of his personality. Now that even CNN - not directly a MAGA propaganda outlet - publishes that More than half, 55%, of all Americans say they see Trump’s presidency as a success while [r]egarding Biden’s presidency so far, 61% say it’s a failure [2] there does seem to be a majority of people who support those policies versus the current ones.

[1] Biden being a long past hist due date habitual liar and grifter who has made his family profit wildly from his near half century in government, Trump being an egomaniacal billionaire who likes nothing better than to be at the centre of attention and is more than willing to let silly details like truth slide to get to that position.

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/28/politics/biden-trump-nost...

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#279

Post by bfrog »

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…

This is the FSF situation in a nutshell, gcc has slowly been eroding in favor of llvm and clang because of this.

FSF donor listing/sponsorship listing is... spartan at best.

Compare this to Linux Foundation and LLVM Foundation, and generally wide swaths of both corporate and personally interested parties contributing time and money and tell me that trying to be idealistic is good for FOSS. The evidence I see is to the contrary.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#280

Post by bfrog »

duped wrote: post #118
bin_bash wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most US citizens seem to agree something needs to be done there regardless of political lean? 74% according to NBC polling (surely not right wing crazy land) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24172785-230343-nbc-...

Seems like a pretty easy win for a majority of voters. Militarization shouldn't be the only imho, but some kind of process needs to happen there. People paying coyotes and dying in the river and desert is wrong. People being stuffed in cages and treated poorly is wrong. Letting everyone in unchecked and unfettered is also wrong.

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