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A leadership crisis in the Nix community

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Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#61

Post by busterarm »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #51
zer00eyz wrote: post #26

NO one wants to admit that the tyranny of leadership is probably a good thing for a projects success. DDH, Linus, Poettering, Im sure someone is offended by hearing one of these names, but look at the status and reputation of their projects. Now go look at Wayland, or Rust who lack these guiding voices... Note that if you did in deep on these projects your likely going to need some popcorn to go with the soap opera l…

> 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.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#62

Post by rs_rs_rs_rs_rs »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #28
suddenclarity wrote: post #19

Skimming the letter makes it look like another attempt at pushing through their Code of Conduct (RFC98) targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry", whatever that means. Now going a step further by erasing the people in charge.

> 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.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#63

Post by meitham »

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…

Funny how the software community could not separate software from politics two years ago when the conflict started in Ukraine! Most GitHub projects started including the Ukraine's flag, and some companies like JetBrains closed their offices in Moscow!

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#64

Post by ParetoOptimal »

joepie91_ wrote: post #52
neuronexmachina wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised. I might be misunderstanding, but I thought Anduril was repeatedly rejected as a NixCon sponsor?

It's a bit more complex than that. They applied to be a sponsor twice; the community objected twice; the Foundation approved both. In one of those cases, the sponsorship was eventually rejected because the venue where the conference was held did not allow it.

Thanks for providing more detail and context. When you are well-versed in this Nix sponsorship/conflict of interest issue it can be had to disentangle what context need to be included to help other fully understand the situation.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#65

Post by gizmo »

joepie91_ wrote: post #47
gizmo wrote: post #24

I don't have any knowledge about nix, the community, about Eelco Dolstra, or about this particular drama. What I do know is that there is no such thing as "community leadership" and that extremely long diatribes about the flaws of the founder can be safely ignored. People who are unhappy with the community or the direction of nix should leave and start their own thing. They'll discover that building something is actu…

I imagine that the people who are unhappy about things are well aware of that, given that they generally are the people who have built NixOS to the point where it is now... It sure is remarkable how many people seem to be assuming that the people complaining must just be some outsiders with no involvement in the project. It's maybe worth asking yourself where that assumption comes from.

The letter is authored by "anonymous contributors", actually. This suggests the authors are minor contributors at the periphery of the project.

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#66

Post by HideousKojima »

danhor wrote: post #29
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…

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 banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might license a program to allow use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan's program might allow only use for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.

>The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task. Not only for the components you explicitly use, but also for the hundreds of components that they link with, invoke, or communicate with.

>How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing usage restrictions in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, straight, soft piece of cooked spaghetti. As one wag put it, this is “someone with a very small hammer seeing every problem as a nail, and not even acknowledging that the nail is far too big for the hammer.”

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#67

Post by Pannoniae »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #48
retool wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How is it slanderous to point out the board composition is not representative of the community. Seriously walk me through this one.

Mostly because they have double standards. If 100% of the board was "diverse" in some way, they would claim that it compensates for historical injustices or something. If they were truly serious about inclusion, it would be completely fine, but this is just authoritarian assholes hiding behind the veneer of "fighting against fascism" (in the document posted by @busterarm, some of these people even openly advocate doxxing their political opponents)

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#68

Post by rgrmrts »

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!

There are two licenses that include restrictions like that that I know of:

- https://github.com/raisely/NoHarm/blob/publish/LICENSE.md

- https://firstdonoharm.dev/

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#69

Post by salviati »

dzogchen wrote: post #33
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.

The free software zealots are a tiny fraction of the open source community.

My understanding of your comment is that "free software zealots" are people who belong to the "free software movement" [1]. If that's correct, where did you get the impression it's "a tiny fraction of the open source community"? This article [2] from 2022 states that 22% of software project have a copyleft license. Is that a fraction you'd deem "tiny"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement

[2] https://www.mend.io/blog/open-source-licenses-trends-and-pre...

Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community

#70

Post by dilyevsky »

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 doubly funny with haskell considering the biggest haskell shop i am aware of has a lot of defense contracts
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