Earlier quoted context omitted.
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How is it slanderous to point out the board composition is not representative of the community. Seriously walk me through this one.
What is the composition of the nix community?
A leadership crisis in the Nix community
81–90 of 286 posts
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stallman covered this in a (IMHO) very well thought out article: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed... His article is specifically about pretend free/open source licenses that restrict what software can be used for. But the conclusion applies to similar behaviors around the entire free/open source ecosystem like conferences: it will just drive participants away and strengthen the position of…
Bridging Stallman's article to the issue at hand of sponsorship, I find it hard to believe that because he's fine with say Oracle using his code that he would also be fine with giving them a platform as a sponsor. I don't actually know his position on this, but mean to communicate I see the use of free software and the sponsorship issue as separate issues.
If Oracle wanted to give a bunch of money to the FSF and sponsor them? I would think RMS would be overjoyed by that development. The beauty of *GPL is that it can't be used exclusively to the benefit of one party (Oracle). It respects the freedom of the user. That's the whole point.
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#83Dolstra 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.
No. e.g. BSD is considered Free Software despite no such requirements. Free Software is software that the user controls instead of controlling the user. If you publish code with no stipulations at all, it is Free Software. It is only when you place requirements on the user that it might become unfree. In fact there are plenty of Free Software licenses that are incompatible with the GPL.
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It does not. And not only is this particular letter signed by many active contributors, the issues far predate this one letter (with this one demand), and many well-known contributors have been involved in speaking out against the current situation.
You're not going to understand complex governance issues and their history from a read of a single article or letter. Consequently, you probably should refrain from drawing conclusions that way.
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#85Dolstra 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…
I do agree it's reasonable to not want this kind of use.
> it is in fact your purview to "ideologically police" the uses your work is applied to
But this seems like a fantasy to me and directly at odds with the realities of open source.
The reality is that open source code is used for a myriad of purposes that I would consider myself ideologically opposed to. But this is ultimately the cost and tradeoff of open source in the system we currently have. Similar to the argument for free speech, in which we tolerate the fact that people have the right to say truly awful things because we deem that an acceptable tradeoff and better than censorship.
You may also be right that this is a matter that is not yet settled, and I'd be interested in a serious discussion about what some kind of workable solution might look like, but I don't see how what's happening in the Nix community right now moves anyone towards that, and if people are truly this principled, the Nix project itself should be the least of everyone's worries.
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#86Culture war grandstanding drowning out the much more interesting discussion around Determinate System’s pledge to support the long-debated Nix Flakes officially. Nix Flakes looking like the real source of the schism in the Nix community.
> Nix Flakes looking like the real source of the schism in the Nix community.
No. In the talks about the fork because of the real issue of MIC sponsorship there was disagreement about whether flakes should be the default among those against MIC sponsorship.
They are both issues, but the most pressing one causing large contributors to leave is the MIC sponsorship issue. The flakes/no-flakes issue existed before and wasn't causing large contributors to leave.
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#87Dolstra 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.
Let me translate GNU for you
"The only limitation is that you are not allowed to make the software less free/libre aka you are not allowed to add "limitations".
GNU developers give you some software, you can do whatever you want except making it less free.
the only people that will complain are developers that would like to remove soem of the user freedoms , because this devs want to make money or because they want more freedom for themselves and not for the users.
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#88Dolstra 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…
I don't see anything in the article that indicates ideological policing. Did I miss that part? It seems like these are questions of conflicts of interest and how the organization is being run. Those seem very relevant.
Yeah. Dolstra is responding to a letter that criticized his views, which isn't what the letter is. The letter's concern is that Dolstra is seriously harming the Nix project by forcing all decisions to go through himself, relitigating decisions that don't go his way, driving away good contributors, and generally causing friction and discord that impede communication and render decisionmaking ineffective. Those are pretty dang outcome-oriented criticisms. The letter spends like half of its length explaining how the Anduril thing and the Foundation are concretely harming the Nix project and how conflicts of interest are contributing to the problem. The least objective thing you can point to is the complaint about the Foundation having terrible minority representation, and even that has quite a bit of real-world support. It's the least ideologically-policing open letter I've seen in a long time.
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#89This 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 agree. I also found this both interesting and strange at first, but ultimately very helpful.
Re: A leadership crisis in the Nix community
#90I think it’s important to make clear that the letter is mostly bogus and almost libelous. Check into any one claim, and you’ll find it’s not the entire story. This however is true: > The Foundation board has unrepresentative composition relative to the community because, due to our count, all current members are cisgender, white-passing, men, one of whom has done military service, and one other (Eelco) likely relies…
if claiming something is bogus, then provide evidence of your claim. otherwise your claim holds less weight than the one you oppose.