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Comment by chpatrick | Hacker News Reader

Anduril is a big user of Nix and wanted to sponsor a conference, which upset some people because they're a part of the military industrial complex.

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> "Much of the frustration has risen from inaction by authoritative figures. Whether inconsiderate sponsorship, conflicts of interest, harmful conduct, or a refusal to collaborate, these actions have repeatedly affirmed such positions of authority as the effective owners of Nix with no consequence."

Right so the author of the post in question, is in favour of Nix taking sponsorship from Andruil, or against it?

It sounds like the author is annoyed that Anduril didn't get sent away (immediately) yes. As far as I know that was actually up to the conference organisers though, not the Nix project.

Right thanks for clearing that out!

The author of the post is saying that the problem is the sponsorship not considering the community. Their own opinion doesn't necessarily matter if they don't choose to be writing an opinion piece.

They are partially writing an opinion piece, but not about their opinion about working with the military. They are writing about Nix leadership vs Nix community.

Just to add some more context: This is not a flash in the pan, but a drama unfolding for some months.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/nixcon_drops_anduril_...

There was also a longer discussion on HN 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418351

That does seem to be a separate instance though, so it was never really properly resolved at that stage.

The reason that Anduril was dropped as a sponsor for the 2023 EU conference was that the venue wouldn't allow the association. This time the NA venue did not have that policy, so the sponsorship went through.

The majority of the tech industry is part of the military industrial complex. It's a shame more don't realize that.

And yet, unlike Guix, the Nix community doesn't seem to be bothered by using a part of the military industrial (spying) complex that is the Microsoft-owned Github.

I mean GitHub can spy on your... public open source code?

It's not just about privacy, it's about building your project as dependent on an organization that does harm. It aligns you with them and makes you want them to succeed so that you can sustain your project, when without that dependency you may have otherwise wished them ill.

How on earth are any of the Nix foundations project "dependent" on GitHub?

I mean they even have their own independent build system?

There's this whole concept of "Embrace, Extend Extinguish", that a lot of people in the open source community hasn't forgotten about, and therefore find it hard to trust anything that Microsoft is about.

What's the most recent thing Microsoft extinguished?

Probably Atom

I mean it never really took off an VS Code is a great replacement. It's not clear if Atom would've gone anywhere even if MS didn't buy Github.

I think atom was going down before Microsoft bought GitHub ?

What harm does Microsoft do? I think on net the world is better with it.

Microsoft is not your friend. Like most large companies, it tries to game the system to the detriment of the general public: Monopolistic practices (embrace-extend-extinguish, discounts for hardware vendors that only bundle Windows, ...), lobbying for software patents, tax avoidance, all that jazz.

There are also concerns with regard to civil liberties such as spying on their customers out of self-interest and on behalf of the US government, cooperating with authoritarian regimes such as China or their participation in Trusted Computing. Also note that while nowadays, just like many other tech companies, Microsoft might get criticized as being 'woke' by people with a certain political outlook, in the late 2000s, they were throwing people off xbox live for mentioning being gay in their profiles (or just having the surname 'Gaywood', for that matter).

This sounds like "Microsoft has done some bad things, ergo it must be a villain that makes the world worse". That doesn't seem like a sensible evaluation strategy.

I think there are gradients here. Anduril is _only_ a defense contractor. It’s fully there. It’s entire raison d’être is defense contracts.

I think it's still a tricky question. What should you do when there's this kind of dilemma and it pisses off a vocal minority in your community? I guess that's where the question of leadership comes up but I don't know what I would do either.

I think in terms of etiquette the best way to deal with disagreement of how an open source project would be to fork the project instead of trying to take over it.

Forking code is easy. Forking a community is not and you end up with lots of duplicated work to the detriment of both groups.

Yes, and contributors to NixOS, and probably you eat meat as well, so they are guilty of killing sentient beings as well, and on account of that I should be in charge of the organisation, and your salary. I'm expecting their and your resignation by the end of the day.

NixOS is not in the business of processing meat though. But they are in the software business, just like Microsoft (and even I guess drone makers, though things get fuzzier here). It's a question of professional deontology.

By that logic shouldn't they be okay to provide software, for people in the business of killing people, since they are not in the killing people business, but in the software business?

"Not as bad" does not necessarily mean "okay".

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