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Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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.

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