A leadership crisis in the Nix community | Hacker News Reader

A leadership crisis in the Nix community

lwn.net

120 pointselikoga274 comments

> 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 statement that is is mission focused (https://www.coinbase.com/en-ca/blog/coinbase-is-a-mission-fo...). Anything that isn't directly related to its mission is out-of-scope. I wish the same was true about software projects like Nix.

If you care about the way your software is used, then by all means, say it in the license! Of course, such software won't get used much.

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

> Nix is a software project, not a social movement.

Upholding the status quo is a social (and political) movement, it's just the most popular and accepted one.

By that rational:

Do you eat food, drink coffee, chocolate. Do you avail yourself of modern pharmacology. Everything you do upholds a status quo of human suffering. You posting on HN is a political statement, from a place of privilege, by that rational.

It's a software project, dont make it political and it will be successful.

Yet you participate in society. Curious.

Yes from a place of massive privilege, just like you, fellow hacker news user.

One that comes at the expense of 1000's of years of marginalized and disenfranchised groups. One that comes at the elimination of entire branches of the family tree.

It's a coin toss that you have neanderthal and densoivan DNA. Those ancestors that we raped and murdered off the face of the earth. And then did that to each other for 1000's of years...

Regardless of what political or social values you believe the reality is that no matter how you envision the world working we're going to have to get in line. Be that for food or iPhones. And a line means there is someone at the back.

It's poor form to complain about the millions of people in front of you when there are billons of them looking at your asshole.

I disagree. I think of movements taking input and energy. It is an active and conscious effort to change something. Upholding the status quo is akin to doing nothing. It's not active; it's passive. It's not a movement, it's a stationary. The two seem distinct to me.

I tend to agree with you on a moral/culpability level: passive acceptance is doing something but I wouldn't call it a "movement."

The mission of reproducible builds is a social mission that will bring good to the world regardless of whether other social goods are achieved.

Trying to tie that mission to other social movements is a strategic error that will more than likely cause Nix to fail in its primary mission while doing virtually nothing meaningful for any of those other causes.

The issue isn't whether Anduril can use the the software. They can.

This stemmed from whether they can publically attach their name to NixCon, which is fundamentally a social event.

Exactly. The license of software and code is not the surrounding community and events.

Likewise, support or protest against various sides in an international conflict does/should not affect the code/software, but is a product of the people involved and their personal convictions.

HN runs on open source software, but the HN community is strongly opposed to certain things, as is their right.

Right now they are not only attached to NixCon but Nix itself. People who hadn't heard about Nix now hear about Anduril.

Before this drama started I had no idea they even existed. Now I know they are a big Nix shop.

Those people who are creating the drama (and looks like they are a small minority) are trying to turn a tech tool into a social movement. This will kill the project.

It's wild to see how much hate Anduril gets from the same people who have statements supporting Ukraine in their READMEs or have licenses preventing Russians from using their software.

How can you demand support for Ukraine, but then get upset by the people who are meeting actual needs for the war effort?

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 Facebook were sponsors? Google of course runs a global surveillance network, and says they're proud to offer AI services to the DoD:

https://cloud.google.com/gov/federal-defense-and-intel

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 it for evil).

Or perhaps the same people are upset over things like Linux sponsors, but everyone ignores them in that context?

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?

I also don't really get it; are they going to use a different (worse) OS because of this? Or just stop pushing changes upstream for packages they care about (either staying out of date or maintaining a personal fork)? It seems like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

You can be upset about something and powerless to push back.

An even bigger irony is that one of major community moderators who is mad is an “ethical software engineer” working at Google.

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...

> 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.

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.

Because virtue

> Anduril started by building tech to hunt poor people crossing the southern border Seems pretty inaccurate to describe the usage of surveillance drones as "hunting poor people". I believe drones were a mostly bipartisan approach to monitoring the border vs building a border wall / expanding the border barrier or whatever we are calling it now.

> Their CEO is a right wing extremist He's not an extremist? He's just a regular Republican. I'm legitimately curious why you think he's an extremist.

> How you can say this is the same as supporting Ukraine against Russia aggression Anduril has been directly supporting Ukraine with its technology since the very start of the war. You do realize that, right?

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?

Nobody publishes statistics on this directly but we know that in recent years that the number of border crossers that have to be rescued from dehydration and heat exhaustion is in the hundreds per week.

Given that AST's towers/software identify objects of interest to CBP, it's probably safe to assume that number is high.

What is the purpose of Anduril's products; to help suffering migrants, to keep them out, or some other purpose?

I'm not convinced that a company named after a sword has good intent no matter how well their PR department tries to package it.

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.

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...

hey you know i think cops aren't all bad, but when they knock on my door i still don't invite them in.

Anduril exists to protect the order. same as cops, only focused externally instead of domestically. but in a global project where people collaborate with each other as individuals, it's all the same. don't talk to the cops: you only stand to lose.

> Nix is a software project, not a social movement.

everyone loves to assert that Nix is this or that. whatever label you fight to place it under, it's a product of some thousands of people. whatever it actually is, it's underpinned by something social.

Every human endeavor is underpinned by something social.

I think it's appropriate to separate concerns and use categorizations to help us separate ideological goals from practical reality. Paper is also used to fight wars, as are a myriad of other goods and services that exist in a more or less neutral space.

There's an important and very large conversation to be had about what we do and don't think is acceptable use of technology and general goods/services, but issues like the Nix meltdown seem like misapplied frustration at how resources are allocated (to buying things used for war) and an attempt to solve that allocation problem by cutting off supply instead of addressing the allocation of funds at the root.

Clearly some people think this is a good tactic, but I question both the effectiveness and the net good of such a tactic when the slope required to implement said tactic is indeed a slippery one.

I would prefer that code I write is never used for purposes I believe to be harmful. But this is fundamentally incompatible with the OSS model.

> > Nix is a software project, not a social movement.

I believe people say that in part because every political topic gets dragged into the community. Yes, there is a political aspect to everything, but that doesn't mean everything under the sun has to be dragged in.

Just take a look into some of the discussions that frequently happens in the NixOS offtopic Matrix channel. A small yet vocal portion of the community constantly brings up extremely hot takes on a broad range of topics. Anyone who objects are met with dismissal, condescension, and personal attacks.

Topics include:

* How tech companies should handle takedowns

Many of us probably already know how this is a very complex and controversial issue. But some folks advocate SESTA / SOPA like measures, accusing anyone who objects of supporting Kiwifarms and telling them to shut up.

* The use of the term "enshittfication"

A vocal member expressed annoyance and went into a long rant when someone mentioned the term. Apparently the term is a self-benefitting slogan for privileged folks because it wasn't popularized by someone they approved of. Fortunately, that didn't result in a argument because the other person immediately stopped engaging.

* AI use

In another case, someone who said they use AI was accused of supporting modern slavery. I'm somewhat skeptical of AI too, but this is just absurd. It really looks like the accuser was looking for a fight because "AI" could've been replaced with literally any other commercial product, from the clothes we wear to rare earth materials present in computers we use to write code. It's a modern day supply chain problem, not an AI problem per se.

It's one thing to express these opinions. But the aggression that followed in many of these cases is unacceptable. It seems to me that this constant cycle of hot takes and aggression is in no small part fueling this conflict even further. Like, supporting the same causes as the EFF can get you branded a right winger by very vocal people.

There are a lot of people who will find their workplace being singularly "mission focused" a good thing, but 5% of Coinbase's staff announced that they'd be leaving within one working week of that post[1], and others followed shortly after. I think that shows that in a corporate environment, it's not possible to retain all of the best staff if you're very publicly burying your head in the sand with regards to social issues - particularly in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd protests.

The author talks about the productivity losses rising from social-issue disagreement in the workplace, but it's rare that you can point to a press release from a C-suite employee and say "this specific document caused one in twenty staff members to leave immediately". The productivity destruction at Coinbase from that press release was enormous.

https://www.coinbase.com/en-gb/blog/a-follow-up-to-coinbase-...

No matter how smart or skilled they are, people who spend an inordinate amount of time arguing politics (and dragging others into it) at work are by definition not "the best staff".

Having a narrow mission focus is the only way to retain your actual best staff.

Not necessarily the case. Consider the possibility that strongly-held political beliefs correlate with software engineering skill, in which case it could easily be that a politically-active but superior engineer comes out ahead despite "wasting" some time on political issues. Yes, they're not as productive as a hypothetical engineer with the same skillset and no political beliefs - but that hypothetical engineer may not exist. Alternatively, consider that forty hours of dedicated software engineering may be beyond the capability of the human brain and that political arguments happen during what would be classified as rest and relaxation time if not for labor standards developed for physical laborers and factory workers in the 1930s. Alternatively, consider that most people work better with motivation, the belief that you are doing good is among the healthiest and most powerful motivators available, that maintaining such a belief requires continuous effort, that such effort would likely involve discussion, and that that discussion would almost necessarily happen at work. I'm not claiming that any of these scenarios are the case. I'm simply pointing out that they are possible and plausible, and thus it is not necessarily the case that an employee arguing politics at work is underperforming, either in relation to their own potential or relative to others.

Did you ever consider that public is horrendously misinformed on basically every "social issue" that arises, and it would literally do more good by just staying the fuck out of it?

It's just a fucking circus to prove to everyone on your Instagram how much you care. You really think people give a shit if it's true or not?

Let's take Gaza. Save the dudes who use babies as human shields. Destroy the universities if they resist! Ridiculous.

That's not what most people believe though. I can both find Hamas's actions reprehensible and also think Israel has done terrible things.

Whatever organization they are trying to sponsor is very obviously a social movement, not a piece of software.

You can only sponsor people, not software.

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.

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.

On one hand, I struggle to think that people might actually care about switching "master" to "main", as opposed to making wider improvements to inclusivity.

On the other hand, I don't have a strong attachment at all to naming a branch "master" and can easily rename it without a second thought.

> On one hand, I struggle to think that people might actually care about switching "master" to "main", as opposed to making wider improvements to inclusivity.

I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".

After that I changed my mind and name all of my branches main and give a little push to projects I'm part of to do the same.

Plus, words do have power:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51USLgPWhgc

> I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".

Master craftsman? Master mold? Master copy? Head Master... Just because this word was used in relation to slavery doesn't curtail its use in language, removing it only serves to focus its "power".

Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have a very different reaction to the word cunt.

Candidly, the erasing of words from language for any reason is very 1984, it's a book you might want to read, its a good primer to understanding how control of language is one of the features of fascism. You should probably read up on how linguistic purity was part and parcel of Italian and to a lesser degree German control of the people.

> Master craftsman? Master mold? Master copy? Head Master... Just because this word was used in relation to slavery doesn't curtail its use in language, removing it only serves to focus its "power".

Except none of those examples are relevant comparisons. It's well documented that the reason the default branch name was master traces back to Bitkeeper, which was using the master/slave nomenclature.

> Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have a very different reaction to the word cunt.

Master and slave have universal meaning across all English dialects.

If you're going to make an argument against this change on the basis of semantics, at least get your facts right.

> It's well documented that the reason the default branch name was master traces back to Bitkeeper, which was using the master/slave nomenclature.

Git never had "slaves". And while no doubt that BitKeeper was a significant influence on Git's adoption of the term "master", can you say it was the only one? Are you arguing that Torvalds had never heard of the term "master copy", and that term didn't influence him at all (not even unconsciously)?

> Master and slave have universal meaning across all English dialects.

Even when a word has the same denotation across dialects, its connotations and associations can differ significantly.

Also, certainly for the word "master", there are senses of that word, and derived words, which are more associated with some English dialects than others. In the UK, it is common to call a school principal a "headmaster"; it is very rare in the US; in Australia, it is more common than in the US but less so than in the UK (and mainly associated with private schools). Similarly, "Master" as a title for the head of a university college is traditional in the UK (especially at its most prestigious institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge), I don't think any US universities use it any more.

> I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".

They only fight that hard because they know the people fighting to remove "master" are (as a group) acting in bad faith.

On this and many other issues they tend to lie about history and language, extort those who don't comply with threats of sabotage towards their projects and/or careers, and will equivocate and dissemble whenever confronted.

It's perfectly fine want to use "main" rather than "master" (that is probably my preference). And it is perfectly fine to suggest other people do as well. But if you suggest it others and they tell "no" (politely or not), the right thing for you to do at that point is to mind your own business.

I mean in the end it could have just been a polite request.

But a lot of people get very defensive about it, not just for practical reasons but out of fear of the slippery slope or the consequences of a perceived angry PC mob that can utterly destroy their projects and careers.

> I don't have a strong attachment at all to naming a branch "master" and can easily rename it without a second thought.

It's easy only if you don't care about all the people who already cloned your repo.

Recovering from remote repos renaming their default branches is no fun.

And yet, branches disappearing is not uncommon. Changing your remote branch name is trivial, but being made aware of it is the problem. It's been a while since this change was done, but if it was still being proposed, the git client saying "oi, this branch changed name" and offering to update things would be a bit more user friendly.

Oh look someone brought a horse carcass to the party.

God forbid a single implementation of popular software change a default in a fairly meaningless way. Especially since the older term hasn't been accurate in software development for like a decade. Does anyone even ship/deploy the "master" branch anymore?

But no, while we should dislike these folks for saying "we don't want a military contractor to sponsor our event", we should 100% get behind "this private company changed a term and I don't like that so obviously they are wrongthinkers"

Based on how these things have historically tuned out, yes. This is very problematic.

The root of the problem is that it is basically impossible to defend yourself against the accusation that you are secretly a fascist. If you say yes, you admit to being a fascist, if you say no, you're a lying fascist. If you question why the accusation is levied against someone else, you're defending a fascist, if you speak out against the proceedings, you're defending fascism.

The only way to prevent accusations of harboring secret fascist sympathies is to deflect the accusation by lashing out against others with the same sort of accusation, thus demonstrating that you are not secretly a fascist.

This is a dynamic that has repeated itself many times, it's the engine behind countless actual witch hunts, but also metaphorical ones such as the McCarthy-era red scare, the ideological persecution under Stalin.

I don't get how this follows; no-one needs to be a secret anything, and the aim isn't even personal. Targeting "ideas rooted in fascism and bigotry" means to oppose the discursive ideas and concepts as they are put forth in the community, and the resulting concrete actions, that come from fascism and bigotry – specifically not the people or private thoughts.

Even if you deal just with ideas and somehow separate them from the people who promote them, what mechanism do you propose to use to decide whether an idea is rooted in bigotry or fascism? The accusation is incredibly nebulous and can be used to derail almost any proposal.

For the sake of argument, let's say I put forward the charge that the policy itself is rooted in bigotry. Can you prove that it is not?

Of course not, but asking for a "proof" for a question like that is a category error. It will be decided by whatever the group decision process is, which would have to be present for all the other non-trivial, and yes, fuzzy things that have to be decided, both technical and social.

Ok, let's pretend you're on the committee and you have dismissed my accusation that the policy is bigoted.

My next move is to publicly accuse the committee harboring fascist sympathies. Your voting record is undeniable, and I am just appalled this stuff can go on in the 2020s and demand the committee is replaced with people who does not hold these bigoted beliefs.

Gotta say, this scenario you're so intricately weaving doesn't sound like any open source project I've ever come across. I guess I'll continue playing. At this point it would depend on how many people agreed with you that the policy itself is rooted in bigotry. If it's just you, then this new accusation is going to sound pretty silly.

I guess you're trying to pull an example from history. I don't doubt that authoritarian regimes can get accusatory, and nonsense can spiral. But we're not talking about authoritarian regimes, we're talking about open source software projects. I don't buy that they're at all similar enough to make this kind of connection.

eelco here is not accused of behaving in a facist or bigoted manner though. The accusation is two steps away already, specifically not being sufficiently supportive of the means of a process which has prevention of facist or bigoted behaviour as one of its goals.

Indeed. Is that not a valid complaint?

Not every policy claiming to prevent (insert something heinous here) is a good one.

The PATRIOT Act is a terrible law. Opposing it doesn't make you a terrorist. But you would've been accused of being one nonetheless if you opposed it in 2001.

It's easy to see why many people wouldn't want to actively get into such a controversy. But even that is being used as grounds for kicking someone out.

I disagree that this is comparable to American politics in 2001, and that Eelco isn't actively involved.

Active involvement? No evidence of Eelco encouraging fascism or bigotry has been presented so far. It's all rhetoric, ad hominems, and insinuations.

Also, I brought up the PATRIOT Act because it's so strikingly similar. Any rule that is broad and vague can and will get abused. Any prior assurances otherwise have zero effect. Yet, looking at discussions in RFC 98, there was strong opposition to making the rules clear and well-defined in scope. It's no wonder the community was unable to reach an agreement. Also no wonder that the whole thing is blowing up even further because the moderation is effectively operating in this way regardless.

I think the GP nailed it. The thing is, no one in the community has been promoting fascism and bigotry. There are, however, plenty of insinuations. That's why there's strong opposition to this kind of thing.

Any other topic would've equally been as problematic. Is it a bad thing to target "terrorism" as well? How about "human trafficking?" Can't you please think of the children!

If you're secretly a facist, then there is no problem because there is no proof of facism, and the burden of proof is on the accuser.

Of course, there is a problem because mob mentality can be relentless.

Making up dubious connections to wrongthink is a bad thing.

What do you do when people who claim to be targeting fascist ideals also use the same tactics as those they're targeting?

You make them take all the words they dont like out of their copy of 1984.

Then they'd be breaking the RFCs stated goal. The possibility of a stated ideal not working doesn't mean you shouldn't have the ideal. Though I suspect my definition of using fascist tactics likely differs from yours in this case, but this isn't the space to re-litigate the paradox of tolerance.

Either side needs to be making factual and objective claims then. Slinging accusations of facism and retorting with the "you're the real facist" isn't going anywhere.

In practice there's probably no facism either way, but it's an easy and loaded term to throw around.

It's scope creep for reproducible package build system, so yes in this case it is.

edit: replaced 'feature' with 'scope' realized I typed an unclear word.

Yes, because "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" is a vague phrase lacking any clear definition, and risks becoming a cudgel for cliques to use to shut down anyone who disagrees with them.

Slippery slope fallacy, however I agree the wording is too vague and needs to be more specified. Facism / bigotry are catch-all terms for a broad range of things, and the RFC should link to or include the definitions they consider, with a caveat that they may be updated at a later time.

> Slippery slope fallacy

How is what I said a "slippery slope"? And what makes it fallacious?

> Facism / bigotry are catch-all terms for a broad range of things

Why not then drop those terms, and replace them with more specific terminology?

The article I linked here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199727) provides evidence for exactly that.

The main reason for the persistence of Nix despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives.

Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense.

*For example, why are Haskellians using Nix so much instead of integrating its concepts into their own tooling?

Cabal has had nix-style local builds since 2016:

https://blog.ezyang.com/2016/05/announcing-cabal-new-build-n...

https://cabal.readthedocs.io/en/2.0/nix-local-build-overview...

Also cabal isn't positioned to be a system level package manager. Haskell programmers are the type to want both their application builds and system dependencies to be reproducible and predictable.

> Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense.

Getting Guix packages to be as complete as nixpkgs isn't a matter of laziness though. One person wouldn't be able to do it no matter how disciplined they were.

You'll also need to deal with project philosophy regarding closed source packages to get Guix as streamlined as Nix.

Cabal has had nix-style local builds since 2016:

That's a bug not a feature.

Every language these days is trying to force you to use its own badly-implemented imitation of Nix. Just look at what cargo does with the target/ directory and wonky "build fingerprints".

It's madness.

It can also make those systems considerably harder to integrate into Nix itself. There almost need to be some language-neutral standards developed for how to manage inputs and lockfiles in such a way that more of this tooling can be shared at the developer/workspace level while also hoisting the same metadata up into systems like Nix and Bazel.

As it is, the rust-in-Nix and bazel-in-Nix stories are both pretty terrible, while the Python one is actually not too bad: https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix (barring these 4000 lines of horrible hacks: https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix/blob/master/over... and these 27000 lines of telling Nix which Python buildsystem every package ever happens to use: https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix/blob/master/over...)

The main reason for the persistence of C despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives.

Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with C. [Insert systems programming language du jour] or any other well-developed language makes more sense.

... Yes.

I see nothing wrong with this statement. Spice it up by inserting Rust at the blank and I can fully agree.

It's not just "first-mover advantage". I wouldn't even say it's mainly first-mover advantage.

It's the need to maintain super legacy systems and interoperability. There are entire CPU architectures that LLVM does not support and are only commonly supported by C and these things are still everywhere and are really gnarly problems to replace them.

Even if you throw everything away on the software side and start over from scratch, that's going to _force_ you to replace some hardware somewhere that you won't or can't replace.

I think Nix is much simpler and more suited for software packaging than Scheme.

I don't think any general purpose language ever invented is simpler than lisp/scheme. I've not taken the time to familiarize myself with Nix yet, and one of the reasons is that the syntax of learning yet another language with its own idioms and syntax isn't something I care to tackle right now. I would love to reap the benefits of something like Nix, but something like Guix is much more appealing to me.

A shame Guix does not work on Mac and probably never will

The Nix language is laughably simple, though, and (unlike Scheme) it happens to be typed.

It's literally just typed JSON with functions and a few built-ins. It's laughably simple and great. The whole "yet another programming language" refrain is so silly when it comes to Nix.

I think the main reason actually is that nix supports more than just Linux - notably macOS.

The quality of Nix packages for Darwin is quite bad compared to Linux though, I don't think there's a core maintainer that runs Nix on Darwin.

There is one: @reckenrode. He's really good. But yeah only one person who knows nixpkgs inside-out runs Darwin. Low bus factor.

By quality do you mean quantity? Sure some packages are missing on Darwin, but those that aren't don't seem "worse" in any way.

Broken builds often take quite a while to be noticed, and there aren't many people to reproduce them. Recently, as an example, `ncdu` broke.

There is Tvix, a Rust implementation of Nix, and although it still uses the Nix programming language, I bet it would be a lot easier to replace it there than in the original C++ codebase. (not just because of the language of implementation)

https://github.com/tvlfyi/tvix

To me, the perfect solution would be to have a base like Nix/Tvix you can build on top of, for example to make a package manager for your language, and have the users of that language's PM interact with TOML or JSON.

Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language

The fundamental difference with Guix is that evaluation (what they call "host code" -- everything that happens BEFORE the .drv is written) is wildly impure.

Guile code can access the network, write to the filesystem, heck it can even pull bytes from /dev/random. It can delete your home directory or email your ssh private keys to Zimbabwe.

The Nix language, by contrast, is incredibly restricted in order to make evaluation a deterministic function of the .nix source code you give it, things whose cryptographic hash is in the .nix source code, and nothing else. There is an --impure flag which lets it read from (but not write to) the filesystem but nixpkgs does not use that.

That is a pretty big rift that I find myself unable to cross. I can eval Nix code from any random bozo on the interwebs without having to trust them. If I trust the nix sandbox (which I mostly do) I can even build the resulting drv. I can be sure that evaluating that Nix code will produce exactly the same drv two years from now that it did today. Guix doesn't offer those things. Because scheme. I'm sorry but scheme just isn't the right language for this, it's too powerful.

> In short, Dolstra is acting as "the effective Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL)" of the project, even though the NixOS Foundation's charter doesn't grant anyone that authority.

This is silly - authority in a software community doesn’t come from a nonprofit charter. Being founder is also no guarantee of authority, but it is more relevant because it’s rooted in actions and outcomes.

The more I observe from the sidelines of open source the less attention I pay to these sorts of disputes. In the end they are all adjudicated by delivering useful software and updates quickly to end users. Whoever does that better “wins.”

Sometimes this is the founder of the project and sometimes not. In general I think it’s a mistake to think anyone cares all the much about anything beyond the license, capabilities of the software, and how quickly the community/maintainers fix bugs. They may say they do but people who are taking software for free are in no position to dictate much and at the end of the day they know and accept it (especially something like who sponsors a conference, who is the keynote speaker (Rails incident) etc)

The letter's entire criticism is that Dolstra is clinging to that position through an extended, conflict-of-interest-ridden campaign of toxic behavior and that this toxic behavior is preventing Nix from "delivering useful software and updates quickly to end users."

Right and if that’s all true he will ignore them and they will eventually fork and bury him. But personally I try to ignore letters like this especially if I’m not personally in the community (but even then sometimes) because words are cheap.

The reaction to Anduril sponsoring Nix is very similar to some people's reaction at Kubecon 2018 where the U.S. Air Force gave a talk about how they are using k8s to deploy software on F-16s.

https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...

People seem to forget that a lot if not most of IT has some form of military background/funding behind it.

Be it the first computers, the Internet, RISC CPUs, BSD UNIX and much much more.

You’re free not to like this fact of course, but then using the technologies anyway is a bit of a double standard.

I think it’s different to actively endorse something vs having it be used for something. If you’re working in a community producing axes and you’re later seeing the organization advertising them for murder instead of cutting down trees, you might understandably not wanna be part of it anymore or try to change the organization.

But a lot of the technologies were explicitly designed with military use in mind. It’s not like some unintended and unplanned side effect.

So a better analogy would be swords that can also be used to cut fruit instead of killing maybe.

But we’re in a thread about leadership crisis of nix here. Was nix designed explicitly for military in mind?

I don't know. The designer and founder of nix at least does not seem to explicitly exclude military use.

From what I understand, this is actually the root cause of the conflict here; the founder of the project seems to be fine with military use, some other members of the community are not.

Are you really expecting people critical of the US military to not use computers, else be keeping a "double standard"?

I think these people are keeping a double standard, yes.

Are you ideologically aligned with the distant origin of everything you use and consume?

I try to be aware of these origins at least.

But we are not talking about distant origins here.

So if you're aware it's ok? Where has anyone in this story shown themselves to be unaware?

And yet you expect to pull social security some day right? Clearly that makes you an ardent communist right?

This is missing the point in the same way that anti-capitalists sometimes get told to just not use money. Or critics of colonialism to just live somewhere else. There are things too essential to boycott - whether we personally like them or their history. It's also a lazy retort that doesn't quite interact with the substance of the critique.

> This is missing the point in the same way that anti-capitalists sometimes get told to just not use money.

Except that's not what I'm doing. It's more like I'm telling anti-capitalists not to trade stock options in order to buy Porsches.

i'm fascinated by this because a lot of my involvement in open source is a pretty direct reaction against state actors like NSA who undermine my privacy. and if i wanted to i could point out that the military took other things away from our field too, like Alan Turing. but ultimately, i think the argument is just that any institution which dumps a lot of money into a space deserves loyalty for that alone, but where's the substance in that? i mean sure, "don't bite the hand that feeds you", but also if you're grown and aren't so desperate for food anymore, then it's completely reasonable, arguably expected, for you to act on principles higher than money.

How did the military take Alan Turing away from our field?

it's believed he committed suicide after losing his employment -- and lots of other things -- on account of being gay. strictly speaking it wasn't the military, but a different part of the security apparatus.

No, it was not "strictly speaking it wasn't the military" - it was not the military at all. It was the civil legal system in the UK.

If it was suicide at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Death

> then it's completely reasonable, arguably expected, for you to act on principles higher than money.

Well that was kind of my point. I see people act on principles of morality when it doesn't negatively affect their convenience and at the same time ignore those principles when it affects their convenience. For me that is the definition of a double standard.

That's it. I'm not saying we should put these people in jail ;)

i've spent two years of my life getting NixOS to work well on my mobile phone because i value things like privacy. i assure you, actually ditching Android/iOS on principle is in fact very much not convenient. i do not see the link.

You are using a mobile phone based on a RISC CPU (presumably) and the Internet. Those are the conveniences I was speaking of.

closed source CPUs are also a thing i have invested inconvenient amounts of time in trying to overcome [1]. i expect by the latter decades of my life it will actually be feasible.

i'll be honest i don't understand what point you're trying to make. if i owe some loyalty to the military for the conveniences of their products, then would not Anduril owe me loyalty for the convenience of my products? the actual request to Anduril/military is way less than that, btw -- it's less "don't use our product" as "don't advertise in our spaces".

1: https://git.uninsane.org/colin/fdtd-coremem

> it's less "don't use our product" as "don't advertise in our spaces"

I guess the problem here is the definition of "our". If Anduril sponsors development of nix, it's as much "their" product and "their" space as it is yours.

Or in other words, they are included in "ours". You might not like that, but that doesn't change the facts.

i don't disagree with this. it takes care to figure out how to actually share the commons. despite my very obvious (at this point) anti-state motivations for being involved in open source, i've actually kept that discourse away from the NixOS spaces for two years. it's only after Anduril is reshaping those spaces to be pro-military that i bring my own world views into this space overtly.

i'm not certain of the ideal approach. i would be content with an agreement that our shared spaces be neither overtly pro nor anti military -- to the degree which this is possible or enforceable. but it is extremely difficult to actually establish consensual agreement on that, and attempting to force it (in any direction) leads to the type of escalatory situation you're watching unfold now.

my most honest takeaway is that NixOS doesn't deserve to be some monolithic thing. communities grow and reshape into loosely connected smaller communities as a pretty natural effect of success every day, and do so peacefully. there are plenty of spaces occupied by people i don't get along with (say, hyprland, or lemmy.ml), and i simply keep my distance. but nixpkgs is a monorepo, with intense infrastructure needs that require a foundation/governing body to meet. for as long as all of our work is so closely linked to that governing body and brand, there's little way for us to arrange ourselves into the more socially intuitive structures which allow for that type of "live and let live" approach wherein we all flourish even without finding consensus.

I think these are very fundamental issues with open source in general. Or even with "open anything" probably, including societies.

If you want something to be open, you have to accept it will also be open to entities and ideas you don't like. If you don't want that, you don't actually want "open".

One way out of this specific situation would probably be a fork, which I suspect is what will happen. But forking is interesting, because in one way it's only possible with open system and on the other hand it's kind of an admission that the openness has failed.

> i would be content with an agreement that our shared spaces be neither overtly pro nor anti military -- to the degree which this is possible or enforceable.

I live in Switzerland. In some ways, this is our official stance in regards to neutrality and I don't think it works very well. Some things are just binary and you can't really be neither pro or anti, unless you're lying to yourself and/or others.

> If you want something to be open, you have to accept it will also be open to entities and ideas you don't like. If you don't want that, you don't actually want "open".

sure, but i worry people see a single label like "open source" and derive a book-long prescriptivist explanation for the thing instead of seeing that it's just an incomplete, fuzzy short-hand. i don't care about "open source". i care (among other things) that when my environment isn't the way i like it, i have the power to improve it -- and in the digital space being able to access/modify the code is how i do that. if one were to bring that interpretation to a physical space, people would apply a much different label to it, even if it meant the same thing to everyone involved. "open source" is just a label: not a map.

> One way out of this specific situation would probably be a fork, which I suspect is what will happen.

one final thing from me: i believe hyprland (mentioned earlier) is a fork of sway, and despite the lead devs of the two being rather at odds with each other... the projects in fact still collaborate, just at a distance, on a common upstream (wlroots). alternately, `rofi` is very adamant to remain X11-only, and there's a sustained fork of it for wayland. but because it's plugin-based, a very large amount of contributions happen in areas completely unaffected by this split.

"forking", in the colloquial duplicate-the-codebase sense is just the most callous manner by which to provide separate spaces for those who can't share a space. plenty of projects out there are full of the same type of disagreements we see in NixOS, and have effectively forked (i.e. provided separate spaces or brands where there otherwise would be only one) but either did so very early on (by adopting something like a plugin model) or did so in a behind-the-scenes manner (by splitting components into separate spaces). i hope that's not too wishy-washy: i believe the technical structures and the social structure of NixOS will eventually settle into some convergent equilibrium, and i believe the result will be better if we're intentional in that process.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Yet you participate in society. Curious!

Straw man

he was in a well, actually

Well then…

Culture 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.

Flakes should be either stabilized, reworked or rejected already. They have been unstable for far too long, the damage they have caused the ecosystem is huge...

The Anduril issue seems to have been the main catalyst for the drama. Seems like Anduril probably did more harm then good - who at Anduril couldn't have predicted that the Nix folks would start to have a major freakout the minute they attempted to sponsor?

Anduril could have predicted this had they actually asked/engaged the community and not just Eelco.

It's worse because after the first time much of the community was trying to write it off as a simple mistake or miscommunication.

It became evident after the second time though that this was very on purpose and it was known there would be an issue.

Well, the activity around changing the status quo was done in a github issue [1]. Which sat around for many months after proposing the Apache Software Foundation's sponsorship policy of "state of nexus". Which didn't give a basis in which to exclude Anduril from sponsoring again.

Obviously there's the "people were angry last time, they will likely be angry this time". But that's projecting personal/political views into a sponsorship.

What should have been the right course of action? I'm not sure. "Tech is easy, people are hard"

1: https://github.com/NixOS/foundation/issues/110

Well, you should know, since you have been involved with both Nix and Anduril, right?!

No MIC sponsoring would have been the right course of action. No matter your sympathies, or alliances in your case.

To even think of the sponsorship as a valid idea is US centric ignorance. Outside the US people don't get the "Thank you for your service" indoctrination and are way, way more reluctant to work with the MIC.

If you knew anything about Germany, the issue with the university host should not have surprised you at all. It's not some modern outrage of wokeism, it's a decades old academic foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_clause

It's hard to find a German university without: http://www.zivilklausel.de/index.php/bestehende-zivilklausel...

Losing VOC support, eh?! Have you been to a CCC event? MIC sponsorship of Nix would lose you more or less the entire German hacker scene, at the very least.

A national defense company sponsoring an international software project, not expecting uproar... I don't know what to say. It's beyond plausibly idiotic. Objectively, completely out of touch.

> In particular the civil clause demands that members of the university reject research projects and funding which could serve weapon technology.

Wait, what? Are you saying German universities are forbidden from contributing to Nix/NixOS, which is used by Anduril?

Or say, the RISC-V ecosystem, which may be used as chips driving military weapons?

... or the Linux kernel? Heck, any OS at all?

Sponsorship with the attached advertisement is very different than "used by". Don't be silly.

Are you even aware, I am referencing the issue of a Nix conference hosted at a German university, or are you in political autopilot drive-by mode?

I linked a Wikipedia article, read it, if you're genuinely interested and not debating in bad faith.

> Sponsorship with the attached advertisement is very different than "used by". Don't be silly.

Sure, but what does that have to do with the Civil clause that you mentioned? It doesn't say anything about sponsorship, but it does say about "used by": "Any participation of science and research with military use or purpose must be rejected". Obviously, this cannot be true, since it can be applied to anything that is used by the military, including paper, towels, pens, computers in general, water, etc.

> Are you even aware, I am referencing the issue of a Nix conference hosted at a German university

I am, and? I think you missed my point?

> I linked a Wikipedia article, read it, if you're genuinely interested and not debating in bad faith.

I did. The Civil clause of some universities does sound fine ("strive to", "focused on"), but the others make a blanket statement that is very hard to take seriously. Obviously, they don't take the statement to the letter, and in fact it's hard to tell what they aren't supposed to do (if anything), unless perhaps you look at the other universities. Even then, none of those clauses say anything that can be applied to hosting a conference with military sponsorship but not to contributing to Nix.

Regardless, I don't think what you linked to is well known outside Germany. You can judge by the extent and completeness of that Wikipedia article. I'm European (EU), went to a European (EU) university and I had never heard of such a clause.

To answer to your point:

> To even think of the sponsorship as a valid idea is US centric ignorance. Outside the US people don't get the "Thank you for your service" indoctrination and are way, way more reluctant to work with the MIC.

I think you're generalizing a wee bit too much -- I'm not from the US and I think there's plenty of indoctrination to go around, and yet I don't think rejecting this sponsorship is in accordance with open source and Free Software values, philosophy and spirit. You can go read about it here -- and notice how it says several times that the point is to include everyone: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

To be honest, I think the mistake with Nixcon was not Anduril, but rather, to host the conference at a German university.

Damn you got Germany good. It's all collapsing now, mensa shoot-outs, marching bands playing on public radio, students getting lectured by ICMBs.

I was just giving an example of a wider sentiment on MIC involvement outside the US. The specifics don't matter at all. In much of Europe working for or with MIC is not widely accepted and makes many people uneasy.

To point is cultural ignorance in an international project.

I've lived in 3 EU countries and visited and known people from many more and while it's true most people would be against most wars, I don't think most people would be against a MIC sponsorship for an open source conference.

Airbus alone employs 40,000 people in the defense sector and there are many, many more MIC companies in Europe where many people are happy to work at (for the record, I'm not one of them). Also, all European countries have a military and buy weapons, and probably all of them also manufacture some weapons or others (microstates being the exception). Some of them even have mandatory drafts, I think.

As an example, I'd be shocked if an Airbus sponsorship would ever be rejected in Europe (perhaps Germany being the exception now that I'm familiar with the Civil clause).

Honestly, you sound like someone with a heavy anti-US and anti-MIC bias (and admittedly, I'm also known to take pleasure in anti-US and anti-MIC prejudices, but my concerns don't intersect this particular scenario at all).

There is still a massive difference between gigacorp Airbus, Siemens, SpaceX, ... or whoever does defense stuff as a side hustle, and a pure defense company like Anduril or Rheinmetall to plaster their logo onto things, or recruit at events. There is no plausible deniability with these companies' intentions and product consequences.

To me at least, there is even a difference between the military and private companies profiting off war and suffering. I would rather have the Bundeswehr around than Anduril. Just because it's something of a necessary evil, doesn't mean I respect the people who seek this career, who want to engineer and sell death.

My stance on the issue is irrelevant. The devision caused in the Nix community was predictable. It was objectively an idiotic idea considering cultural and consequential differences. Even a pro-MIC person should realize this.

And let's not forget the conflict of interest of Nix's VIPs here in this particular matter, greatly shading any presumption of good-faith arguments. It's been wildly stupid.

And lastly, FYI, these sponsorships do have strings attached, especially when money matters:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1338390/darpa-pulls-fu...

Because defense contractors typically think what they are doing is purely good and could in no way be thought of as being bad. A form of “reality-distortion field”.

You could make the reverse argument - that the conference organizers think what defense contractors are doing is purely bad and could in no way be thought of as being good. Ultimately it’s up to _us_ (proxied through our elected officials) to use software tools for good or bad purposes, the creation of a tool in itself isn’t the problem. I think most defense contractors are keenly aware of the implications of their work.

I suppose one could make any argument. At the end of the day, the onus is on the company making weapons to prove to the community that its weapons are used for “good” - whatever that means to the community in question.

Personally, I think accepting a sponsorship is a step too far: it’s an implicit admission that Nix is associated with the defense industry. Some communities are okay with this, but such a move will definitely alienate a good chunk of people. They and other defense companies should of course be allowed to participate in the community and contribute to Nix.

There are too many stakeholders, it’s too forkable (guix, flox, Anduril).

Maybe the official leadership has a shuffle, maybe it’s even big.

I’m not changing my Nix investment, I discourage others from changing theirs.

Me neither. Mocking Nix is the new mocking "I use Arch BTW" but when you're deep in it you realize it absolutely is the way, and if it's not Nix or Nix in some more evolved form it will be something very close to it.

What does guix have to do with Nix (genuine question, not snarky)?

Guix was based on Nix.

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.

https://guix.gnu.org/en/about/

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.

same idea, but in a scheme.

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 actually a great deal harder than it looks from the outside.

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.

The letter is an unhinged diatribe written by anonymous authors and should be disregarded on that basis.

Seems like this is becoming the terminal phase of the FOSS lifecycle for many projects.

I wonder what makes some long-lived communities immune to this behavior...OpenBSD comes to mind.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1338390/darpa-pulls-fu...

Github culture is the infection vector. That's why OpenBSD is unaffected.

Hygiene, folks.

Also could be the fact that the entire reason OpenBSD exists is that De Raadt got cancelled out of NetBSD: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/1994/12/23/0000.ht...

I really don't see the problem with accepting sponsorship money from Anduril. Rejecting it just results in less improvements and exposure for Nix.

They're going to continue to use Nix either way, and in the same way that the community can fork Nix because they're unhappy with the sponsorship, so can Anduril - and their fork might just be private.

Defence companies and all sorts of other companies that people might disagree with heavily use open source projects.

For those that are curious about an alternative perspective on this matter, I detailed much of my personal views in my reddit suspension post. I don't have much context on the EU NixCon 2023 events, but I've been actively involved with the project for 2019, 2020, 2021, beginning of 2022, and late 2023.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_u...

This seems more like a community crisis around Nix than a leadership crisis in the Nix community.

What does a community crisis mean exactly?

If every member of the community wants one thing, and the leadership doesn't, then the community wins, every time.

https://github.com/nrdxp/rfc-evidence/blob/dfe80298dddf9858a...

Quotes from the article linked:

> the community is heavily leaning into what might be termed the myth of marginalization

> this group, still upset about the failure of RFC 98, is using the myth of fascism

How can one take this document seriously after reading these sentences?

It's a bit skewed as far as the author's perspective, but so is everything. It's like reading the news. You have to filter past the bias and look at the facts.

The picture that it paints about the actions of the people involved is accurate.

> The picture that it paints about the actions of the people involved is accurate.

No.

It just criticizes one group for pushing for a specific ideology and then starts pushing for it's own subjective ideology while championing itself as the "rational" and "neutral" position.

Yes, the right wing tone makes it cringy, but it does have a point. A vocal portion of the community is using far right scare to get off with abusive behavior. It's just another variation of the "think of the children" rhetoric. It's very effective at deflecting criticism because it associates critics with the most unsympathetic of people. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

The document uses support for its claims. Yup, the language is obviously quite emotional and biased, but the facts are correct nonetheless. Do you have any particular/specific issues with the issues raised in this RFC?^^

How is this claim supported:

> Simultaneously, this group, still upset about the failure of RFC 98, is using the myth of fascism combined with an abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance (originally formulated by Karl Popper with a very different intent) to portray their opponents as bad-faith actors, or even as outright evil. They themselves, of course, do everything they can to appear justified in exercising power with absolutely no accountability, and with a clear sense of their own privileged entitlement to do so

Sure but this letter is not by "every member", not even close. It's just a letter by a very loud minority. In such a case I don't think the outcome is actually all that clear. As people have been saying from the beginning, the writers of the letter can always just fork the codebase and the fact that they haven't done that implies that they are unsure if enough of the community would follow them.

Related submissions:

Open letter to the NixOS foundation (50 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107370

The dire state of NixOS's moderation culture (76 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40166912

---

Additionally, these r/NixOS submissions may be of interest:

Jon Ringer: "In case I'm unable to return, wish you all the best" (348 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_u...

Transparency about jonringer’s suspension (153 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceeg8h/transparency...

Thoughts on Jon Ringer's temporary suspension (71 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceiz36/thoughts_on_...

Moderation no-go zones (55 comments; ongoing) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cfv8vo/moderation_n...

---

Finally, the RFC to improve the situation:

https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175

This 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.

I wonder if the inspiration for this comes from Bibles? It's a common practice to have direct quotes from Jesus in red.

I had the same thought! I dismissed it though as perhaps coincidence because anyone used to reading a "red text" bible may find it offensive or at least distasteful to equate other people's words with Jesus. I could very well be overthinking that though and/or be projecting my own religious upbringing (where blasphemy and sacrilegiosity are very sensitive and highly frowned upon. Even saying "he" instead of "He" is looked at as skirting the line).

It is a very practical way to show someone is being quoted though.

Something like that.

It's specifically for quotations that come from other sources and are presented verbatim; In the LWN UI settings: "These preferences affect how text that is quoted from other sources (press articles or whatever) in LWN news articles is rendered in your browser."

I 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 on undisclosed military-tech work.

> I think it’s important to make clear that the letter is mostly bogus and almost libelous.

That's not my reading of it.

However my biggest issue is the conflict of interest between Eelco -> DetSys -> Anduril Contract -> Eelco fighting hard for Nix to sponsor Anduril.

As foundation chair he should declare that he doesn't have a conflict of interest and DetSys doesn't have a contract with Anduril or have recused himself from the sponsorship discussion.

The whole idea behind Open Source is that one does not discriminate.

As a Nix user I feel like those people who started this whole drama are actually negative to this project. They are trying to use Nix as a tool for their political goals.

I think the best for Nix would be to just move forward and ignore them.

> As a Nix user I feel like those people who started this whole drama are actually negative to this project.

The people who signed Anduril as a sponsor, apologized to the community, and signed Anduril as a sponsor again anyway started this drama and are a negative.

So what?

The nature of Open Source is that Abduril can use it anyway and it is more whether Nix can get funding to help it become mainstream.

[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)

> . 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"

People arguing from the direction you seem to be usually are big about not assuming intent... why assume intent here?

How can you prove they don't both believe they are fighting about fascism and care about that fight?

First, I'm not from that "side" which you think I am. Second, I do assume intent and here it's beyond reasonable doubt that this is about pushing your agenda. I do not dispute that some of these people genuinely believe that they are doing good - either they got brainwashed by others, or they've successfully brainwashed themselves. (In fact, many of us, including me, brainwashed ourself with various things on occasions. It's fairly common)

I won't go over the entire document, but it's pretty telling how they've refused to commit to "no politics" as a rule - because they want to promote theirs! The problem wasn't that sidr linked to politics, but that he linked to the wrong type. (I checked it out and I definitely don't agree with most of it. But that doesn't mean I can't defend his right to speak)

I don't believe that the boards composition for engineering and technological organizations or projects should be chosen based on the results of measuring skulls, genetics or what partners they openly prefer for sexual intercourse, that seems unrelated to the work.

The slander against the board is quite obvious and I believe you're being disingenuous.

I was being sincere. I think it's reasonable to expect a governing board to be at least partially representative of the users & contributors of the project. It seems extremely presumptuous at best to tell people their lives & experiences are not relevant to the work they do, and that they are wrong to want people with similar experiences acting in leadership.

So no, I still can't see slander. What is obvious to you is not apparent to me at all so please walk me through it.

I understand your position, but I respectfully disagree. Selecting leadership based on immutable characteristics like race, gender or sexuality rather than merit and contributions is misguided and prejudiced, even if motivated by a desire for representation.

The current leaders' "lives & experiences" very much inform their work - their experience contributing to and building the project. What's irrelevant and presumptuous is assuming their race, gender, etc. make them unfit or that "people with similar experiences" (i.e. the same demographics) would necessarily lead better. The slander is in attacking and attempting to de-legitimize the board not based on their actions or competence, but on their identities. That's textbook ad hominem.

Inclusion means welcoming people of all backgrounds, not enforcing demographic quotas or judging people's fitness based on identity rather than ability. If you have substantive concerns about board decisions or project direction, by all means raise them. But leave identity politics out of it and focus on the issues. Presuming leaders can't serve the community well because of innate traits is its own form of prejudice.

The only real criticism of concern was the military contracts and a conflict of interest, which I believe is valid and needs discussion, the rest just seems like personal attacks meant to further some unrelated agenda.

What is the composition of the nix community?

It's not hard to argue "the nix community is not 100% white male".

What is it then?

I don't know. I can invalidate the Nix community is 100% white by knowing 1 or more community members that aren't white and/or male... which I do.

> one other (Eelco) likely relies on undisclosed military-tech work.

While this may be technically true, the framing seems disingenuous, unless I am missing something. I have not been following the situation closely. My understanding is that Eelco's company, Determinate Systems, _may_ have contracts with customers connected to the military-industrial complex, but I dislike the implication as it renders Eelco as a bad-faith actor. It seems like a circular argument. I also dislike the implication that it is somehow problematic for Eelco's _for profit_, separate entity to have customers that the _community_ finds problematic.

> My understanding is that Eelco's company, Determinate Systems, _may_ have contracts with customers connected to the military-industrial complex, but I dislike the implication as it renders Eelco as a bad-faith actor.

As chair of the foundation, Eelco should do what he can to avoid even the appearance of malfeasance, including declaring or denying conflicts of interest.

if claiming something is bogus, then provide evidence of your claim. otherwise your claim holds less weight than the one you oppose.

> Check into any one claim, and you’ll find it’s not the entire story.

Indeed. If you look at pull request 10513, you see Eelco propose a bug fix, another person point out the flaws in his approach, and Eelco subsequently closing his own pull request and filing a new PR with a different approach.

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/10513

The save-nix-together signatories describe this as “ignoring other people and only considering his way”.

I suppose they were counting on no one bothering to read their citations?

Can anybody more knowledgeable than me clarify how a project like Fedora Silverblue compares to Nix? I know Nix has the declarative configuration, but do you get the same reproducibility out of Silverblue?

My knowledge is that Silverblue is kind of image based and you get reproducibility with snapshots. This makes me think it's like docker.

Whereas Nix is about reproducibility all the way down to the individual libraries and software.

Witch hunt detected. Turning care knob straight to zero. Maybe I’ll tune back in if there’s a change in the wind.

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 levels of drama.

Nix is going to be interesting to watch in the coming months.

> 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.

> 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.

This just isn't true. See "Transparency about jonringers suspension"[0] and also notice it's a suspension and not a ban. Note that Jon's post to reddit titled it a "ban".

Which side seems to be trying to stir things up here?

Also, before that discourse post there has always been a public moderation log here:

https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/c0f7744701cba40f0...

0: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-was-jon-ringer-banned-from...

>NO one wants to admit that the tyranny of leadership is probably a good thing for a projects success.

I see that expressed all the time ...

That same day, Samuel Dionne-Riel stated that Dolstra had refused to clarify whether he had a relationship with Anduril and asked Christensen, a co-founder of Determinate Systems: "Does DetSys have or had relationships with Anduril?" Christensen replied: "Did you know this category of question is pretty much impossible to answer because NDAs are a thing?"

[Determinate Systems] produces its own installer for Nix that the company promises will provide stable support for some Nix features. The letter states: "This is fine, however, it is questionably acceptable to do that while employing the lead developer of CppNix [the main Nix implementation] and saying nothing about how this will interact with the team's [decision-making] autonomy."

So "DetSys" is a commercial provider of Nix services, making corporate promises about future Nix feature support and (presumably) contracting with Anduril whose current focus is Shahed-inspired kamikaze drones, while wearing a separate hat as board chair of NixOS Foundation.

Effectively the tl;dr is whether Nix foundation should be bankrolled by the DoD, feature roadmap guided by the needs of mass produced suicide drones. And if they are, do other contributors want to continue providing free R&D for that organization?

> ...are going to be interpreted as a bunch of left-wing people taking over the project

Yeah, it's a bunch of left-wing malcontents trying to take over a project.

Anyways, Nix is very much decentralized as far as open-source projects go.

> Yeah, it's a bunch of left-wing malcontents trying to take over a project.

Or a bunch of people who were told they have a voice, put in time/work under that assumption, then when it came time for their voice to count were just ignored.

But I bet life sure is easy when you can just label people something nasty and dismiss their worthless opinions outright.

Is it a technical thing they are being ignored about or are they trying to exclude people?

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 endeavor.

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...

I'm a free software advocate, but I'm not a free software zealot. I think nonrestrictive terms of use is the only way to remain ethical. However I'm also a pragmatist and understand the value and use of non-free software. Zealots famously allow for no such exceptions.

Another example There are a number of "rust zealots" who believe it's a moral imperative to rewrite all software in rust, and any who disagrees is immoral and acting in bad faith. Similarly the number of people who are rust zealots are a small fraction of those who like and advocate for rust.

> 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.

"Well, you see... just keep all politics out of FOSS except for the important FOSS ones I agree with" ;)

Yes, when you scope a movement to just the thing it's about, you'll get a greater intersection of people who can agree on those ideals (i.e. actual intersectionality). If you check https://stallman.org/ you'll see that he's very opinionated on politics, probably moreso than almost all people (he has multiple things he writes about across the world every single day going back decades and maintains a list of assorted topics that mostly have nothing to do with software where he thinks we should change the law[0]. He's encouraged many boycotts over the years, and goes way further than most people to stick to them), but he wisely kept that movement focused on the thing it was supposed to be about, and in doing so was able to actually accomplish something.

[0] https://stallman.org/there-ought-to-be-a-law.html

but free software and open source aren't the same movements and don't have the same ideologies. There's some overlap, sure.

Given that Nix is LGPL 2.1 and Nixpkgs is MIT, the project leans more towards the open source camp than the free software camp.

Exactly. Source with caveats has long been a celebrated part of open source. I find it entirely understandable that some people are not happy with contributing to the project if their contributions go towards producing weapons. Anduril could have made an anonymous donation, but they specifically wanted the publicity. They have had employees asking to hire people to "fill the gap" left behind by people who have decided to move on due to the lack of stance in disapproving of Anduril's sponsorship. This has always been more than "I don't want them to use it" and quickly has become a takeover of the community due to how their employees and others have been pushing the policy decisions.

>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...

People want them not to be advertised at official Nix events, not to bar them from using it. That wauld be impossible due to licensing so isn't on the table.

Would you require the FSF to accept a sponsorship from anyone and to advertise them in return?

Should Microsoft be allowed to sponsor the next FSF convention?

Fuck no

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.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

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.

the term you’re looking for is “license agreement”

There is a very narrow set of restrictions that is generally agreed upon for it to be free software still, and that restriction is generally to the effect of "you can't remove other peoples rights".

That seems extremely different than targeting particular company for idealogical reasons and trying to remove their rights.

No, its exactly the opposite actually. You're thinking of copyleft. The Free Software movement was a direct response to corporations attempting to restrict what users could do on their own computer via dumb terms of service agreements. It guarantees 4 fundamental freedoms:

>The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

>The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

>The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

>The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

Only in a very limited sense. Look up what happens when you try add a restriction of "You can't use this software for evil", or "You can't use this software to make nuclear weapons" to OSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Software_lic...

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 enough that I wouldn't consider it settled yet.

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/

> perhaps we do need a new popular license or set of variants that exclude certain industries.

Such a license would not be considered open source or Free Software.

Someone else posted this link about a similar situation in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Software_lic...

The license allowing for something does not mean you are okay with anyone being part of your community.

Sure, but that's an orthogonal point to the one OP made isn't it? Contributing to open source projects is incompatible with not wanting someone else to use your work based on ideological differences. Perhaps contributors don't think about this until they're faced with a situation that makes them uncomfortable and I sympathize with that and maybe we should start adding disclosures that say "your work may be used by entities you do not want using your work".

The software licencing is also completely irrelevant here, nobody said that Anduril can't use Nix. The issue was that the community largely did not want them as sponsors. There is a very big difference to allowing someone (or some company) to use your software and wanting to participate in a conference where the same company is a sponsor.

I honestly don't understand what objecting to them as a sponsor does. Sponsorship benefits the project for everyone. Is the objection to both the sponsorship and their presence in the conference? Folks who don't want to engage with them at the conference can simply not engage with them.

Also AFAIK one of the conferences objected to their presence, so they weren't able to have a booth there. Individual participants are in their right to make these decisions and act on them (like that one conference did). What exactly is the outcome people want?

People don't want Anduril to benefit from the NixOS they work on via publicity or association.

Most wouldn't have a problem with Anduril donating and asking for no sponsorship or other benefits in return.

I mean... if you license your work under nixpkgs license (MIT), you no longer really have the right to police who uses it. Of course, you are free to maintain your own nixpkgs and share your changes with whomever you want under whatever license you want.

All major open source projects are used by arms dealers. It's a big industry. Any business has customers they ideologically dislike. I get how that's annoying but it is what it is.

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.

>It's very reasonable to not want your work used by arms dealers

One man's arms dealer is another man's defense against death and destruction. I'm no fan of defense contractors for many reasons, but there is a simple reality that you need weapons, and lots of them, to defend yourself and your nation against aggressors, and someone has to build them. Imagine how much worse the war would be going for Ukraine if they didn't have advanced weaponry being provided to them by defense contractors.

If you don't want arms dealers using your work, then don't release it under an open source license.

> 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.

The issue here is one of sponsorship.

Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.

If Anduril donated but wasn't listed as a sponsor and didn't have a booth, I bet many wouldn't have an issue.

> 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.

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 manufacturing weapons, don't you think this isn't likely to be a popular opinion? That it's unreasonable to expect people to share it?

> 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.

Contributors to open source projects aren’t asking the question “should the thing be done,” they are asking the question “should I do the thing.” I think lots of people fall into the general bucket of “sure, the military is necessary for a country, but I don’t personally want to work on it.”

It is a weird sort of diffused understanding of responsibility (we all pay taxes and our representatives vote on whether or not we’ll do war, after all), but I think it is not that uncommon. Lots of people don’t seem to want to be unusually personally responsible for military applications, compared to their peers, I guess?

If you want this in formal terms: "pulling the trigger" and "living with yourself after pulling the trigger" are both skills that some people have and other people don't, those skills exist on a continuum of both directness and effectiveness, and comparative advantage applies all the way down at the level of individuals and their personal skillsets. Even if you support your polity's military aims your polity's military aims may be better accomplished if you aggressively refuse to work on military projects, thereby allowing yourself to contribute more effectively in other areas and freeing others up where they can contribute to military projects more effectively than you could. That's one of the things that tax dollars amortize over, if you're looking at it from high enough up.

That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Somebody could think about maximizing the effectiveness of society at doing war, while admitting that their competitive advantage doesn’t lay in directly doing violence. I don’t think I’ve seen that before, and I don’t think it is how most of the people who come to the conclusion that they’d rather not contribute directly to the military come to that conclusion. But it is an interesting line of thought.

I think most people just feel differently about things they do directly, than they do about things they indirectly contribute to through taxes or just existing in the economy, and don’t put a ton of thought into it.

> Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.

It's a non-sequitur, why have a problem with Anduril being advertised but not have a problem with Anduril using the software (i.e. because it's FOSS)? Anduril also gets much more value out of, and furthers their mission much more by, using the software than they do from advertising. And if you have a problem with software being used for military purposes, why are you contributing to a project with an LGPL license instead of one which forbids military purposes?

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 proprietary solutions instead.

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.

You've already commented ten times in this thread. If you don't know, maybe don't say anything?

Do you know if Stallman would platform Oracle by allowing them to be a sponsor?

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.

That is about licenses, not about community participation, let alone community policy or sponsorships. Those are all very different things with very different considerations.

(Signed, someone who absolutely does not want military contractors in their community, but feels that a license is the wrong place to enforce that.)

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.

I have never heard of the company in question and don't know anything about them other than what was mentioned in TFA, but a main portion of the conflicts that have happened seem to be about whether a particular company should be allowed to sponsor or not. If it were special treatment for that company that others wouldn't get then that would be a different story, but it seems mainly that people don't like what the company builds and don't want them sponsoring, at least explicitly. That seems ideological to me.

I absolutely sympathize with them fwiw. I despise DRM and think it's a reprehensible practice, and I would be extremely off-put if my code were being used by one of those companies. I would hate to see them at a conference. But I acknowledge that is my ideological bend, so my opposition there is "ideological"

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.

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!

It's like he didn't even read the letter. It's fact after fact, sourced and linked and screenshotted, demonstrating that Dolstra, the Foundation, and Anduril are engaged in toxic leadership that are concretely limiting the Nix Project's ability to build good software. It's not even about Anduril's business, it's about how they're at the center of a web of conflicts of interest that are producing poor software engineering decisions and driving away good contributors. The letter's authorship clearly understood that the obvious response was going to involve tone policing and complaints about "ideology" and went well out of their way to write the letter to address that avenue of attack - the whole first paragraph is about how it's not about ideology, the first sentence is that it's not about ideology, there are dozens of points about how it's not about ideology. It's all about observed cultural dynamics and results.

When the whole first paragraph is about how it's not about ideology, it's about ideology.

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