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Comment by ParetoOptimal | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

> 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.

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