The website doesn't outright say it, but I believe the reason for the fork is the Anduril scandal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199153
Built for a community, not for a corporation. Lix is built by a team of open-source volunteers – and exists to provide an alternative to the commercial interests that have long plagued both upstream CppNix and corporate-authored forks. We’re proud to stand by our open conflict of interest statements, and proud to listen to community voices on issues of sponsorship, direction, and moderation.
Of course there's corporate sponsorships, how else do you expect people to work on this stuff full time and eat. Food and Shelter aren't handed out for free last I checked.
Mind boggling statements.
I see no mention of CppNix other than from certain detractors.
Edit: This is not a comment on the rest of the content of your post. I just thought it was kind of fair to call it CppNix!
Here is a github issue where they talk about some of the transition to cpp:
This interpretation is confirmed in the "Conflict of Interest Statements" section of https://lix.systems/team/ which contains wording like "TMLLC declares that it has no financial stake in the future of Lix or Nix, no ties to the military-industrial-complex, and a strong commitment to avoiding such ties."
I like the concept of this section. I don't think I've seen something like this before. I think it might have been valuable in the cloud/containerization ecosystem where everyone is fishing for consulting hours by advertising the open-source components they use. Sometimes the lines get a little blurry, and it is quite frustrating.
I noticed that there is 1 out of 11 on the core team who is a "he/him". I don't know if non-he/hims are especially opposed to the war machine (e.g. like academics often are), or if are there other social factors that cause the cultural split?
I'm not sure if the anduril "scandal" has gotten as much attention as the "jonringer vs reserved board seat for gender minority" discussion, I imagine this might be related to the latter.
Yet all 11 devs are White males.
Here is Hexa, a lead moderator, saying that the NixOS community is effectively "a Nazi bar": https://chaos.social/@hexa/112661968657636449
This is what Jade Lovelace, a team member of Lix, wrote:
> there's a lot of work still to do on getting fascists out of the community and everyone is quite exhausted from the fight to get this passed. however. the fascists will get kicked out.
Is this really the type of person you want leading your community?
The thing that bothered me the most was the bad faith behavior from the moderation team, where any kind of disagreement is treated as abusive behavior and grounds for banning, even if the issue at hand boils down to:
1. We agree about X
2. We disagree about how to achieve X
On the one hand, I hesitate to recommend wasting time going down the rabbit hole. On the other hand, it’s a pretty interesting rabbit hole and one where the supposed “good guys” are behaving like tyrants, and then calling people who disagree with them fascists.
If nothing else it’s an interesting case study of community dynamics, and given the cultural factors that are driving these dynamics, seems likely to happen across other projects in the future.