I resented people building fiefdoms because they're often commercially motivated and used to drive consulting engagements. They fragment the community on a deeply technical level, ruining code reuse and interoperability, for negligible technical improvements. I don't have any idea what the authors' views on project governance or human rights are, that wasn't a factor for me.
Presumably you reject everything supported by money from DARPA?
Yet you can be on the internet and make things a bit better by rejecting military sponsorship/influence in things you're involved in today.
Sponsorships are generally acknowledged with quid-pro-quo advertising opportunities - otherwise they'd be called silent donations.
In the case of tech conferences like the inciting incident, that means your logo everywhere, maybe an ad spot in between talks, and booth space. You might get some intangible reputational benefits from whatever other sponsors are present if they are viewed as highly prestigious or respected. Might even have opportunities to do a talk by one of your employees, we've all been to conferences where a vendor conspicuously also has a talk that coincidentally features their products heavily. All in all, it can elevate your perceived legitimacy in various ways.
Advertising might get you more business or more applicants and thereby grow your reach and success.
In terms of my personal values I'm a pacifist. I don't want to see something I like(d), something I made modest code contributions to, used to advertise for a commercial military organization that manufactures equipment for violence. It's the same way a vegan probably doesn't want to see advertisements by the beef farming industry or that someone who cares about renewable energy and sustainability doesn't want to see sponsorship by someone whose holdings are a huge stake in coal mining and fossil-fuel power plants.
In the case of the inciting incident, it wasn't a case of massive dollar amounts, it was ~$5k USD and it wouldn't have jeopardized the conference at all to say no thank you.
I'm more of a pragmatic pacifist myself, which allows or even carefully supports violence for suppressing violence. I believe the USAF is generally speaking aligned with me on that. Which is why I'm not unhappy when they work with FOSS.
I'd like to think that I'm pragmatic as well, which is why I won't deny that NixOS would likely get used in conflict with or without event sponsor deals promoting it. However, if your in-person events pivot from a technically-focused gathering of like-minded individuals to a war council bankrolled by Anduril, I'd expect most attendees to be angry. Especially once you consider that the United States sponsors the export of weapons to countries that don't use violence for justifiable or proportional causes.
Just let people do their thing. You’re not a bad person if you have nothing wise to say about people being hurt, and lots to say about resolving dependency constraints.
> fragment the community on a deeply technical level, ruining code reuse and interoperability
Most Nix consultancies I encounter make highly reusable flakes. flake-parts, flake-utils, fenix. They have a small commercial spot in their package’s namespace, and the first reason you look them up is “I wonder if they’re doing other smart Nix things that I can copy”, and they usually do.
> might be a poor leader in that situation
FUD.
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundation-board-giving-...
> While the foundation board was never intended to lead the community, we cannot deny that it is perceived to be in that role by many, and we therefore take full accountability. [...] Eelco is the principal author of Nix and undoubtedly a central figure in the ecosystem that grew around it. We confirm that Eelco showed no intention to be perceived as or act like the BDFL of the Nix ecosystem, or the Nix code base. *To commit to that in a timely manner, he has decided to formally step down from the board. This decision was made amicably and in mutual agreement with the board that this is the right thing to do.* Our collaboration was always characterised by our deep respect for Eelco’s work and our awareness of his lasting impact on our lives.
That said, as a complete outsider, the quote "the foundation board was never intended to lead the community" is wild to me. It sounds like the director of NASA going "I never intended this role to have anything to do with space". I think I understand the meaning behind the sentence - they wanted to support the community, but that the community leads itself in some way - but I can also see why the community would see them as having that leadership role that they apparently wanted to avoid. I also don't understand why someone who wanted a purely technical role would ever be on that board in the first place.
Like I said, I'm not really following this debacle, and I don't know the details. I'm just amazed at that quote, which seems very revealing to me.
The NixOS Conflict in Under 5 Minutes
* it reads like the result of 'there was a power struggle and my side lost'
* it falls back constantly to overly simple cause-and-effect answers to complicated problems
* it clearly is trying to paint certain people as villains and dissecting their imagined motivations while excusing or ignoring the motivations of others
Individual union organisers might also be social activists, but effective union organisers know that they need to a appeal to all employees regardless of their politics. And historically unions have been just as socially unreconstructed as companies, and subject to the same process of social activists pushing for their reform.
Do you think an outsider (ie. an impartial person) be able to provide a better summary?
Even as outsider has to get his info somehow, usually by interviewing those involved and then filtering stuff.
One need only look at labor's reaction to the Teamster's president's speech at the RNC to realize that this is clearly not the case.
> At a properly run company, if you are caught eating someone else's sandwich from the fridge, your boss will confront you and say "hey, Bob, don't eat Ted's sandwiches." That will be the end of it. In an organization with weak leadership, however, the entire company will receive an email from HR in the afternoon dictating a company-wide seminar on sandwich theft prevention, a #sandwich-theft chatroom will be created, posters depicting sandwich thieves in an encircled red X will appear on the walls, etc. The latter is more akin to what happened in the Nix case I outlined. There was no leadership in place to deal with an isolated sandwich theft, so it now needed to discuss policies with the goal of ending sandwich theft forever and punishing all sandwich thieves globally.
As an outsider, it looks like Nix had a weak leader who refused to mediate differences between people. He didn’t do what was right and just. His problem, and his irresponsibility, became everyone else’s problem and responsibility. A power vacuum but also a moral vacuum.
As someone who closely observed all of this over the months, I can confirm that this was exactly the root cause of the whole issue. 4 out of 5 of these leaders eventually burnt out and quit.[^1]
The new governance structure, despite the rough start[^2], hopefully will solve that and create an actually caring leadership.
[^1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1dqn9os/4_out_of_5_n...
[^2]: https://shealevy.com/blog/2024/05/08/broken-promises-the-nix...
Rather, I see the problem as character. The chosen leader(s) need the internal, personal qualities necessary for getting volunteers to cooperate well. External structure won't save the project if leaders lack character, it will just slow the damage they can wrought.
Relatedly, I was uncharitable before in emphasizing the weakness of Nix's leader. I think we all lack the moral (apolitical) education necessary for just leadership.
Or Eelco actually stepped down and the majority of large Nix contributors don't like fascists or the military industrial complex.
I bloody hate war and the military, but I have to agree with that one. While Russia, China & co. keep moving closer and closer to the fascism of pre-WWII world, the collective West seems to be the only force countering that, though parts of the US politics is showing signs of also falling into the seductive philosophy of fascism.
Meaning of the word has been twisted and manipulated to refer to anyone who has a different opinion on something, to the benefit of actual neonazis and fascists.
I do wish there was some slightly better platform specific documentation though.
It's unofficial and I've not personally tried it, but isn't that https://github.com/HoloISO/releases ?
Unfortunately, he's also part of the mob that chased the founder out of the Nix project and decided it should be yet another battleground for identity politics.
Like you, seeing the community entertain these stupid political fiefdoms makes me want nothing to do with NixOS.
However, I might stick with it out of laziness though until SteamOS runs on 3rd party hardware. The Jovian project is a Nix-based SteamOS clone that's been working well on my Legion Go, and I don't want to spend the time back in tinkerland finding something to replace it.