TLDR: politician/social activist type guy invaded community of poductive happy developers and destroyed it from the inside out.

Thanks for this link. Confirms my suspiicion that woke activism is a tech community killer. Saw that happen in Debian, and left after the 2016 Linus inciident. I tell you, if they whip out a CoC, run as fast as you can!

I don't know much about it but that summary seems completely unreliable:

* 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

Interesting, but not convinced of its impartiality. There's a strange attempt here to link labour union organising to social activism, which is incorrect and ahistorical. And also irrelevant to nix, which is a community rather than an employer.

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.

There are no impartial reporters, you gotta take it all in and decide for yourself.

When a person is deeply involved with something that turned into a conflict and then they write their history of it, as is the case with the link above, then I would say that framing them as a 'reporter' is not accurate.

Out of curiosity - what makes you think that the author of the link above, Chris McDonough (incidentally an author of the Pyramid Python web framework), is "deeply involved" with the NixOS conflict?

It is a firsthand account of someone in the community. They referenced no sources and gave a description of events based entirely on memory. They claimed their own involvement and interest in the outcomes.

Right, but I don't see a better way.

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.

If the person is involved in a situation and recounts a history from their perspective it is not reporting. It doesn't matter whether you think they did a good job or not. A combatant in a war writing their evaluation of it afterwards is not 'reporting' and neither is what he did.

So now we're comparing the NixOS community to a warzone? Is it really that bad?

An analogy is not a literal comparison between two things. It is a way to describe something by pointing out relationships between things and comparing the relationships. It does not literally compare NixOS with a warzone.

> 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

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.

Why do these people always have to ruin good projects?

Because it is good and people want to do selfish things.

The end result is fragmented projects, worse developers and less activity. Congratulations. You got your social point across to the detriment of everyone.

Power tripping. Ever wonder why projects become "foundations" with heavy emphasis on non technical bureaucratic bloat, committees, forums, "community managers" with way too much power and so on?

The main reason to become a foundation is to have some legal entity to deal with money. Some times projects get grants or donations or google summer of code mentor payments, and that can either go into a random account of whoever happened to be in contact with the donor, or it can be properly managed by a foundation with agreed-upon guidelines on where to store money and what it can be used on.

Putting aside the accusations of activist ideology, this paragraph seems key:

> 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 an outsider, it looks like Nix had a weak leader who refused to mediate differences between people.

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...

Without knowing the specifics: I doubt a governance structure will produce good leadership. I've seen Rust people place their hopes in abstract, convoluted processes, and they've failed repeatedly.

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.