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

Yet you participate in society. Curious.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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...

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.

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

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...)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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

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.

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?

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?

he was in a well, actually

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

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.

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

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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?

> 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.

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!

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

> 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?

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...

> 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.

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)

What is the composition of the nix community?

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 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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...