Short Summary of the Community Drama of the Linux Distribution “NixOS”, so that you can get the big picture and form your own opinion with the provided sources.
Clarification of the “Steering Comittee” as Project Leadership
Moderation Team resigns in Protest
- Resignation Post, with examples of interference: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-the-moderation-team/69828
- Conflict due different interests:
- the Moderation Team desires being independent. otherwise, they can’t moderate the behavior of people in positions of power.
- the Moderation Team is currently accountable to the Steering Comittee: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-the-moderation-team/69828/6
Technical Leadership works for Military Company, causing Fear of Alignment with Facism.
- Steering Committee works for Military Company https://discourse.nixos.org/t/sc-member-tomberek-works-for-anduril/68971
- People in the community feel uncomfortable with that, since the US and its military are heading towards facsism: https://mstdn.games/@KFears/115275676459535171
- The Steering Committee made a public Post about that, explaining the Situation: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/statement-on-a-steering-committee-member-joining-anduril/69007
Can we avoid calling taking action against valid moral objections “drama”? It only serves to make the people doing the right thing sound like they’re being immature, even when they’re obviously right.
Objecting to a fascist government’s influence over very powerful build infrastructure used around the world is the right thing to do.
Why don’t we destigmatise drama?
Imagine if we referred to the recent UN walkout as “Drama at the UN.” It trivializes the topic.
valid moral objections
That’s the thing, whether or not they’re valid depends on the person you’re asking.
I personally think this is a load of bullshit and just another instance of slacktivists trying to guilt people into doing their bidding.
Hopefully the leader in question doesn’t change a single thing due to this pressure. He would be a helpless child if he didn’t have the strength to resist this kind of peer pressure from online drama.
So…you don’t believe in democracy? That people involved, stakeholders, don’t have a right to influence the direction of an organized effort?
I mean yeah, if you ask a fascist how they feel about fascism, they probably don’t think it’s a big deal.
That’s the thing, whether or not they’re valid depends on the person you’re asking.
No it fucking doesn’t! There are people who think that, but they’re wrong.
Moral relativism is bullshit.
How is taking direct action to stigmatize someone who is enabling our fascist military “slacktivism”? What do you propose would be a more fitting and effective tactic for someone who doesn’t want their work associated in any way to the US military?
Good on the team for not aiding the genocidal American MIC.
First things first: a simple search for “anduril nixos” shows that NixOS and Anduril Industries (defense technology) have been entangled for years.
So, pretty sure there’s plenty history & dissent here, but I never dived into it.
In detail this looks like just another community drama, but when you zoom out a different picture emerges: commercial interest, a will to silence dissent (and I will give them the benefit of the doubt that it isn’t for ideological reasons but simple worry about money). The Enshittification of a distro. With a military/fascist twist.
Here’s an interesting detail:
Unfortunately, the Constitution does not provide a meaningful recourse to SC overreach
So they have a flawed “constitution” which - judging by its name - should supersede the steering committee. It’s not like it’s really a constitution though, with all that would entail. It sounds more like, hm, “communitywashing” to me. Still, I wonder if they’re willing to take that colorful terminology one step further and make an amendment to said constitution.
So yeah, political bias and unilateral decisions.
I’ve always been leery of NixOS, and I mean since they started pushing it over a decade ago, always claiming it’s revolutionary better than $STANDARD_LINUX_DISTRO.
First things first: a simple search for “anduril nixos” shows that NixOS and Anduril Industries (defense technology) have been entangled for years.
It’s more like Anduril using Nix{OS} and trying to insert themselves into the community. There’s been a lot of opposition to that, including an open letter and maintainers quitting; this was a big part of the reason for Steering Committee formation in the first place. The SC has since voted on some based things, like banning Anduril from job posting on community forums and sponsoring conferences. I was hoping they would just ban any mention of Anduril anywhere, but that’s going too far for them unforutenately; and banning technical contributions wouldn’t make sense.
An SC member joining Anduril (after being elected, not before, mind you) is really bad, but I bet they will lose their seat in a month’s time when there’s a new election. The community is mostly antifascist and thus anti-MIC. It’s like one of the most leftist technical communities I’ve seen, perhaps more so than Rust.
Sounds like interpersonal bullshit reframed as politics. Honestly impressed at the resignation letter being able to use so many words while avoiding actually directly explaining what they’re upset about. Of course it would take something really egregious and extraordinary for me to give a shit, because…
The steering committee or board of trustees or whatever should be sitting the rules for the organization, up to an including adding or removing mods from a forum if they want. That’s what they exist for. The idea that a mod team should be independent of the actual organizational structure of an institution is ridiculous.
And now DHH is getting involved in this shitshow. For those not chronically online enough, DHH is one of the developers of Rails, has a rap sheet of drama, and has his own dirty laundry full of racism, transphobia, and has managed to drive his own company into the shitter.
So really a bunch of winners are coming out of the woodwork for this one.
As a happy Debian user i’m not hearing any of it.
I’ve been saying this for years: Just switch to Guix.
- An official GNU project;
- Herd instead of systemd;
- Uses Linux Libre and only 100% free software;
- Big, friendly, helpful community;
- Regular meetups, unconferences and other events;
- Config is done in an established language (Scheme) instead of an idiosyncratic DSL.
Also, a fraction of packages, users and guides.
I think Guix is great, but as a NixOS enthusiast who genuinely wanted to try it out, I gave up in the face of the lack of docs for people who aren’t working in lab or have a PhD in computing of some sort.
Also, how is shepherd better than systems? Genuinely curious.
Lastly, I agree Nix is not a very enjoyable language, but scheme doesn’t look like a very beginner friendly option either. Could be wrong, I’m not a programmer.
As someone who is curious about Nix but has given up after trying to wade through the myriad and conflicting “getting started” resources for it, I cant imagine how bad guix docs must be for a Nix enthusiast to adandon it.
If you are still trying to find the best guide, I recommend this one
That’s one the books I tried to get through. Maybe it was in a more raw state at the time, but it didn’t click for me.
Yah 100% free no thanks. And I actually like systemd.
Is it non-trivial to enable non-free repos?
https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
Quite trivial
Never tried! But I’m assuming it’s a pain indeed. Not even Signal Desktop works out-of-the-box (or maybe at all, haven’t tried either) because of Electron.
The most ridiculous thing in the conversations I read was someone arguing that the fact that Anduril has a member at SC (Steering Committee) weakens their position. The mental gymnastic is so insane to me because it completely naively expect people who have a conflict of interest to do the right thing. What if they don’t ?
There is real smart fascists out there. they won’t kindly “recuse themselves” and weaken Anduril positions. Very suspicious that someone would argue that Anduril gets weaker at SC by having people there.
The most ridiculous thing in the conversations I read was someone arguing that the fact that Anduril has a member at SC (Steering Committee) weakens their position. The mental gymnastic is so insane to me because it completely naively expect people who have a conflict of interest to do the right thing. What if they don’t ?
The argument there was that they would be excluded of any votes related to said company.
It reads as an “honor” system rather than any objective exclusionary mechanism. Steering committee members are expected, and to their credit, were considered to have done so, but it all seems like judgement calls.
It is fully possible that grey areas or instances where other SC members didn’t personally care, were not met with recusal.
It would overall be better to not have those conflicts be likely or even possible.
Steering Committee works for Military Company
It’s only one SC member, and they switched jobs after being elected last year. I think the Nix community is generally very much against US MIC, and unlikely to actually elect someone working for them. Although it was well-known that tomberek (and johnringer) are US-military-aligned.
After reading a bit more into the modteam situation, I have to say I’m on the mod team’s side here.
Good thing Linux distros can be forked, so devs who might have a target on their backs can theoretically fork NixOS and run away with that.
Good thing Linux distros can be forked,
Distro isn’t the problem; The OS is already on a far too tight update schedule, fork away, but we need the package repository to remain sound and I don’t know what this would do to that.
