open letter to the NixOS foundation
save-nix-together.org

this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    I have no bone in this infighting, nor am I interested in Nix per se (to me, it’s one of those computing fads like Rust or Emacs that flare up once in a while then subside, either by becoming mainstream or irrelevant). But the fact that the resident fascists at lobste.rs reacted to this letter in strong terms tells me it’s by the good guys.

    (one commentator mentioned

    The people who wrote this letter are left -progressives with politics seriously antithetical to my own and hostile to several demographic categories I belong to.

    These categories being white-male-cis-straight-libertarian-American.

    )

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Yeah, I thought the cake was quite sneerworthy. “I’m struggling to think of any organizations that I would refuse to accept money or contributions from out of principle,” they say. I also rolled my eyes at the sock. “In my observations over the last few months,” says a person who I’m relatively sure doesn’t participate in FLOSS at all, let alone Nix/nixpkgs.

      On a happier note, some folks revealed themselves as decent people, and I’m marking them too. It’s good to know that some neighbors are respectable.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        Lobste.rs is an offshoot of HN, started mainly because HN accepts a lot of stuff that’s not computing. So it’s laser-focussed on that, but of course, open source governance drama is on-topic.

        People have been banned for being both regular assholes and bigots - one of the features is an open modlog:

        https://lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=(All)&what[users]=users

        But of course part of the memetic evolution is that fascists have become very good at being acceptable community members, by never giving the mods enough rope to hang them with.

        Here’s the discussion, btw. I’ve been a long-term member so I “know” where some people stand. See if you can detect them!

        https://lobste.rs/s/0qvtim/open_letter_nixos_foundation

        edit I can extend invites to those who wish one, but I’ll do basic vetting first.

        • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
          11·
          7 months ago

          my biggest gripe with lobsters is that the mods pretend that software development happens in vacuum and is done by spherical avatars of an idea of a programmer, so any social issues should never be mentioned aloud or – worse yet – discussed.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        it’s largely a bit more indie/non-VC-hypebros than HN, but it also has a standing problem of some fash presence that it hasn’t quite yet accepted it needs to deal with