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.

    • foobarbruh@awful.systems
      1·
      7 months ago

      Defenders of the first Anduril sponsorship at the Europeans NixCon 2023 who participated in the discussion on Discourse have been termed “murder machine apologists” by J in the NixOS foundation Matrix room, likening them linguistically to people who defend actual murder. We believe that such rhetoric is inappropriate in a professional setting.

      “Defending murder professionals isn’t defending actual murder guys. MODS!”

      • sinedpick@awful.systems
        1·
        7 months ago

        I really feel bad for poo-pooing my undergrad software ethics class. I could be a murder-machine builder right now if I hadn’t accidentally found certain spaces online and had the right friends.

    • self@awful.systemsOPM
      1·
      7 months ago

      oh wow, somehow I called that Standard is a fascist land-grab for control over the Flakes standard library (and it also just really fucking sucks to use)

      they really are doing their damndest to reframe all of this as minor drama, aren’t they? it’s kind of amazing how limited the techfash project takeover toolbox is — cause it doesn’t take much variation in methodology to succeed, unfortunately. for better or worse, what’s going on in Nix is probably going to be worth writing about in the end.

        • self@awful.systemsOPM
          1·
          7 months ago

          “popular Linux distro gets taken over by nazis” does have a ring to it as an article title

            • antifuchs@awful.systems
              1·
              7 months ago

              It’s funny, by some metrics it is intensely popular: GitHub contributor count and daily commit volume would be two… but it definitely is a vanishingly small user base compared to Fedora or Ubuntu or, lol, Android, ofc.

              That contributor count metric is also a fun one to consider when people complain about politics in OSS - this is the size of a small municipality, of course there’s going to be politics.

    • jax@awful.systems
      1·
      7 months ago

      I know approximately nothing about Nix (or computers really lol), but I do know that if your community crisis has reached the point that someone suggests using the orange site as a guiding star, you’re fucked?*

      Hi all, fwiw Hacker News has evolved a set of community & moderation guidelines over many years, aimed at fostering thoughtful curiosity and minimizing flame wars. Context is similar but not exactly the same, so may or may not be useful, but posting just in case it is. Moderator @dang does a good job at reminding folks from time to time to stick to the guidelines, not heavy-handed but effective and respectful.

      *edit for obligatory appending of ?