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On Community in Nix

by popey on 4/26/24, 5:34 PM with 11 comments

• by flurie on 4/26/24, 6:13 PM

  There are a few things this is responding to, but since it does not provide the context directly, here they are (by no means exhaustive):

  - Anduril dropped as NixCon sponsor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418351

  - Open letter against MIC sponsorship: https://nixos-users-against-mic-sponsorship.github.io/

  - Open letter in support of MIC sponsorship: https://nixos-users-for-western-mil-and-govs.github.io/

  - Updated sponsorship policy: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundation-event-sponsor...

  - Open letter asking Eelco Dolstra to step down from NixOS Foundation and Nix team: https://save-nix-together.org/

• by depr on 4/26/24, 6:33 PM

  "The ongoing debate on these issues has been divisive to the community and deleterious to our collective goals"

  If you simply all agreed with me we wouldn't have all these important community members getting in fights and leaving.

  "I am just one member of the five-member Nix team and hold no more formal authority than the others in determining the direction of the team"

  Thought the inclusion of the word "formal" here was was pretty funny.

  Both the letter and this response are pretty disappointing. The letter was too long and didn't make a great case even if it was ultimately probably right in many ways. And Eelco did not attempt to understand the writers, choosing to simply deny every single thing, which is not great leadership.

  Even if he did nothing wrong at all, he makes no attempt to reach out to people who feel he has, to reconcile with them. To people who feel, justifiable or not, excluded he simply says: I've always done my best to create an inclusive environment. He doesn't seem to comprehend that one can try, but fail.

  For someone with some interest in Nix but never having tried it, this has done enough to turn me off it for a few years. Who knows if it will still be around by then, considering the leadership and community.

• by licebmi__at__ on 4/26/24, 6:39 PM

  Up to this point, I was on the fence with regarding Eelco. I mean, I'm against the MIC sponsorship, yet I accept that sometimes a project doesn't take the direction I want, and I could understand that a leader has to compromise since part of the community indeed wants to go forward on this regards with the sponsorship.

  Yet this post is really tone deaf. At this point, this is beyond the sponsorship, but recognizing that the community is split and addressing this issue. Important contributors have been banning each other on different communities, at least one important contributor has decided to step out of the maintainer role.

  I'm a nobody on the nix community so is not like it even matters if I support Eelco or not, but this kind of response actually makes me worried about the future of the community.

• by KingMob on 4/29/24, 11:47 AM

  This goes into more details, with receipts: https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

• by asmor on 4/26/24, 8:36 PM

  The art of saying nothing and still filling 2 pages.

• by ChrisArchitect on 4/26/24, 7:23 PM

  Related:

  The dire state of NixOS's moderation culture

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40166912

• by deputy on 4/26/24, 6:21 PM

  [deleted]