an open letter to the NixOS foundation
an open letter to the NixOS foundation
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.
consider this a gentle warning that bootlicking for fucking Anduril of all companies won’t end well. you techfash fucks.
Eelco posted another non-apology and stepped down from the NixOS Foundation board. here’s the Aux take on it which I think has a bit more value than the original post alone did.
in essence: this is a good step, but it’s important to remember that Eelco and friends have made concessions like this in the past, and it hasn’t mattered to their (informal but very real) entrenched positions of power. specifically, Eelco hasn’t stepped down from the Nix evaluator team or promised he’d change any of his behavior there (and the evaluator is key to Nix, and to commercializing the project against the community’s wishes), and there’s no clarity on how the Nix governance changes will impact bad actors (which specifically includes Anduril). there’s still a very good place for Aux and any other Nix fork to exist as long as Eelco and company haven’t committed to taking actions that will remedy the most crucially broken parts of the Nix community.
In positive News, there is now a zulip (yep, the chat system with the threads) instance where nix governance gets discussed, with a faiiiirly reasonable and toothsome code of conduct. I don’t want to hope too much but maybe there is a way this project can heal, I’d certainly appreciate not having to spend person-months migrating all my personal computing to some much worse platform.
The fascists have been incredibly effective at diverting people to all the conversations that don't matter. It's the same strategy as always -- "be loudly wrong about an insignificant issue and watch the leftists jump to correct you."
Anduril is mentioned once in the NixOS thread and zero times in the aux.computer thread. So let's say I'm not hopeful.
absolutely! there’s a clear pattern to how fascists take over FOSS projects and the commons in general. what’s interesting is how visible it all is in Nix’s case; they aren’t even bothering to hide what they’re doing, other than the typical distortions from the fash weirdos flooding Nix’s discussion forums. in this case it’s such an obvious bait and switch, and it sucks to see people fall for it yet again.
I really should start writing about technofascism again. it’s becoming increasingly important that FOSS projects learn about and are ruggedized against the pathways fascists use to take over the commons, because if this obvious shit keeps working, we’ll have nothing of value left.
“be loudly wrong about an insignificant issue and watch the leftists jump to correct you.”
It's taken me way too long to learn how to avoid falling for weaponized nerd sniping, and it still gets me sometimes.
NSFW Edit: This is why we sneer, innit? Be laconic, be witty, and deprive fashy bullshit the dignity of an effortful reply.
There's some bitter irony to the fact that I've been getting nonstop notices about commits to the infamous "lazy trees" branch, the thing that is supposed to make flakes usable with monorepos (but in practice has yet to do so). Watching those notifications the last couple of days has told me all I needed to know.
oops all eelco and he really ain’t doing much in these commits, is he? between that and the recent commits to the Nix evaluator it’s pretty obvious he’s keeping near-exclusive control over what gets into the evaluator and how it’s developed
it’s very likely that Eelco and Determinate Systems have employed an old strikebreaking technique: they’ve agreed to concessions that don’t inconvenience them and weren’t really what was demanded. Eelco has lost a board position he didn’t want, but maintains a position that’ll ensure he and his friends can commercialize improvements to Nix by controlling what goes into the evaluator, ensuring that only Determinate Systems can implement an improved version of Nix with a working version of flakes.
oh the nix community thread is going fucking great:
Can we not use controversial, handwavy and subjective terms such as sealioning without strong evidence? Surely we can phrase them as something more concrete and objective such as xxx did yyy which implies zzz (you get the point)?
[…]
I contest the notion that sealioning is objective. Objective by definition means that the standard is independent of any specific person’s judgment, and as such should be able to be judged by a machine. Can you give men such a definition?
the deepest pit of hell is just sealions sealioning about sealioning
I’m not trying to get banned so I will tread carefully.
I’m a black guy from the USA, I love using NixOS, want it to be the #1 Linux distro.
I don’t think anyone would use N-word here, it’s universal in any forum I’ve been a part of that derogatory language is an instant ban.
So my question about the particular use of the word “Protection” is sincere here. What am I being protected from here. Again I haven’t seen any threads where any verbal assaults occurred.
I don’t don’t want anybody to be afraid to debate me personally because they’re afraid that I’m a “protected class” or something.
this post in the exact tone and style of republican twitter is presented without further comment
the anduril dude has run crying to reddit. Since anyone who actually has a miniscule amount of technical ability and emotional maturity has left reddit, the results are predictable.
holy fuck that thread is oops all trolls and it’s adorable that some of them are pretending they don’t know what’s going on
god, these people are the worst
so this is a prime example of how disfunctional shit gets when your open source community is this toxic. “oh the person with the (gonna be honest, not incredibly difficult) role of release manager is a shithead who was using his meager amount of power to repeatedly harass people! but how can we possibly fire him with a release coming up?” it’s easy when your community functions:
- replace shithead with one of the two other people on the release committee
- if they’re shitheads too, replace them with anyone non-shitheaded and competent from the community and have them follow the first shithead’s release docs
- if those docs don’t exist because the first shithead wasn’t doing his job (and of course he wasn’t), oops! delay the release til you can write those docs cause there’s no reason release manager in a distro famous for its automated testing and releases should be anything more than a minor role
but there’s nobody making the above calls, because “woke made us miss a NixOS release” is the point. it’s absolutely going to be used as a weapon against anyone who brings up valid issues.
one of those complicit dickheads that was highlighted in the open letter has, unfortunately, said words again
there’s nothing more non-political than destroying your own community because you want to get funding and a tiny amount of code from a right-wing defense contractor whose explicit mission is to use your and your contributors’ work to more efficiently kill people
It’s worth noting that the open letter received 232 signatures. However, 231 contributors have opted to keep contributing to nixpkgs, which makes me optimistic that things will work out.
christ almighty. there’s no number of signatures or amount of core maintainers quitting that’ll stop these fuckers from using bad math and statistics to make it look like a good thing. this is the mind-numbing banality of technofascism — you can always ass-pull some numbers to justify your ghastly fucking position no matter how many people tell you you’re a fucking ghoul.
Lotta people are leaving, holy shit
Update: Milestone got deleted, pulled out a Wayback machine copy
ah, this must be why the lie being pushed now is that it’s really just two people causing all the problems. anything to stop the bleeding without instituting any changes at all!
I seem to have made the same mistake that @danderson mentioned in #307033. This PR rectifies the issue by leaving the Determinate Systems community.
This orphans a bunch of long tail packages, but hopefully someone who loves the idea of hunting migrants with Nix-powered surveillance can take over.
fucking brutal
I’m currently watching some old gnu hacker and his buddies tie themselves into furious knots defending Anduril against the ravages of… ah… not being allowed full control over an open source project
check the stream of piss-warm takes coming from that account for a long list of reasons why guix isn’t a viable path forward for nix users
If NixOS shits itself and dies, don't say they weren't warned.
our instance runs on NixOS, so I’m not relishing the prospect of rewriting all our deployment and configuration stuff and fleeing the distro because it got taken over by fascists. I’m hoping for a fork if none of the demands in the open letter are met.
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.
)
the resident fascists at lobste.rs
Never heard of it. is this a hackernews for chuds?
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.
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.
several demographic categories
Those are the same pictures.
the fascists in the community proposed to finally moderate nixos properly, and this is their body of evidence of terrible leftist harrasment.
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.
Kind of fascinating that last link leads with references to lobste.rs, and Srid, a terrible person who was banned from the site 3 months ago: https://lobste.rs/~srid
(Irenes is a mod and a good one too.)
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
Jin 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!”
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.
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 ?
There's a LWN piece that does a pretty good job with framing the specifics of this letter within some context. It gets some things wrong, such as stating that the arms manufacturer was rejected as a sponsor in both cases, but it has been corrected. The orange site is, of course, negging it with mod tools, showing that they're fine with mods pulling out the C-4 when it's their unelected mod team of choice.
a fork has appeared, courtesy of Jake Hamilton. the site seems a bit unstable for right now, but it looks like it’s starting on the right foot otherwise.
an orange site thread about the fork that as of now is mostly jon ringer refusing to log off
There's a vast difference between "working to solve it" and "forking it"!
The younger generations do not get the concept of "respect"! They need to respect those who've done the most work and not feel entitled that a small contribution to something makes them equal rights owners!
holy shit this is it, this is what forking hostility gets you. just straight up racist uncle at thanksgiving level takes
- Use of social media to target individuals [3]
Ah yes, the good old projection, never fails to be completely transparent.
Big Daddy happily reminds Anduril that this should have no impact on their murder bot deliverables.
wow I was expecting a nothing of a statement from Eelco, but that was worse than nothing. let’s look at some lowlights:
It is my opinion that it is not for us, as open source software developers, to decide whose views are valid and whose are not, and to allow or disallow project or conference participation as a result.
this is utterly wrong. one of the most important jobs an open source developer has is to evaluate contributors and their contributions to prevent bad actors from damaging the community — whether that’s through bad code or bad intent (and see the xz incident for when maintainers don’t do this).
also, in general, it’s part of our job as good people to actively enable marginalized folks to participate regardless of the type of project we run. that’s why this “non-political” horseshit from Eelco and co just (very intentionally) favors the rich defense contractor that spends a lot of money flooding Nix’s community platforms with trolls.
Throughout my career, I have consistently supported work towards creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for all individuals, regardless of their background. I continue to support initiatives to ensure that everyone feels valued and appreciated, and I have actively encouraged opportunities to amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized.
not one example, Eelco? Nix has been around for 20 years and you didn’t have one anecdote or example of an initiative to link? is it because the historically marginalized folks you say you’ve supported are now very loudly calling you out, and your stupid ass thinks that’s because they’re ungrateful for all the shitty initiatives you started to shut them up that didn’t actually address anyone’s concerns in a material way?
I encourage everyone reading this who feels that they have not been heard or feels displaced to join the Determinate Systems community as we continue working to make Nix as easy to use and as impactful as possible. Our code of conduct is available here, and you can join our Discord at https://determinate.systems/discord.
oh finally, the classics! Determinate Systems doesn’t control Nix, but if you’ve got issues with how we control Nix you should join our Discord where we can more effectively shout down anyone who complains too much. the classic cryptobro move, now in a project I give a damn about!
Eelco can fuck all the way off
I've been fairly surprised by how poorly they've handled community engagement since they were "founded". If there's one good thing that can come of all this, it will be to make DetSys sufficiently toxic that they lose purchase in the larger enterprise and end up the first ones to blink with a fork. Some have suggested that they've all but done that already, and while there's no conclusive evidence, I'm looking forward to breaking out the popcorn if they end up trying to speedrun Hashicorp.
here’s a depressing but informative post from one of the people who tried to fix things before everything boiled over
kinda good to know Xe isn't a garbage person. I've been 🤨 watching some of their takes/engagement on ML shit. hoped that maybe it was explained by youth/lack of exposure to certain kinds of things, and part of this post confirms the direction of that hypothesis