A leadership crisis in the Nix community

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/970824/0d89c6d83efad1e0/

by elikoga • 2 years ago

120 274 2 years ago

lwn.net

benreesman• 2 years ago

There are too many stakeholders, it’s too forkable (guix, flox, Anduril).

Maybe the official leadership has a shuffle, maybe it’s even big.

I’m not changing my Nix investment, I discourage others from changing theirs.

lambdaba• 2 years ago

Me neither. Mocking Nix is the new mocking "I use Arch BTW" but when you're deep in it you realize it absolutely is the way, and if it's not Nix or Nix in some more evolved form it will be something very close to it.

slekker2• 2 years ago

What does guix have to do with Nix (genuine question, not snarky)?

busterarm10• 2 years ago

Guix was based on Nix.

ddellacosta• 2 years ago

It's a bit hidden in their about page:

    GNU Guix provides state-of-the-art package management features such as transactional upgrades and roll-backs, reproducible build environments, unprivileged package management, and per-user profiles. It uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, but packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language—which makes it nicely hackable.

https://guix.gnu.org/en/about/

hprotagonist• 2 years ago

same idea, but in a scheme.

busterarm10• 2 years ago

This seems more like a community crisis around Nix than a leadership crisis in the Nix community.

yifanl• 2 years ago

What does a community crisis mean exactly?

If every member of the community wants one thing, and the leadership doesn't, then the community wins, every time.

busterarm10• 2 years ago

https://github.com/nrdxp/rfc-evidence/blob/dfe80298dddf9858a...

WJW• 2 years ago

Sure but this letter is not by "every member", not even close. It's just a letter by a very loud minority. In such a case I don't think the outcome is actually all that clear. As people have been saying from the beginning, the writers of the letter can always just fork the codebase and the fact that they haven't done that implies that they are unsure if enough of the community would follow them.

aredox2• 2 years ago

The main reason for the persistence of Nix despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives.

Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense.

*For example, why are Haskellians using Nix so much instead of integrating its concepts into their own tooling?

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

Cabal has had nix-style local builds since 2016:

https://blog.ezyang.com/2016/05/announcing-cabal-new-build-n...

https://cabal.readthedocs.io/en/2.0/nix-local-build-overview...

Also cabal isn't positioned to be a system level package manager. Haskell programmers are the type to want both their application builds and system dependencies to be reproducible and predictable.

Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense.

Getting Guix packages to be as complete as nixpkgs isn't a matter of laziness though. One person wouldn't be able to do it no matter how disciplined they were.

Macha2• 2 years ago

You'll also need to deal with project philosophy regarding closed source packages to get Guix as streamlined as Nix.

karma_pharmer4• 2 years ago

Cabal has had nix-style local builds since 2016:

That's a bug not a feature.

Every language these days is trying to force you to use its own badly-implemented imitation of Nix. Just look at what cargo does with the target/ directory and wonky "build fingerprints".

It's madness.

dzogchen2• 2 years ago

The main reason for the persistence of C despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives.

Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with C. [Insert systems programming language du jour] or any other well-developed language makes more sense.

aredox2• 2 years ago

... Yes.

tempaccount4203• 2 years ago

I see nothing wrong with this statement. Spice it up by inserting Rust at the blank and I can fully agree.

busterarm10• 2 years ago

It's not just "first-mover advantage". I wouldn't even say it's mainly first-mover advantage.

It's the need to maintain super legacy systems and interoperability. There are entire CPU architectures that LLVM does not support and are only commonly supported by C and these things are still everywhere and are really gnarly problems to replace them.

Even if you throw everything away on the software side and start over from scratch, that's going to _force_ you to replace some hardware somewhere that you won't or can't replace.

tripdout3• 2 years ago

I think Nix is much simpler and more suited for software packaging than Scheme.

orthecreedence2• 2 years ago

I don't think any general purpose language ever invented is simpler than lisp/scheme. I've not taken the time to familiarize myself with Nix yet, and one of the reasons is that the syntax of learning yet another language with its own idioms and syntax isn't something I care to tackle right now. I would love to reap the benefits of something like Nix, but something like Guix is much more appealing to me.

hamandcheese3• 2 years ago

I think the main reason actually is that nix supports more than just Linux - notably macOS.

_cenw4• 2 years ago

The quality of Nix packages for Darwin is quite bad compared to Linux though, I don't think there's a core maintainer that runs Nix on Darwin.

tempaccount4203• 2 years ago

There is Tvix, a Rust implementation of Nix, and although it still uses the Nix programming language, I bet it would be a lot easier to replace it there than in the original C++ codebase. (not just because of the language of implementation)

https://github.com/tvlfyi/tvix

To me, the perfect solution would be to have a base like Nix/Tvix you can build on top of, for example to make a package manager for your language, and have the users of that language's PM interact with TOML or JSON.

karma_pharmer4• 2 years ago

Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language

The fundamental difference with Guix is that evaluation (what they call "host code" -- everything that happens BEFORE the .drv is written) is wildly impure.

Guile code can access the network, write to the filesystem, heck it can even pull bytes from /dev/random. It can delete your home directory or email your ssh private keys to Zimbabwe.

The Nix language, by contrast, is incredibly restricted in order to make evaluation a deterministic function of the .nix source code you give it, things whose cryptographic hash is in the .nix source code, and nothing else. There is an --impure flag which lets it read from (but not write to) the filesystem but nixpkgs does not use that.

That is a pretty big rift that I find myself unable to cross. I can eval Nix code from any random bozo on the interwebs without having to trust them. If I trust the nix sandbox (which I mostly do) I can even build the resulting drv. I can be sure that evaluating that Nix code will produce exactly the same drv two years from now that it did today. Guix doesn't offer those things. Because scheme. I'm sorry but scheme just isn't the right language for this, it's too powerful.

Laaas• 2 years ago

I think it’s important to make clear that the letter is mostly bogus and almost libelous.

Check into any one claim, and you’ll find it’s not the entire story.

This however is true:

The Foundation board has unrepresentative composition relative to the community because, due to our count, all current members are cisgender, white-passing, men, one of whom has done military service, and one other (Eelco) likely relies on undisclosed military-tech work.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

I think it’s important to make clear that the letter is mostly bogus and almost libelous.

That's not my reading of it.

However my biggest issue is the conflict of interest between Eelco -> DetSys -> Anduril Contract -> Eelco fighting hard for Nix to sponsor Anduril.

As foundation chair he should declare that he doesn't have a conflict of interest and DetSys doesn't have a contract with Anduril or have recused himself from the sponsorship discussion.

takeda3• 2 years ago

The whole idea behind Open Source is that one does not discriminate.

As a Nix user I feel like those people who started this whole drama are actually negative to this project. They are trying to use Nix as a tool for their political goals.

I think the best for Nix would be to just move forward and ignore them.

retool3• 2 years ago

[flagged]

giraffe_lady3• 2 years ago

How is it slanderous to point out the board composition is not representative of the community. Seriously walk me through this one.

xyzzy_plugh• 2 years ago

one other (Eelco) likely relies on undisclosed military-tech work.

While this may be technically true, the framing seems disingenuous, unless I am missing something. I have not been following the situation closely. My understanding is that Eelco's company, Determinate Systems, _may_ have contracts with customers connected to the military-industrial complex, but I dislike the implication as it renders Eelco as a bad-faith actor. It seems like a circular argument. I also dislike the implication that it is somehow problematic for Eelco's _for profit_, separate entity to have customers that the _community_ finds problematic.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

My understanding is that Eelco's company, Determinate Systems, _may_ have contracts with customers connected to the military-industrial complex, but I dislike the implication as it renders Eelco as a bad-faith actor.

As chair of the foundation, Eelco should do what he can to avoid even the appearance of malfeasance, including declaring or denying conflicts of interest.

styxfrix• 2 years ago

if claiming something is bogus, then provide evidence of your claim. otherwise your claim holds less weight than the one you oppose.

philodeon• 2 years ago

Check into any one claim, and you’ll find it’s not the entire story.

Indeed. If you look at pull request 10513, you see Eelco propose a bug fix, another person point out the flaws in his approach, and Eelco subsequently closing his own pull request and filing a new PR with a different approach.

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/10513

The save-nix-together signatories describe this as “ignoring other people and only considering his way”.

I suppose they were counting on no one bothering to read their citations?

jsyang00• 2 years ago

The Anduril issue seems to have been the main catalyst for the drama. Seems like Anduril probably did more harm then good - who at Anduril couldn't have predicted that the Nix folks would start to have a major freakout the minute they attempted to sponsor?

bitfilped• 2 years ago

Anduril could have predicted this had they actually asked/engaged the community and not just Eelco.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

It's worse because after the first time much of the community was trying to write it off as a simple mistake or miscommunication.

It became evident after the second time though that this was very on purpose and it was known there would be an issue.

jonringer1172• 2 years ago

Well, the activity around changing the status quo was done in a github issue [1]. Which sat around for many months after proposing the Apache Software Foundation's sponsorship policy of "state of nexus". Which didn't give a basis in which to exclude Anduril from sponsoring again.

Obviously there's the "people were angry last time, they will likely be angry this time". But that's projecting personal/political views into a sponsorship.

What should have been the right course of action? I'm not sure. "Tech is easy, people are hard"

1: https://github.com/NixOS/foundation/issues/110

Cyph0n2• 2 years ago

Because defense contractors typically think what they are doing is purely good and could in no way be thought of as being bad. A form of “reality-distortion field”.

docandrew• 2 years ago

You could make the reverse argument - that the conference organizers think what defense contractors are doing is purely bad and could in no way be thought of as being good. Ultimately it’s up to _us_ (proxied through our elected officials) to use software tools for good or bad purposes, the creation of a tool in itself isn’t the problem. I think most defense contractors are keenly aware of the implications of their work.

nightowl_games• 2 years ago

Can anybody more knowledgeable than me clarify how a project like Fedora Silverblue compares to Nix? I know Nix has the declarative configuration, but do you get the same reproducibility out of Silverblue?

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

My knowledge is that Silverblue is kind of image based and you get reproducibility with snapshots. This makes me think it's like docker.

Whereas Nix is about reproducibility all the way down to the individual libraries and software.

themgt• 2 years ago

That same day, Samuel Dionne-Riel stated that Dolstra had refused to clarify whether he had a relationship with Anduril and asked Christensen, a co-founder of Determinate Systems: "Does DetSys have or had relationships with Anduril?" Christensen replied: "Did you know this category of question is pretty much impossible to answer because NDAs are a thing?"

[Determinate Systems] produces its own installer for Nix that the company promises will provide stable support for some Nix features. The letter states: "This is fine, however, it is questionably acceptable to do that while employing the lead developer of CppNix [the main Nix implementation] and saying nothing about how this will interact with the team's [decision-making] autonomy."

So "DetSys" is a commercial provider of Nix services, making corporate promises about future Nix feature support and (presumably) contracting with Anduril whose current focus is Shahed-inspired kamikaze drones, while wearing a separate hat as board chair of NixOS Foundation.

Effectively the tl;dr is whether Nix foundation should be bankrolled by the DoD, feature roadmap guided by the needs of mass produced suicide drones. And if they are, do other contributors want to continue providing free R&D for that organization?

suddenclarity• 2 years ago

Skimming the letter makes it look like another attempt at pushing through their Code of Conduct (RFC98) targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry", whatever that means. Now going a step further by erasing the people in charge.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry"

Is targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" a bad thing?

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 2 years ago

When, for people pushing this targeting, fascism/bigotry means having a branch in your repo names master I absolutely believe targeting ideas rooted in fascism/bigotry is a bad thing.

marginalia_nu3• 2 years ago

Based on how these things have historically tuned out, yes. This is very problematic.

The root of the problem is that it is basically impossible to defend yourself against the accusation that you are secretly a fascist. If you say yes, you admit to being a fascist, if you say no, you're a lying fascist. If you question why the accusation is levied against someone else, you're defending a fascist, if you speak out against the proceedings, you're defending fascism.

The only way to prevent accusations of harboring secret fascist sympathies is to deflect the accusation by lashing out against others with the same sort of accusation, thus demonstrating that you are not secretly a fascist.

This is a dynamic that has repeated itself many times, it's the engine behind countless actual witch hunts, but also metaphorical ones such as the McCarthy-era red scare, the ideological persecution under Stalin.

nh23423fefe• 2 years ago

Making up dubious connections to wrongthink is a bad thing.

fireflash382• 2 years ago

What do you do when people who claim to be targeting fascist ideals also use the same tactics as those they're targeting?

throwawa14223• 2 years ago

It's scope creep for reproducible package build system, so yes in this case it is.

edit: replaced 'feature' with 'scope' realized I typed an unclear word.

skissane3• 2 years ago

Yes, because "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" is a vague phrase lacking any clear definition, and risks becoming a cudgel for cliques to use to shut down anyone who disagrees with them.

busterarm10• 2 years ago

The article I linked here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199727) provides evidence for exactly that.

ordinaryradical• 2 years ago

Dolstra nailed it:

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.

You really should not be in open source if you believe it is your purview to ideologically police the usage and contribution to your software. That notion is incompatible with the spirit of the endeavor.

danhor• 2 years ago

Isn't that exactly what the free software movement is based upon? You can only use our software if you agree to share your source code modifications with the binary (death to proprietary software, very ideological) and you can only contribute if you agree if that.

dzogchen2• 2 years ago

The free software zealots are a tiny fraction of the open source community.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

Isn't that exactly what the free software movement is based upon? You can only use our software if you agree to share your source code modifications with the binary (death to proprietary software, very ideological) and you can only contribute if you agree if that.

"Well, you see... just keep all politics out of FOSS except for the important FOSS ones I agree with" ;)

busterarm10• 2 years ago

but free software and open source aren't the same movements and don't have the same ideologies. There's some overlap, sure.

Given that Nix is LGPL 2.1 and Nixpkgs is MIT, the project leans more towards the open source camp than the free software camp.

moody__• 2 years ago

Exactly. Source with caveats has long been a celebrated part of open source. I find it entirely understandable that some people are not happy with contributing to the project if their contributions go towards producing weapons. Anduril could have made an anonymous donation, but they specifically wanted the publicity. They have had employees asking to hire people to "fill the gap" left behind by people who have decided to move on due to the lack of stance in disapproving of Anduril's sponsorship. This has always been more than "I don't want them to use it" and quickly has become a takeover of the community due to how their employees and others have been pushing the policy decisions.

HideousKojima3• 2 years ago

I've stated above some parts of my views about certain political issues unrelated to the issue of free software—about which of those activities are or aren't unjust. Your views about them might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might license a program to allow use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan's program might allow only use for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.
The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task. Not only for the components you explicitly use, but also for the hundreds of components that they link with, invoke, or communicate with.
How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing usage restrictions in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, straight, soft piece of cooked spaghetti. As one wag put it, this is “someone with a very small hammer seeing every problem as a nail, and not even acknowledging that the nail is far too big for the hammer.”

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

ndriscoll5• 2 years ago

No. e.g. BSD is considered Free Software despite no such requirements. Free Software is software that the user controls instead of controlling the user. If you publish code with no stipulations at all, it is Free Software. It is only when you place requirements on the user that it might become unfree. In fact there are plenty of Free Software licenses that are incompatible with the GPL.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

simion314• 2 years ago

Let me translate GNU for you "The only limitation is that you are not allowed to make the software less free/libre aka you are not allowed to add "limitations".

GNU developers give you some software, you can do whatever you want except making it less free.

the only people that will complain are developers that would like to remove soem of the user freedoms , because this devs want to make money or because they want more freedom for themselves and not for the users.

binary1322• 2 years ago

the term you’re looking for is “license agreement”

hamandcheese3• 2 years ago

There is a very narrow set of restrictions that is generally agreed upon for it to be free software still, and that restriction is generally to the effect of "you can't remove other peoples rights".

That seems extremely different than targeting particular company for idealogical reasons and trying to remove their rights.

weberer• 2 years ago

No, its exactly the opposite actually. You're thinking of copyleft. The Free Software movement was a direct response to corporations attempting to restrict what users could do on their own computer via dumb terms of service agreements. It guarantees 4 fundamental freedoms:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

Only in a very limited sense. Look up what happens when you try add a restriction of "You can't use this software for evil", or "You can't use this software to make nuclear weapons" to OSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Software_lic...

giraffe_lady3• 2 years ago

It's very reasonable to not want your work used by arms dealers, and it is in fact your purview to "ideologically police" the uses your work is applied to.

"If you don't want to help create war machines you can't contribute" is your solution, not mine.

Historically the conventions of open source has been that use is completely without restriction, but there has always been conflict about that. The domain is new enough that I wouldn't consider it settled yet.

rgrmrts4• 2 years ago

But the software licensing explicitly allows your work being used by anyone (as long as they adhere to the license). If you don't want your work to be used by entities you disagree with you can not contribute to the project or advocate for use of a different license.

anon291• 2 years ago

I mean... if you license your work under nixpkgs license (MIT), you no longer really have the right to police who uses it. Of course, you are free to maintain your own nixpkgs and share your changes with whomever you want under whatever license you want.

gizmo4• 2 years ago

All major open source projects are used by arms dealers. It's a big industry. Any business has customers they ideologically dislike. I get how that's annoying but it is what it is.

haswell2• 2 years ago

I do agree it's reasonable to not want this kind of use.

it is in fact your purview to "ideologically police" the uses your work is applied to

But this seems like a fantasy to me and directly at odds with the realities of open source.

The reality is that open source code is used for a myriad of purposes that I would consider myself ideologically opposed to. But this is ultimately the cost and tradeoff of open source in the system we currently have. Similar to the argument for free speech, in which we tolerate the fact that people have the right to say truly awful things because we deem that an acceptable tradeoff and better than censorship.

You may also be right that this is a matter that is not yet settled, and I'd be interested in a serious discussion about what some kind of workable solution might look like, but I don't see how what's happening in the Nix community right now moves anyone towards that, and if people are truly this principled, the Nix project itself should be the least of everyone's worries.

HideousKojima3• 2 years ago

It's very reasonable to not want your work used by arms dealers

One man's arms dealer is another man's defense against death and destruction. I'm no fan of defense contractors for many reasons, but there is a simple reality that you need weapons, and lots of them, to defend yourself and your nation against aggressors, and someone has to build them. Imagine how much worse the war would be going for Ukraine if they didn't have advanced weaponry being provided to them by defense contractors.

If you don't want arms dealers using your work, then don't release it under an open source license.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

You really should not be in open source if you believe it is your purview to ideologically police the usage and contribution to your software.

The issue here is one of sponsorship.

Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.

If Anduril donated but wasn't listed as a sponsor and didn't have a booth, I bet many wouldn't have an issue.

neuronexmachina• 2 years ago

Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.

I might be misunderstanding, but I thought Anduril was repeatedly rejected as a NixCon sponsor?

bin_bash• 2 years ago

What's the issue people have with Anduril? Is it just that they make defense equipment?

My (possibly wrong) interpretation is that people feel we shouldn't make weapons. That we should just stop fighting entirely. This is clearly an extremist position, I don't think many people in the west think that we should (for example), completely blockade Ukraine from even buying weapons.

Even if you believe we should stop manufacturing weapons, don't you think this isn't likely to be a popular opinion? That it's unreasonable to expect people to share it?

solatic• 2 years ago

Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.

It's a non-sequitur, why have a problem with Anduril being advertised but not have a problem with Anduril using the software (i.e. because it's FOSS)? Anduril also gets much more value out of, and furthers their mission much more by, using the software than they do from advertising. And if you have a problem with software being used for military purposes, why are you contributing to a project with an LGPL license instead of one which forbids military purposes?

HideousKojima3• 2 years ago

Stallman covered this in a (IMHO) very well thought out article: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

His article is specifically about pretend free/open source licenses that restrict what software can be used for. But the conclusion applies to similar behaviors around the entire free/open source ecosystem like conferences: it will just drive participants away and strengthen the position of proprietary solutions instead.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

Bridging Stallman's article to the issue at hand of sponsorship, I find it hard to believe that because he's fine with say Oracle using his code that he would also be fine with giving them a platform as a sponsor.

I don't actually know his position on this, but mean to communicate I see the use of free software and the sponsorship issue as separate issues.

joepie91_5• 2 years ago

That is about licenses, not about community participation, let alone community policy or sponsorships. Those are all very different things with very different considerations.

(Signed, someone who absolutely does not want military contractors in their community, but feels that a license is the wrong place to enforce that.)

duxup2• 2 years ago

I don't see anything in the article that indicates ideological policing. Did I miss that part?

It seems like these are questions of conflicts of interest and how the organization is being run. Those seem very relevant.

freedomben4• 2 years ago

I have never heard of the company in question and don't know anything about them other than what was mentioned in TFA, but a main portion of the conflicts that have happened seem to be about whether a particular company should be allowed to sponsor or not. If it were special treatment for that company that others wouldn't get then that would be a different story, but it seems mainly that people don't like what the company builds and don't want them sponsoring, at least explicitly. That seems ideological to me.

I absolutely sympathize with them fwiw. I despise DRM and think it's a reprehensible practice, and I would be extremely off-put if my code were being used by one of those companies. I would hate to see them at a conference. But I acknowledge that is my ideological bend, so my opposition there is "ideological"

saulrh5• 2 years ago

Yeah. Dolstra is responding to a letter that criticized his views, which isn't what the letter is. The letter's concern is that Dolstra is seriously harming the Nix project by forcing all decisions to go through himself, relitigating decisions that don't go his way, driving away good contributors, and generally causing friction and discord that impede communication and render decisionmaking ineffective. Those are pretty dang outcome-oriented criticisms. The letter spends like half of its length explaining how the Anduril thing and the Foundation are concretely harming the Nix project and how conflicts of interest are contributing to the problem. The least objective thing you can point to is the complaint about the Foundation having terrible minority representation, and even that has quite a bit of real-world support. It's the least ideologically-policing open letter I've seen in a long time.

meitham• 2 years ago

Funny how the software community could not separate software from politics two years ago when the conflict started in Ukraine! Most GitHub projects started including the Ukraine's flag, and some companies like JetBrains closed their offices in Moscow!

saulrh5• 2 years ago

It's like he didn't even read the letter. It's fact after fact, sourced and linked and screenshotted, demonstrating that Dolstra, the Foundation, and Anduril are engaged in toxic leadership that are concretely limiting the Nix Project's ability to build good software. It's not even about Anduril's business, it's about how they're at the center of a web of conflicts of interest that are producing poor software engineering decisions and driving away good contributors. The letter's authorship clearly understood that the obvious response was going to involve tone policing and complaints about "ideology" and went well out of their way to write the letter to address that avenue of attack - the whole first paragraph is about how it's not about ideology, the first sentence is that it's not about ideology, there are dozens of points about how it's not about ideology. It's all about observed cultural dynamics and results.

msgilligan• 2 years ago

When the whole first paragraph is about how it's not about ideology, it's about ideology.

gizmo4• 2 years ago

I don't have any knowledge about nix, the community, about Eelco Dolstra, or about this particular drama. What I do know is that there is no such thing as "community leadership" and that extremely long diatribes about the flaws of the founder can be safely ignored.

People who are unhappy with the community or the direction of nix should leave and start their own thing. They'll discover that building something is actually a great deal harder than it looks from the outside.

joepie91_5• 2 years ago

I imagine that the people who are unhappy about things are well aware of that, given that they generally are the people who have built NixOS to the point where it is now...

It sure is remarkable how many people seem to be assuming that the people complaining must just be some outsiders with no involvement in the project. It's maybe worth asking yourself where that assumption comes from.

gizmo4• 2 years ago

The letter is authored by "anonymous contributors", actually. This suggests the authors are minor contributors at the periphery of the project.

zer00eyz5• 2 years ago

NO one wants to admit that the tyranny of leadership is probably a good thing for a projects success.

DDH, Linus, Poettering, Im sure someone is offended by hearing one of these names, but look at the status and reputation of their projects. Now go look at Wayland, or Rust who lack these guiding voices... Note that if you did in deep on these projects your likely going to need some popcorn to go with the soap opera levels of drama.

Nix is going to be interesting to watch in the coming months.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

NO one wants to admit that the tyranny of leadership is probably a good thing for a projects success.

I don't disagree, but it needs to be communicated upfront and transparent without some guise of it being anything else so that potential contributors can decide if it's right for them from the outset.

busterarm10• 2 years ago

The very people decrying the lack of leadership transparency on the moderation team do their work behind closed doors, don't operate with transparency or consistency and disallow all meta discussion of their moderation work.

Oh and ban anyone that openly disagrees with their values.

duxup2• 2 years ago

NO one wants to admit that the tyranny of leadership is probably a good thing for a projects success.

I see that expressed all the time ...

otabdeveloper4• 2 years ago

...are going to be interpreted as a bunch of left-wing people taking over the project

Yeah, it's a bunch of left-wing malcontents trying to take over a project.

Anyways, Nix is very much decentralized as far as open-source projects go.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

Yeah, it's a bunch of left-wing malcontents trying to take over a project.

Or a bunch of people who were told they have a voice, put in time/work under that assumption, then when it came time for their voice to count were just ignored.

But I bet life sure is easy when you can just label people something nasty and dismiss their worthless opinions outright.

fireflash382• 2 years ago

Is it a technical thing they are being ignored about or are they trying to exclude people?

cosmic_quanta• 2 years ago

Anduril, a military contractor that uses NixOS, has repeatedly attempted to become a sponsor of NixCon, which did not go over well with the community

Something similar happened in the Haskell community, where some people called for Anduril job postings to be removed.

Nix is a software project, not a social movement. The goals of Nix are entirely separate from how the software is used.

I really like Coinbase's statement that is is mission focused (https://www.coinbase.com/en-ca/blog/coinbase-is-a-mission-fo...). Anything that isn't directly related to its mission is out-of-scope. I wish the same was true about software projects like Nix.

If you care about the way your software is used, then by all means, say it in the license! Of course, such software won't get used much.

dilyevsky• 2 years ago

It’s doubly funny with haskell considering the biggest haskell shop i am aware of has a lot of defense contracts

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

Nix is a software project, not a social movement.

Upholding the status quo is a social (and political) movement, it's just the most popular and accepted one.

zer00eyz5• 2 years ago

By that rational:

Do you eat food, drink coffee, chocolate. Do you avail yourself of modern pharmacology. Everything you do upholds a status quo of human suffering. You posting on HN is a political statement, from a place of privilege, by that rational.

It's a software project, dont make it political and it will be successful.

orthecreedence2• 2 years ago

I disagree. I think of movements taking input and energy. It is an active and conscious effort to change something. Upholding the status quo is akin to doing nothing. It's not active; it's passive. It's not a movement, it's a stationary. The two seem distinct to me.

I tend to agree with you on a moral/culpability level: passive acceptance is doing something but I wouldn't call it a "movement."

lliamander3• 2 years ago

The mission of reproducible builds is a social mission that will bring good to the world regardless of whether other social goods are achieved.

Trying to tie that mission to other social movements is a strategic error that will more than likely cause Nix to fail in its primary mission while doing virtually nothing meaningful for any of those other causes.

Powdering7082• 2 years ago

The issue isn't whether Anduril can use the the software. They can.

This stemmed from whether they can publically attach their name to NixCon, which is fundamentally a social event.

Cthulhu_9• 2 years ago

Exactly. The license of software and code is not the surrounding community and events.

Likewise, support or protest against various sides in an international conflict does/should not affect the code/software, but is a product of the people involved and their personal convictions.

HN runs on open source software, but the HN community is strongly opposed to certain things, as is their right.

takeda3• 2 years ago

Right now they are not only attached to NixCon but Nix itself. People who hadn't heard about Nix now hear about Anduril.

Before this drama started I had no idea they even existed. Now I know they are a big Nix shop.

Those people who are creating the drama (and looks like they are a small minority) are trying to turn a tech tool into a social movement. This will kill the project.

pantsforbirds4• 2 years ago

It's wild to see how much hate Anduril gets from the same people who have statements supporting Ukraine in their READMEs or have licenses preventing Russians from using their software.

How can you demand support for Ukraine, but then get upset by the people who are meeting actual needs for the war effort?

fabrice_d5• 2 years ago

Anduril started by building tech to hunt poor people crossing the southern border of the US. Their CEO is a right wing extremist. How you can say this is the same as supporting Ukraine against Russia aggression is obviously telling more about you than about anyone else.

colinsane8• 2 years ago

hey you know i think cops aren't all bad, but when they knock on my door i still don't invite them in.

Anduril exists to protect the order. same as cops, only focused externally instead of domestically. but in a global project where people collaborate with each other as individuals, it's all the same. don't talk to the cops: you only stand to lose.

colinsane8• 2 years ago

Nix is a software project, not a social movement.

everyone loves to assert that Nix is this or that. whatever label you fight to place it under, it's a product of some thousands of people. whatever it actually is, it's underpinned by something social.

haswell2• 2 years ago

Every human endeavor is underpinned by something social.

I think it's appropriate to separate concerns and use categorizations to help us separate ideological goals from practical reality. Paper is also used to fight wars, as are a myriad of other goods and services that exist in a more or less neutral space.

There's an important and very large conversation to be had about what we do and don't think is acceptable use of technology and general goods/services, but issues like the Nix meltdown seem like misapplied frustration at how resources are allocated (to buying things used for war) and an attempt to solve that allocation problem by cutting off supply instead of addressing the allocation of funds at the root.

Clearly some people think this is a good tactic, but I question both the effectiveness and the net good of such a tactic when the slope required to implement said tactic is indeed a slippery one.

I would prefer that code I write is never used for purposes I believe to be harmful. But this is fundamentally incompatible with the OSS model.

soraminazuki5• 2 years ago

> Nix is a software project, not a social movement.

I believe people say that in part because every political topic gets dragged into the community. Yes, there is a political aspect to everything, but that doesn't mean everything under the sun has to be dragged in.

Just take a look into some of the discussions that frequently happens in the NixOS offtopic Matrix channel. A small yet vocal portion of the community constantly brings up extremely hot takes on a broad range of topics. Anyone who objects are met with dismissal, condescension, and personal attacks.

Topics include:

* How tech companies should handle takedowns

Many of us probably already know how this is a very complex and controversial issue. But some folks advocate SESTA / SOPA like measures, accusing anyone who objects of supporting Kiwifarms and telling them to shut up.

* The use of the term "enshittfication"

A vocal member expressed annoyance and went into a long rant when someone mentioned the term. Apparently the term is a self-benefitting slogan for privileged folks because it wasn't popularized by someone they approved of. Fortunately, that didn't result in a argument because the other person immediately stopped engaging.

* AI use

In another case, someone who said they use AI was accused of supporting modern slavery. I'm somewhat skeptical of AI too, but this is just absurd. It really looks like the accuser was looking for a fight because "AI" could've been replaced with literally any other commercial product, from the clothes we wear to rare earth materials present in computers we use to write code. It's a modern day supply chain problem, not an AI problem per se.

It's one thing to express these opinions. But the aggression that followed in many of these cases is unacceptable. It seems to me that this constant cycle of hot takes and aggression is in no small part fueling this conflict even further. Like, supporting the same causes as the EFF can get you branded a right winger by very vocal people.

Shrezzing• 2 years ago

There are a lot of people who will find their workplace being singularly "mission focused" a good thing, but 5% of Coinbase's staff announced that they'd be leaving within one working week of that post[1], and others followed shortly after. I think that shows that in a corporate environment, it's not possible to retain all of the best staff if you're very publicly burying your head in the sand with regards to social issues - particularly in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd protests.

The author talks about the productivity losses rising from social-issue disagreement in the workplace, but it's rare that you can point to a press release from a C-suite employee and say "this specific document caused one in twenty staff members to leave immediately". The productivity destruction at Coinbase from that press release was enormous.

https://www.coinbase.com/en-gb/blog/a-follow-up-to-coinbase-...

lliamander3• 2 years ago

No matter how smart or skilled they are, people who spend an inordinate amount of time arguing politics (and dragging others into it) at work are by definition not "the best staff".

Having a narrow mission focus is the only way to retain your actual best staff.

nrdxp2• 2 years ago

Did you ever consider that public is horrendously misinformed on basically every "social issue" that arises, and it would literally do more good by just staying the fuck out of it?

It's just a fucking circus to prove to everyone on your Instagram how much you care. You really think people give a shit if it's true or not?

Let's take Gaza. Save the dudes who use babies as human shields. Destroy the universities if they resist! Ridiculous.

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

Whatever organization they are trying to sponsor is very obviously a social movement, not a piece of software.

You can only sponsor people, not software.

bfrog2• 2 years ago

This is the FSF situation in a nutshell, gcc has slowly been eroding in favor of llvm and clang because of this.

FSF donor listing/sponsorship listing is... spartan at best.

Compare this to Linux Foundation and LLVM Foundation, and generally wide swaths of both corporate and personally interested parties contributing time and money and tell me that trying to be idealistic is good for FOSS. The evidence I see is to the contrary.

freedomben4• 2 years ago

This is a meta comment, but the (apparent) style of using a different color (red) to indicate direct quotes is interesting. At first I found it confusing and a little distracting, but on the second pass where my goal was to cleanly separate the author's opinion from the sources, it was extremely helpful.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

I agree. I also found this both interesting and strange at first, but ultimately very helpful.

pantsforbirds4• 2 years ago

I wonder if the inspiration for this comes from Bibles? It's a common practice to have direct quotes from Jesus in red.

freedomben4• 2 years ago

I had the same thought! I dismissed it though as perhaps coincidence because anyone used to reading a "red text" bible may find it offensive or at least distasteful to equate other people's words with Jesus. I could very well be overthinking that though and/or be projecting my own religious upbringing (where blasphemy and sacrilegiosity are very sensitive and highly frowned upon. Even saying "he" instead of "He" is looked at as skirting the line).

indrora• 2 years ago

Something like that.

It's specifically for quotations that come from other sources and are presented verbatim; In the LWN UI settings: "These preferences affect how text that is quoted from other sources (press articles or whatever) in LWN news articles is rendered in your browser."

jdoss• 2 years ago

The reaction to Anduril sponsoring Nix is very similar to some people's reaction at Kubecon 2018 where the U.S. Air Force gave a talk about how they are using k8s to deploy software on F-16s.

https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...

thuuuomas• 2 years ago

Culture war grandstanding drowning out the much more interesting discussion around Determinate System’s pledge to support the long-debated Nix Flakes officially.

Nix Flakes looking like the real source of the schism in the Nix community.

ParetoOptimal26• 2 years ago

Nix Flakes looking like the real source of the schism in the Nix community.

No. In the talks about the fork because of the real issue of MIC sponsorship there was disagreement about whether flakes should be the default among those against MIC sponsorship.

They are both issues, but the most pressing one causing large contributors to leave is the MIC sponsorship issue. The flakes/no-flakes issue existed before and wasn't causing large contributors to leave.

tempaccount4203• 2 years ago

Flakes should be either stabilized, reworked or rejected already. They have been unstable for far too long, the damage they have caused the ecosystem is huge...

tripdout3• 2 years ago

I really don't see the problem with accepting sponsorship money from Anduril. Rejecting it just results in less improvements and exposure for Nix.

They're going to continue to use Nix either way, and in the same way that the community can fork Nix because they're unhappy with the sponsorship, so can Anduril - and their fork might just be private.

Defence companies and all sorts of other companies that people might disagree with heavily use open source projects.

binary1322• 2 years ago

Witch hunt detected. Turning care knob straight to zero. Maybe I’ll tune back in if there’s a change in the wind.

stonewall• 2 years ago

Seems like this is becoming the terminal phase of the FOSS lifecycle for many projects.

I wonder what makes some long-lived communities immune to this behavior...OpenBSD comes to mind.

jijijijij6• 2 years ago

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1338390/darpa-pulls-fu...

karma_pharmer4• 2 years ago

Github culture is the infection vector. That's why OpenBSD is unaffected.

Hygiene, folks.

Also could be the fact that the entire reason OpenBSD exists is that De Raadt got cancelled out of NetBSD: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/1994/12/23/0000.ht...

eduction2• 2 years ago

In short, Dolstra is acting as "the effective Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL)" of the project, even though the NixOS Foundation's charter doesn't grant anyone that authority.

This is silly - authority in a software community doesn’t come from a nonprofit charter. Being founder is also no guarantee of authority, but it is more relevant because it’s rooted in actions and outcomes.

The more I observe from the sidelines of open source the less attention I pay to these sorts of disputes. In the end they are all adjudicated by delivering useful software and updates quickly to end users. Whoever does that better “wins.”

Sometimes this is the founder of the project and sometimes not. In general I think it’s a mistake to think anyone cares all the much about anything beyond the license, capabilities of the software, and how quickly the community/maintainers fix bugs. They may say they do but people who are taking software for free are in no position to dictate much and at the end of the day they know and accept it (especially something like who sponsors a conference, who is the keynote speaker (Rails incident) etc)

saulrh5• 2 years ago

The letter's entire criticism is that Dolstra is clinging to that position through an extended, conflict-of-interest-ridden campaign of toxic behavior and that this toxic behavior is preventing Nix from "delivering useful software and updates quickly to end users."

eduction2• 2 years ago

Right and if that’s all true he will ignore them and they will eventually fork and bury him. But personally I try to ignore letters like this especially if I’m not personally in the community (but even then sometimes) because words are cheap.

steve197713• 2 years ago

People seem to forget that a lot if not most of IT has some form of military background/funding behind it.

Be it the first computers, the Internet, RISC CPUs, BSD UNIX and much much more.

You’re free not to like this fact of course, but then using the technologies anyway is a bit of a double standard.

myaccountonhn2• 2 years ago

I think it’s different to actively endorse something vs having it be used for something. If you’re working in a community producing axes and you’re later seeing the organization advertising them for murder instead of cutting down trees, you might understandably not wanna be part of it anymore or try to change the organization.

steve197713• 2 years ago

But a lot of the technologies were explicitly designed with military use in mind. It’s not like some unintended and unplanned side effect.

So a better analogy would be swords that can also be used to cut fruit instead of killing maybe.

dwb8• 2 years ago

Are you really expecting people critical of the US military to not use computers, else be keeping a "double standard"?

steve197713• 2 years ago

I think these people are keeping a double standard, yes.

_cenw4• 2 years ago

This is missing the point in the same way that anti-capitalists sometimes get told to just not use money. Or critics of colonialism to just live somewhere else. There are things too essential to boycott - whether we personally like them or their history. It's also a lazy retort that doesn't quite interact with the substance of the critique.

steve197713• 2 years ago

This is missing the point in the same way that anti-capitalists sometimes get told to just not use money.

Except that's not what I'm doing. It's more like I'm telling anti-capitalists not to trade stock options in order to buy Porsches.

colinsane8• 2 years ago

i'm fascinated by this because a lot of my involvement in open source is a pretty direct reaction against state actors like NSA who undermine my privacy. and if i wanted to i could point out that the military took other things away from our field too, like Alan Turing. but ultimately, i think the argument is just that any institution which dumps a lot of money into a space deserves loyalty for that alone, but where's the substance in that? i mean sure, "don't bite the hand that feeds you", but also if you're grown and aren't so desperate for food anymore, then it's completely reasonable, arguably expected, for you to act on principles higher than money.

michtzik• 2 years ago

How did the military take Alan Turing away from our field?

steve197713• 2 years ago

then it's completely reasonable, arguably expected, for you to act on principles higher than money.

Well that was kind of my point. I see people act on principles of morality when it doesn't negatively affect their convenience and at the same time ignore those principles when it affects their convenience. For me that is the definition of a double standard.

That's it. I'm not saying we should put these people in jail ;)

jijijijij6• 2 years ago

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

davidgerard2• 2 years ago

Yet you participate in society. Curious!

steve197713• 2 years ago

Straw man

jonringer1172• 2 years ago

For those that are curious about an alternative perspective on this matter, I detailed much of my personal views in my reddit suspension post. I don't have much context on the EU NixCon 2023 events, but I've been actively involved with the project for 2019, 2020, 2021, beginning of 2022, and late 2023.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_u...

srid• 2 years ago

Related submissions:

Open letter to the NixOS foundation (50 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107370

The dire state of NixOS's moderation culture (76 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40166912

---

Additionally, these r/NixOS submissions may be of interest:

Jon Ringer: "In case I'm unable to return, wish you all the best" (348 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_u...

Transparency about jonringer’s suspension (153 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceeg8h/transparency...

Thoughts on Jon Ringer's temporary suspension (71 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceiz36/thoughts_on_...

Moderation no-go zones (55 comments; ongoing) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cfv8vo/moderation_n...

---

Finally, the RFC to improve the situation:

https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175

A leadership crisis in the Nix community

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