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.

  • self@awful.systemsOPM
    14·
    8 months ago

    consider this a gentle warning that bootlicking for fucking Anduril of all companies won’t end well. you techfash fucks.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    8 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
      6·
      8 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.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        8 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

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        8 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
          7·
          8 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
      7·
      8 months ago

      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

      • self@awful.systemsOPM
        10·
        8 months ago

        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

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          8 months ago

          Who wants to take bets on this person having edited the sentence “spare the rod, spoil the child” out of their post purely on the grounds of decency thinking “it won’t sit well on Hacker news”?

      • self@awful.systemsOPM
        8·
        8 months ago

        “the people complaining about nix just want drama”, I said, while exploding into such a large cloud of crybaby piss that I’m posting on every tech news site and Reddit simultaneously about how the wokes temporarily banned me for being an absolute shithead

        • sinedpick@awful.systems
          8·
          8 months ago

          he really can’t STFU, can he? After reading his earlier posts I wouldn’t even have blinked, he just seemed like the garden variety “marginalized people don’t exist” type. Now he’s taken the mask off and gone full narcissist assclown. what an idiot.

          • self@awful.systemsOPM
            10·
            8 months ago

            all of the bad actors in the Nix community have a remarkable gift for SBF levels of self-defeating explanation. funny things happen when folks who’ve self-appointed to positions of power (especially positions that shouldn’t have power, like with Jon, or shouldn’t exist at all, like with Eelco) suddenly face accountability from folks who’re absolutely onto their bullshit and done fucking around

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        8 months ago
        • Use of social media to target individuals [3]

        Ah yes, the good old projection, never fails to be completely transparent.

  • flizzo@awful.systems
    9·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • self@awful.systemsOPM
      12·
      8 months ago

      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

      • flizzo@awful.systems
        8·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      8 months ago

      Count the “I”s, fucking hell

      Once again saying the world would be improved if people learn to internalise that narcissists exist :|

    • foobarbruh@awful.systems
      14·
      8 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
        8·
        8 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.

    • jax@awful.systems
      10·
      8 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 ?

    • self@awful.systemsOPM
      7·
      8 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
          6·
          8 months ago

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

            • antifuchs@awful.systems
              9·
              8 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.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          8 months ago

          kinda surprised it hasn’t already seen some coverage

          almost half makes me want to point Cox at it too…

  • self@awful.systemsOPM
    8·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • self@awful.systemsOPM
      10·
      8 months ago

      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

    • pyrex@awful.systems
      7·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
        12·
        8 months ago

        “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.

      • self@awful.systemsOPM
        9·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • flizzo@awful.systems
          9·
          8 months ago

          Something that’s been interesting to observe through all of this is just how much moderation matters to the quality of discussion in a space, no matter what the space is or who runs it.

    • flizzo@awful.systems
      5·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • self@awful.systemsOPM
        9·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • self@awful.systemsOPM
        5·
        8 months ago

        also, Aux has just cut its first unstable release (and zero pissbaby release managers were required to do it), and I’ve joined the Aux CLI (Aux’s fork of the Nix evaluator) SIG, though I haven’t seen much movement there since that SIG’s still looking to fill some leadership roles. I’m hoping that a forked evaluator can help fix some of the deeper problems with Nix, regardless of Eelco’s plans for the ecosystem.

  • sinedpick@awful.systems
    6·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • self@awful.systemsOPM
      6·
      8 months ago

      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

      • self@awful.systemsOPM
        6·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          8 months ago

          I’m pretty fucking sure that with as little production nix as I’ve done I could viably do a nix release in a handful of days with only a very minor bit of scrambling (and that’d be finding things like keys etc)

          I definitely wouldn’t, mind. I’ve frozen all attempts to progress my knowledge and use of it until fork happens (which now seems near guaranteed). Let DetSys and Anduril eat their shitcake.

  • self@awful.systemsOPM
    6·
    8 months ago

    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

      • self@awful.systemsOPM
        12·
        8 months ago

        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

        • self@awful.systemsOPM
          5·
          8 months ago

          clearly the problem is none of these long-term open source package maintainers understand that open source means Anduril can use NixOS for whatever they like! and clearly that means we have to give them an outsized amount of direct and indirect control over our committees and board, accept their money even when our entire community and several partner organizations tell us not to, let their trolls take over our discussion forums, and set up several shady commercial deals between them and a company that controls a bunch of Nix’s supposedly community-owned infrastructure (which we’ll also insist they have the right to use, even when their commercial usage of it far outstrips the value of their contributions to the community (which, in any case, wants Anduril to fuck off))

          yeah, that’s the problem here

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        8 months ago

        Briefly clicked through the commit history earlier, there’s a couple more that aren’t tagged in the milestone list

        Expect more spin soon, I guess

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          8 months ago

          ran a quick search on the repo to check something, rg -l 'maintainers = \[ \]'

          can’t paste the results here unfortunately (guessing post size or lemmy filtering or something). not a very scientific or comprehensive search but I just wanted a very quick look. couple of names in there that I can see that aren’t great to not have maintainers on.

          (note: a more thorough check would also have to check sub-team(?) expressions as well as recent git modifications on those expressions. however, I’m not going to even try do that before I’ve had some food, and maybe ordered some booze too)

    • self@awful.systemsOPM
      6·
      8 months ago

      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.

        • self@awful.systemsOPM
          8·
          8 months ago

          every bone in my body wants to, but spinning up the infrastructure for a Nix fork would literally bankrupt me

          I will definitely contribute what I can (including a reasonable monthly donation, expertise if needed, and any code improvements I haven’t contributed to nixpkgs) to any fork that fixes Nix’s structural and leadership issues to the satisfaction of the authors of the open letter

          I can also promise to be a particularly persistent advocate for the fork, but that goes without saying