20
an open letter to the NixOS foundation
(save-nix-together.org)
this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.
in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.
some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:
(logo credit, with modifications by @dgerard@awful.systems)
a maintainer quit
one of those complicit dickheads that was highlighted in the open letter has, unfortunately, said words again
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!
fucking brutal
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
I love that this milestone is 2 days overdue, but progress is being made!
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
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)
delroth jumped too
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
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.
the obvious question is "when fork" but FFS SELF DON'T TAKE THIS ONE ON TOO
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
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/delroths-muting-in-the-moderation-matrix-room/44090/15
(I’m wincing at the tone policing and “let’s please just be civil” in that thread; it hurts how much that good intent has been weaponised)
good notes
4th toot is entirely on point