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an open letter to the NixOS foundation (save-nix-together.org)
submitted 7 months ago by self@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems
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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.

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[-] self@awful.systems 7 points 7 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.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 7 months ago

the obvious question is "when fork" but FFS SELF DON'T TAKE THIS ONE ON TOO

[-] self@awful.systems 8 points 7 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

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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