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an open letter to the NixOS foundation (save-nix-together.org)
submitted 8 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 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.systems 5 points 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.

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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