The dire state of NixOS's moderation culture

>>srid+(OP)
I coincidentally started lurking and responding to some support threads the NixOS discourse a few weeks ago, because I appreciate the project and I wanted to get more involved in it. In the past couple days I've seen this train wreck play out in real time, both on discourse and on github discussions.

From what I could gather, the main factor that led the community to this point is Anduril's involvement in the community. Anduril is a miltech company and a contractor of the USA DoD. It looks like they use Nix extensively to train ML models and deploy combat drones, and several of their employees have very close ties to the Nix community; Jon Ringer (an Anduril employee, who is mentioned several times in this document) has recently been a release manager for three versions of NixOS, and was nominated to become a release manager for the upcoming 24.05 release.

Anduril wanted to sponsor NixCon last year because of this deep involvement in the community. I was not there to see it, but from what I've seen lately, many members of the community were not happy about it. The sponsorship was eventually pulled, because the on-site video team for the conference (https://c3voc.de/) threatened to pull out on their own over this sponsorship.

From my understanding there has been no official decision taken over Anduril's sponsorship since last year's debacle. Many people in the community think that this is because Eelco Dolstra, the creator and de-facto BDFL of Nix, is currently employed by Determinate Systems, which is rumored to have a contract with Anduril.

Edit: I just want to make it clear that I don't agree with what is presented in this document. I just wanted to present an overview of what, from my perspective, happened up to this point.

>>steinu+ie
As someone with decision making power in a small Canadian robotics firm that occasionally does military work (mostly environmental monitoring), this does make nixos a lot less attractive. The reproducible builds make it very attractive for reliable robotics, but if the nix community is that against me taking money from the military, well that's going to present a whole other set of challenges. Even for the 90% of our work that doesn't involve any potential military use.

>>traver+Te
> if the nix community is that against me taking money from the military

As far as I understand it, the objection would be if

  - you were simultaneously a key person in Nix, like a release manager
  - your company officially sponsored events that associated Nix with military
  - several of your employees were active contributors to core parts of Nix

I think the last one might not even be a big issue, or at least it might not blow up.

Surely, the usage of Nix in any domain is a free choice. You can't really police that anyways.

>>sshine+Xm
I think the main objection was Anduril sponsoring NixCon, because a lot of people see it as the Nix community advertising a miltech company in exchange for money the foundation doesn't necessarily need.

>>steinu+sr
Correct, there was an open letter [1].

And to clarify above, there was no "contributors of this company" dynamic to the outrage.

"jobs" are things which come and go, not a lot of people are will to burn their personal image for a [potentially] uncaring company. And I'm certainly not one of them either.

[1]: https://nixos-users-against-mic-sponsorship.github.io/

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