> 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.
You really should not be in open source if you believe it is your purview to ideologically police the usage and contribution to your software. That notion is incompatible with the spirit of the endeavor.
The issue here is one of sponsorship.
Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.
If Anduril donated but wasn't listed as a sponsor and didn't have a booth, I bet many wouldn't have an issue.
My (possibly wrong) interpretation is that people feel we shouldn't make weapons. That we should just stop fighting entirely. This is clearly an extremist position, I don't think many people in the west think that we should (for example), completely blockade Ukraine from even buying weapons.
Even if you believe we should stop manufacturing weapons, don't you think this isn't likely to be a popular opinion? That it's unreasonable to expect people to share it?
It is a weird sort of diffused understanding of responsibility (we all pay taxes and our representatives vote on whether or not we’ll do war, after all), but I think it is not that uncommon. Lots of people don’t seem to want to be unusually personally responsible for military applications, compared to their peers, I guess?