The document is very long and I don't really get the structure. It's very hard to make anything of it really. It somewhat makes me suspicious, even. I would write exactly like this if I knew how to do this and had to sidestep an issue. Long, hard to follow stuff filled with words.
Is there a clear summary, an easy-to-follow timeline? (of course these are always going to be presented from one side)
Also,
> Simultaneously, this group, still upset about the failure of RFC 98, is using the myth of fascism combined with an abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance
- What is the myth of fascism?
- What is the abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance?
I get the paradox of tolerance is that you can't really tolerate intolerance or else you'll be eaten. [1]
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society's practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them
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.
When there's stuff like this going on, I don't think it's helpful to try and do a full review of who did what wrong, or what the hypothetical motivations of any of these groups of people are, but instead to just review the actual proposed policy changes.
remember the so-called """fascists""" being denounced here are just a defense contractor, and by extension anyone who doesn't have a problem with them funding a nix conference.
- Moderation actions are public on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/moderations
- Irene wasn’t active in that discussion.
- Some of the most upvoted comments were against the moderation clique.
The two authors of this RFC, shortly after they opened the PR, got banned by the NixOS moderators.
You may join the following Matrix room to discuss the RFC openly, https://app.element.io/#/room/#rfc-175-all-together:matrix.o...
"left-wing ethno-nationalism" is an oxymoron.
It is already happening and with the help of some known personalities in the Rust community [0].
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.
*Although comments no longer can see based on previous it was becoming a heated conversation.
**For comparison, open letter discussion in HN: >>40107370
Nowhere in the ban log you mentioned "attempted brigading"; rather what you mentioned, as reasons for the ban, was "lots of off-topic stories" & "[using] Lobsters to fight with the NixOS project".
https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1751586246026313906
Neither of which is true, of course, nor can they be proven.
To let the readers judge for themselves, here are my lobste.rs submissions & comments:
https://lobste.rs/~srid/stories
https://lobste.rs/~srid/threads
And here's the submission that got me banned (after a NixOS moderator, Hexa, commented on it so as to derail the submission):
Ah, but they can.
> [your fight with Nix] only happened to be the last one you tried to start on Lobsters.
For example, readers can easily verify that this statement is lie by going to that last submission and see that there was no fight (except Hexa himself fighting into the void):
So, once again, where is the evidence for your accusations?
(Incidentally, where you say "23 of your comments and 21 of your stories" -- a figure I can't confirm -- I'm sure none of those happened in the last few months or are related to Nix in anyway, as my involvement have exclusively been technical, ergo they are nothing to do with "[using] Lobsters to fight with the NixOS project", and if they were about "lots of off-topic stories" then I would have been banned long time ago.)
mrustc, an independent implementation, has produced identical output.
> rustc bootstrap tested and validated (1.19.0 isn't fully repeatable, but later versions are)
https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc?tab=readme-ov-file#p...
This means you'd have to land the same attack in both mrustc and rustc, making the possibility infinitesimally small.
This isn't accurate.
Per a summary at the time, https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixcon-2023-sponsorship-situat...
- c3voc resolved to not redistribute talks from Anduril (or with Anduril branding), but would otherwise cover the event.
- Anduril was withdrawn as a sponsor, since the venue had a policy against military funding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_clause), and time constraints didn't allow for clarity about whether the event could be held with Anduril as a sponsor.
FWIW, at the time of writing this post, Anduril is a sponsor of Nixcon 2024. https://2024-na.nixcon.org/
But you're not the spokesperson for Guix, are you?
A quick search of GUIX mailing lists turned up this thread from 2017.
From [Chris Marusich](https://narkive.com/BnGNBXUh.7):
> I don't want to use Guix on macOS to package, promote, or make it easy to use non-free software.
Interestingly, that entire thread is a good faith exploration of what it would take to run Guix on mac at the time, but they conclude that there's no Free Software way to bootstrap the entire process, and rule it out. They consider toolchains, compilers, emulators, VMs, Docker, etc. but not starting with XCode.
Which is fine! Guix simply has different values and makes different choices.
You repeatedly say "can't", but given how Guix shares DNA with nix, which has done it on a mac, I'm a bit dubious about any technical infeasibility.