Maybe the official leadership has a shuffle, maybe it’s even big.
I’m not changing my Nix investment, I discourage others from changing theirs.
GNU Guix provides state-of-the-art package management features such as transactional upgrades and roll-backs, reproducible build environments, unprivileged package management, and per-user profiles. It uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, but packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language—which makes it nicely hackable.
Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense.
*For example, why are Haskellians using Nix so much instead of integrating its concepts into their own tooling?
If every member of the community wants one thing, and the leadership doesn't, then the community wins, every time.
Check into any one claim, and you’ll find it’s not the entire story.
This however is true:
> The Foundation board has unrepresentative composition relative to the community because, due to our count, all current members are cisgender, white-passing, men, one of whom has done military service, and one other (Eelco) likely relies on undisclosed military-tech work.
https://blog.ezyang.com/2016/05/announcing-cabal-new-build-n...
https://cabal.readthedocs.io/en/2.0/nix-local-build-overview...
Also cabal isn't positioned to be a system level package manager. Haskell programmers are the type to want both their application builds and system dependencies to be reproducible and predictable.
> Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with Nix. Guix or any rewrite as a library in a well-developed language* makes more sense.
Getting Guix packages to be as complete as nixpkgs isn't a matter of laziness though. One person wouldn't be able to do it no matter how disciplined they were.
[Determinate Systems] produces its own installer for Nix that the company promises will provide stable support for some Nix features. The letter states: "This is fine, however, it is questionably acceptable to do that while employing the lead developer of CppNix [the main Nix implementation] and saying nothing about how this will interact with the team's [decision-making] autonomy."
So "DetSys" is a commercial provider of Nix services, making corporate promises about future Nix feature support and (presumably) contracting with Anduril whose current focus is Shahed-inspired kamikaze drones, while wearing a separate hat as board chair of NixOS Foundation.
Effectively the tl;dr is whether Nix foundation should be bankrolled by the DoD, feature roadmap guided by the needs of mass produced suicide drones. And if they are, do other contributors want to continue providing free R&D for that organization?
That's not my reading of it.
However my biggest issue is the conflict of interest between Eelco -> DetSys -> Anduril Contract -> Eelco fighting hard for Nix to sponsor Anduril.
As foundation chair he should declare that he doesn't have a conflict of interest and DetSys doesn't have a contract with Anduril or have recused himself from the sponsorship discussion.
Whereas Nix is about reproducibility all the way down to the individual libraries and software.
> 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.
People who are unhappy with the community or the direction of nix should leave and start their own thing. They'll discover that building something is actually a great deal harder than it looks from the outside.
DDH, Linus, Poettering, Im sure someone is offended by hearing one of these names, but look at the status and reputation of their projects. Now go look at Wayland, or Rust who lack these guiding voices... Note that if you did in deep on these projects your likely going to need some popcorn to go with the soap opera levels of drama.
Nix is going to be interesting to watch in the coming months.
> the community is heavily leaning into what might be termed the myth of marginalization
> this group, still upset about the failure of RFC 98, is using the myth of fascism
How can one take this document seriously after reading these sentences?
Is targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" a bad thing?
Yeah, it's a bunch of left-wing malcontents trying to take over a project.
Anyways, Nix is very much decentralized as far as open-source projects go.
"If you don't want to help create war machines you can't contribute" is your solution, not mine.
Historically the conventions of open source has been that use is completely without restriction, but there has always been conflict about that. The domain is new enough that I wouldn't consider it settled yet.
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.
The picture that it paints about the actions of the people involved is accurate.
"Well, you see... just keep all politics out of FOSS except for the important FOSS ones I agree with" ;)
Something similar happened in the Haskell community, where some people called for Anduril job postings to be removed.
Nix is a software project, not a social movement. The goals of Nix are entirely separate from how the software is used.
I really like Coinbase's statement that is is mission focused (https://www.coinbase.com/en-ca/blog/coinbase-is-a-mission-fo...). Anything that isn't directly related to its mission is out-of-scope. I wish the same was true about software projects like Nix.
If you care about the way your software is used, then by all means, say it in the license! Of course, such software won't get used much.
His article is specifically about pretend free/open source licenses that restrict what software can be used for. But the conclusion applies to similar behaviors around the entire free/open source ecosystem like conferences: it will just drive participants away and strengthen the position of proprietary solutions instead.
It became evident after the second time though that this was very on purpose and it was known there would be an issue.
It seems like these are questions of conflicts of interest and how the organization is being run. Those seem very relevant.
I might be misunderstanding, but I thought Anduril was repeatedly rejected as a NixCon sponsor?
It sure is remarkable how many people seem to be assuming that the people complaining must just be some outsiders with no involvement in the project. It's maybe worth asking yourself where that assumption comes from.
Given that Nix is LGPL 2.1 and Nixpkgs is MIT, the project leans more towards the open source camp than the free software camp.
I don't disagree, but it needs to be communicated upfront and transparent without some guise of it being anything else so that potential contributors can decide if it's right for them from the outset.
I know very many people who would refuse to work for certain companies and in certain industries — and have rejected certain projects — but would happily contribute to something MIT licensed that would end up in those systems anyway!
Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with C. [Insert systems programming language du jour] or any other well-developed language makes more sense.
Or a bunch of people who were told they have a voice, put in time/work under that assumption, then when it came time for their voice to count were just ignored.
But I bet life sure is easy when you can just label people something nasty and dismiss their worthless opinions outright.
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
I see that expressed all the time ...
Oh and ban anyone that openly disagrees with their values.
>The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task. Not only for the components you explicitly use, but also for the hundreds of components that they link with, invoke, or communicate with.
>How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing usage restrictions in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, straight, soft piece of cooked spaghetti. As one wag put it, this is “someone with a very small hammer seeing every problem as a nail, and not even acknowledging that the nail is far too big for the hammer.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement
[2] https://www.mend.io/blog/open-source-licenses-trends-and-pre...
Nix Flakes looking like the real source of the schism in the Nix community.
I don't actually know his position on this, but mean to communicate I see the use of free software and the sponsorship issue as separate issues.
(Signed, someone who absolutely does not want military contractors in their community, but feels that a license is the wrong place to enforce that.)
While this may be technically true, the framing seems disingenuous, unless I am missing something. I have not been following the situation closely. My understanding is that Eelco's company, Determinate Systems, _may_ have contracts with customers connected to the military-industrial complex, but I dislike the implication as it renders Eelco as a bad-faith actor. It seems like a circular argument. I also dislike the implication that it is somehow problematic for Eelco's _for profit_, separate entity to have customers that the _community_ finds problematic.
I absolutely sympathize with them fwiw. I despise DRM and think it's a reprehensible practice, and I would be extremely off-put if my code were being used by one of those companies. I would hate to see them at a conference. But I acknowledge that is my ideological bend, so my opposition there is "ideological"
Upholding the status quo is a social (and political) movement, it's just the most popular and accepted one.
The root of the problem is that it is basically impossible to defend yourself against the accusation that you are secretly a fascist. If you say yes, you admit to being a fascist, if you say no, you're a lying fascist. If you question why the accusation is levied against someone else, you're defending a fascist, if you speak out against the proceedings, you're defending fascism.
The only way to prevent accusations of harboring secret fascist sympathies is to deflect the accusation by lashing out against others with the same sort of accusation, thus demonstrating that you are not secretly a fascist.
This is a dynamic that has repeated itself many times, it's the engine behind countless actual witch hunts, but also metaphorical ones such as the McCarthy-era red scare, the ideological persecution under Stalin.
The slander against the board is quite obvious and I believe you're being disingenuous.
You're not going to understand complex governance issues and their history from a read of a single article or letter. Consequently, you probably should refrain from drawing conclusions that way.
> it is in fact your purview to "ideologically police" the uses your work is applied to
But this seems like a fantasy to me and directly at odds with the realities of open source.
The reality is that open source code is used for a myriad of purposes that I would consider myself ideologically opposed to. But this is ultimately the cost and tradeoff of open source in the system we currently have. Similar to the argument for free speech, in which we tolerate the fact that people have the right to say truly awful things because we deem that an acceptable tradeoff and better than censorship.
You may also be right that this is a matter that is not yet settled, and I'd be interested in a serious discussion about what some kind of workable solution might look like, but I don't see how what's happening in the Nix community right now moves anyone towards that, and if people are truly this principled, the Nix project itself should be the least of everyone's worries.
No. In the talks about the fork because of the real issue of MIC sponsorship there was disagreement about whether flakes should be the default among those against MIC sponsorship.
They are both issues, but the most pressing one causing large contributors to leave is the MIC sponsorship issue. The flakes/no-flakes issue existed before and wasn't causing large contributors to leave.
GNU developers give you some software, you can do whatever you want except making it less free.
the only people that will complain are developers that would like to remove soem of the user freedoms , because this devs want to make money or because they want more freedom for themselves and not for the users.
They're going to continue to use Nix either way, and in the same way that the community can fork Nix because they're unhappy with the sponsorship, so can Anduril - and their fork might just be private.
Defence companies and all sorts of other companies that people might disagree with heavily use open source projects.
So no, I still can't see slander. What is obvious to you is not apparent to me at all so please walk me through it.
> 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 (originally formulated by Karl Popper with a very different intent) to portray their opponents as bad-faith actors, or even as outright evil. They themselves, of course, do everything they can to appear justified in exercising power with absolutely no accountability, and with a clear sense of their own privileged entitlement to do so
Another example There are a number of "rust zealots" who believe it's a moral imperative to rewrite all software in rust, and any who disagrees is immoral and acting in bad faith. Similarly the number of people who are rust zealots are a small fraction of those who like and advocate for rust.
No.
It just criticizes one group for pushing for a specific ideology and then starts pushing for it's own subjective ideology while championing itself as the "rational" and "neutral" position.
That seems extremely different than targeting particular company for idealogical reasons and trying to remove their rights.
>The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
>The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
>The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
>The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
I wonder what makes some long-lived communities immune to this behavior...OpenBSD comes to mind.
This stemmed from whether they can publically attach their name to NixCon, which is fundamentally a social event.
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?
People arguing from the direction you seem to be usually are big about not assuming intent... why assume intent here?
How can you prove they don't both believe they are fighting about fascism and care about that fight?
This is silly - authority in a software community doesn’t come from a nonprofit charter. Being founder is also no guarantee of authority, but it is more relevant because it’s rooted in actions and outcomes.
The more I observe from the sidelines of open source the less attention I pay to these sorts of disputes. In the end they are all adjudicated by delivering useful software and updates quickly to end users. Whoever does that better “wins.”
Sometimes this is the founder of the project and sometimes not. In general I think it’s a mistake to think anyone cares all the much about anything beyond the license, capabilities of the software, and how quickly the community/maintainers fix bugs. They may say they do but people who are taking software for free are in no position to dictate much and at the end of the day they know and accept it (especially something like who sponsors a conference, who is the keynote speaker (Rails incident) etc)
As chair of the foundation, Eelco should do what he can to avoid even the appearance of malfeasance, including declaring or denying conflicts of interest.
Be it the first computers, the Internet, RISC CPUs, BSD UNIX and much much more.
You’re free not to like this fact of course, but then using the technologies anyway is a bit of a double standard.
Would you require the FSF to accept a sponsorship from anyone and to advertise them in return?
On the other hand, I don't have a strong attachment at all to naming a branch "master" and can easily rename it without a second thought.
It's that they sell surveillance equipment that's used at the US's southern border, the crisis at which is a hot political issue today.
This just isn't true. See "Transparency about jonringers suspension"[0] and also notice it's a suspension and not a ban. Note that Jon's post to reddit titled it a "ban".
Which side seems to be trying to stir things up here?
Also, before that discourse post there has always been a public moderation log here:
https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/c0f7744701cba40f0...
0: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-was-jon-ringer-banned-from...
How can you demand support for Ukraine, but then get upset by the people who are meeting actual needs for the war effort?
Also AFAIK one of the conferences objected to their presence, so they weren't able to have a booth there. Individual participants are in their right to make these decisions and act on them (like that one conference did). What exactly is the outcome people want?
One man's arms dealer is another man's defense against death and destruction. I'm no fan of defense contractors for many reasons, but there is a simple reality that you need weapons, and lots of them, to defend yourself and your nation against aggressors, and someone has to build them. Imagine how much worse the war would be going for Ukraine if they didn't have advanced weaponry being provided to them by defense contractors.
If you don't want arms dealers using your work, then don't release it under an open source license.
I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".
After that I changed my mind and name all of my branches main and give a little push to projects I'm part of to do the same.
Plus, words do have power:
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?
everyone loves to assert that Nix is this or that. whatever label you fight to place it under, it's a product of some thousands of people. whatever it actually is, it's underpinned by something social.
I won't go over the entire document, but it's pretty telling how they've refused to commit to "no politics" as a rule - because they want to promote theirs! The problem wasn't that sidr linked to politics, but that he linked to the wrong type. (I checked it out and I definitely don't agree with most of it. But that doesn't mean I can't defend his right to speak)
I am aware Guix did fork Nix but from what I've read, there's almost nothing left in Guix that still uses the initial Nix code?
The author talks about the productivity losses rising from social-issue disagreement in the workplace, but it's rare that you can point to a press release from a C-suite employee and say "this specific document caused one in twenty staff members to leave immediately". The productivity destruction at Coinbase from that press release was enormous.
https://www.coinbase.com/en-gb/blog/a-follow-up-to-coinbase-...
So a better analogy would be swords that can also be used to cut fruit instead of killing maybe.
Indeed. If you look at pull request 10513, you see Eelco propose a bug fix, another person point out the flaws in his approach, and Eelco subsequently closing his own pull request and filing a new PR with a different approach.
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/10513
The save-nix-together signatories describe this as “ignoring other people and only considering his way”.
I suppose they were counting on no one bothering to read their citations?
For the sake of argument, let's say I put forward the charge that the policy itself is rooted in bigotry. Can you prove that it is not?
Anduril exists to protect the order. same as cops, only focused externally instead of domestically. but in a global project where people collaborate with each other as individuals, it's all the same. don't talk to the cops: you only stand to lose.
The current leaders' "lives & experiences" very much inform their work - their experience contributing to and building the project. What's irrelevant and presumptuous is assuming their race, gender, etc. make them unfit or that "people with similar experiences" (i.e. the same demographics) would necessarily lead better. The slander is in attacking and attempting to de-legitimize the board not based on their actions or competence, but on their identities. That's textbook ad hominem.
Inclusion means welcoming people of all backgrounds, not enforcing demographic quotas or judging people's fitness based on identity rather than ability. If you have substantive concerns about board decisions or project direction, by all means raise them. But leave identity politics out of it and focus on the issues. Presuming leaders can't serve the community well because of innate traits is its own form of prejudice.
The only real criticism of concern was the military contracts and a conflict of interest, which I believe is valid and needs discussion, the rest just seems like personal attacks meant to further some unrelated agenda.
I think it's appropriate to separate concerns and use categorizations to help us separate ideological goals from practical reality. Paper is also used to fight wars, as are a myriad of other goods and services that exist in a more or less neutral space.
There's an important and very large conversation to be had about what we do and don't think is acceptable use of technology and general goods/services, but issues like the Nix meltdown seem like misapplied frustration at how resources are allocated (to buying things used for war) and an attempt to solve that allocation problem by cutting off supply instead of addressing the allocation of funds at the root.
Clearly some people think this is a good tactic, but I question both the effectiveness and the net good of such a tactic when the slope required to implement said tactic is indeed a slippery one.
I would prefer that code I write is never used for purposes I believe to be harmful. But this is fundamentally incompatible with the OSS model.
As a Nix user I feel like those people who started this whole drama are actually negative to this project. They are trying to use Nix as a tool for their political goals.
I think the best for Nix would be to just move forward and ignore them.
Personally, I think accepting a sponsorship is a step too far: it’s an implicit admission that Nix is associated with the defense industry. Some communities are okay with this, but such a move will definitely alienate a good chunk of people. They and other defense companies should of course be allowed to participate in the community and contribute to Nix.
You can only sponsor people, not software.
The people who signed Anduril as a sponsor, apologized to the community, and signed Anduril as a sponsor again anyway started this drama and are a negative.
Do you eat food, drink coffee, chocolate. Do you avail yourself of modern pharmacology. Everything you do upholds a status quo of human suffering. You posting on HN is a political statement, from a place of privilege, by that rational.
It's a software project, dont make it political and it will be successful.
> Their CEO is a right wing extremist He's not an extremist? He's just a regular Republican. I'm legitimately curious why you think he's an extremist.
> How you can say this is the same as supporting Ukraine against Russia aggression Anduril has been directly supporting Ukraine with its technology since the very start of the war. You do realize that, right?
My next move is to publicly accuse the committee harboring fascist sympathies. Your voting record is undeniable, and I am just appalled this stuff can go on in the 2020s and demand the committee is replaced with people who does not hold these bigoted beliefs.
Most wouldn't have a problem with Anduril donating and asking for no sponsorship or other benefits in return.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_u...
https://github.com/tvlfyi/tvix
To me, the perfect solution would be to have a base like Nix/Tvix you can build on top of, for example to make a package manager for your language, and have the users of that language's PM interact with TOML or JSON.
But we are not talking about distant origins here.
I guess you're trying to pull an example from history. I don't doubt that authoritarian regimes can get accusatory, and nonsense can spiral. But we're not talking about authoritarian regimes, we're talking about open source software projects. I don't buy that they're at all similar enough to make this kind of connection.
God forbid a single implementation of popular software change a default in a fairly meaningless way. Especially since the older term hasn't been accurate in software development for like a decade. Does anyone even ship/deploy the "master" branch anymore?
But no, while we should dislike these folks for saying "we don't want a military contractor to sponsor our event", we should 100% get behind "this private company changed a term and I don't like that so obviously they are wrongthinkers"
Master craftsman? Master mold? Master copy? Head Master... Just because this word was used in relation to slavery doesn't curtail its use in language, removing it only serves to focus its "power".
Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have a very different reaction to the word cunt.
Candidly, the erasing of words from language for any reason is very 1984, it's a book you might want to read, its a good primer to understanding how control of language is one of the features of fascism. You should probably read up on how linguistic purity was part and parcel of Italian and to a lesser degree German control of the people.
I believe people say that in part because every political topic gets dragged into the community. Yes, there is a political aspect to everything, but that doesn't mean everything under the sun has to be dragged in.
Just take a look into some of the discussions that frequently happens in the NixOS offtopic Matrix channel. A small yet vocal portion of the community constantly brings up extremely hot takes on a broad range of topics. Anyone who objects are met with dismissal, condescension, and personal attacks.
Topics include:
* How tech companies should handle takedowns
Many of us probably already know how this is a very complex and controversial issue. But some folks advocate SESTA / SOPA like measures, accusing anyone who objects of supporting Kiwifarms and telling them to shut up.
* The use of the term "enshittfication"
A vocal member expressed annoyance and went into a long rant when someone mentioned the term. Apparently the term is a self-benefitting slogan for privileged folks because it wasn't popularized by someone they approved of. Fortunately, that didn't result in a argument because the other person immediately stopped engaging.
* AI use
In another case, someone who said they use AI was accused of supporting modern slavery. I'm somewhat skeptical of AI too, but this is just absurd. It really looks like the accuser was looking for a fight because "AI" could've been replaced with literally any other commercial product, from the clothes we wear to rare earth materials present in computers we use to write code. It's a modern day supply chain problem, not an AI problem per se.
It's one thing to express these opinions. But the aggression that followed in many of these cases is unacceptable. It seems to me that this constant cycle of hot takes and aggression is in no small part fueling this conflict even further. Like, supporting the same causes as the EFF can get you branded a right winger by very vocal people.
Obviously there's the "people were angry last time, they will likely be angry this time". But that's projecting personal/political views into a sponsorship.
What should have been the right course of action? I'm not sure. "Tech is easy, people are hard"
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/archive/2022/open-source-...
with Google right there as a diamond sponsor and Meta as a platinum sponsor. IBM is also a diamond sponsor, and we've all heard about them and the literal Nazis (and the time they got a license exception for JSLint to be able to use it for evil).
Or perhaps the same people are upset over things like Linux sponsors, but everyone ignores them in that context?
The LWN article indicates 24 maintainers have removed themselves, which appears to be ~0.7% of the maintainer list. Were these people particularly impactful? Is there an actual crisis here?
I also don't really get it; are they going to use a different (worse) OS because of this? Or just stop pushing changes upstream for packages they care about (either staying out of date or maintaining a personal fork)? It seems like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Software_lic...
Even if you support open borders, this technology is essential.
I tend to agree with you on a moral/culpability level: passive acceptance is doing something but I wouldn't call it a "movement."
Trying to tie that mission to other social movements is a strategic error that will more than likely cause Nix to fail in its primary mission while doing virtually nothing meaningful for any of those other causes.
Having a narrow mission focus is the only way to retain your actual best staff.
I think most people just feel differently about things they do directly, than they do about things they indirectly contribute to through taxes or just existing in the economy, and don’t put a ton of thought into it.
The nature of Open Source is that Abduril can use it anyway and it is more whether Nix can get funding to help it become mainstream.
They only fight that hard because they know the people fighting to remove "master" are (as a group) acting in bad faith.
On this and many other issues they tend to lie about history and language, extort those who don't comply with threats of sabotage towards their projects and/or careers, and will equivocate and dissemble whenever confronted.
It's perfectly fine want to use "main" rather than "master" (that is probably my preference). And it is perfectly fine to suggest other people do as well. But if you suggest it others and they tell "no" (politely or not), the right thing for you to do at that point is to mind your own business.
It's the need to maintain super legacy systems and interoperability. There are entire CPU architectures that LLVM does not support and are only commonly supported by C and these things are still everywhere and are really gnarly problems to replace them.
Even if you throw everything away on the software side and start over from scratch, that's going to _force_ you to replace some hardware somewhere that you won't or can't replace.
It's literally just typed JSON with functions and a few built-ins. It's laughably simple and great. The whole "yet another programming language" refrain is so silly when it comes to Nix.
Except none of those examples are relevant comparisons. It's well documented that the reason the default branch name was master traces back to Bitkeeper, which was using the master/slave nomenclature.
> Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have a very different reaction to the word cunt.
Master and slave have universal meaning across all English dialects.
If you're going to make an argument against this change on the basis of semantics, at least get your facts right.
Open letter to the NixOS foundation (50 comments) >>40107370
The dire state of NixOS's moderation culture (76 comments) >>40166912
---
Additionally, these r/NixOS submissions may be of interest:
Jon Ringer: "In case I'm unable to return, wish you all the best" (348 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_u...
Transparency about jonringer’s suspension (153 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceeg8h/transparency...
Thoughts on Jon Ringer's temporary suspension (71 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ceiz36/thoughts_on_...
Moderation no-go zones (55 comments; ongoing) https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cfv8vo/moderation_n...
---
Finally, the RFC to improve the situation:
No MIC sponsoring would have been the right course of action. No matter your sympathies, or alliances in your case.
To even think of the sponsorship as a valid idea is US centric ignorance. Outside the US people don't get the "Thank you for your service" indoctrination and are way, way more reluctant to work with the MIC.
If you knew anything about Germany, the issue with the university host should not have surprised you at all. It's not some modern outrage of wokeism, it's a decades old academic foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_clause
It's hard to find a German university without: http://www.zivilklausel.de/index.php/bestehende-zivilklausel...
Losing VOC support, eh?! Have you been to a CCC event? MIC sponsorship of Nix would lose you more or less the entire German hacker scene, at the very least.
A national defense company sponsoring an international software project, not expecting uproar... I don't know what to say. It's beyond plausibly idiotic. Objectively, completely out of touch.
edit: replaced 'feature' with 'scope' realized I typed an unclear word.
Git never had "slaves". And while no doubt that BitKeeper was a significant influence on Git's adoption of the term "master", can you say it was the only one? Are you arguing that Torvalds had never heard of the term "master copy", and that term didn't influence him at all (not even unconsciously)?
> Master and slave have universal meaning across all English dialects.
Even when a word has the same denotation across dialects, its connotations and associations can differ significantly.
Also, certainly for the word "master", there are senses of that word, and derived words, which are more associated with some English dialects than others. In the UK, it is common to call a school principal a "headmaster"; it is very rare in the US; in Australia, it is more common than in the US but less so than in the UK (and mainly associated with private schools). Similarly, "Master" as a title for the head of a university college is traditional in the UK (especially at its most prestigious institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge), I don't think any US universities use it any more.
Given that AST's towers/software identify objects of interest to CBP, it's probably safe to assume that number is high.
Any other topic would've equally been as problematic. Is it a bad thing to target "terrorism" as well? How about "human trafficking?" Can't you please think of the children!
The PATRIOT Act is a terrible law. Opposing it doesn't make you a terrorist. But you would've been accused of being one nonetheless if you opposed it in 2001.
It's easy to see why many people wouldn't want to actively get into such a controversy. But even that is being used as grounds for kicking someone out.
Wait, what? Are you saying German universities are forbidden from contributing to Nix/NixOS, which is used by Anduril?
Or say, the RISC-V ecosystem, which may be used as chips driving military weapons?
... or the Linux kernel? Heck, any OS at all?
Such a license would not be considered open source or Free Software.
Someone else posted this link about a similar situation in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Software_lic...
It's specifically for quotations that come from other sources and are presented verbatim; In the LWN UI settings: "These preferences affect how text that is quoted from other sources (press articles or whatever) in LWN news articles is rendered in your browser."
Well that was kind of my point. I see people act on principles of morality when it doesn't negatively affect their convenience and at the same time ignore those principles when it affects their convenience. For me that is the definition of a double standard.
That's it. I'm not saying we should put these people in jail ;)
It's a non-sequitur, why have a problem with Anduril being advertised but not have a problem with Anduril using the software (i.e. because it's FOSS)? Anduril also gets much more value out of, and furthers their mission much more by, using the software than they do from advertising. And if you have a problem with software being used for military purposes, why are you contributing to a project with an LGPL license instead of one which forbids military purposes?
From what I understand, this is actually the root cause of the conflict here; the founder of the project seems to be fine with military use, some other members of the community are not.
If it was suicide at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Death
It's easy only if you don't care about all the people who already cloned your repo.
Recovering from remote repos renaming their default branches is no fun.
Are you even aware, I am referencing the issue of a Nix conference hosted at a German university, or are you in political autopilot drive-by mode?
I linked a Wikipedia article, read it, if you're genuinely interested and not debating in bad faith.
i'll be honest i don't understand what point you're trying to make. if i owe some loyalty to the military for the conveniences of their products, then would not Anduril owe me loyalty for the convenience of my products? the actual request to Anduril/military is way less than that, btw -- it's less "don't use our product" as "don't advertise in our spaces".
I guess the problem here is the definition of "our". If Anduril sponsors development of nix, it's as much "their" product and "their" space as it is yours.
Or in other words, they are included in "ours". You might not like that, but that doesn't change the facts.
I'm not convinced that a company named after a sword has good intent no matter how well their PR department tries to package it.
Likewise, support or protest against various sides in an international conflict does/should not affect the code/software, but is a product of the people involved and their personal convictions.
HN runs on open source software, but the HN community is strongly opposed to certain things, as is their right.
In practice there's probably no facism either way, but it's an easy and loaded term to throw around.
But a lot of people get very defensive about it, not just for practical reasons but out of fear of the slippery slope or the consequences of a perceived angry PC mob that can utterly destroy their projects and careers.
Of course, there is a problem because mob mentality can be relentless.
The fundamental difference with Guix is that evaluation (what they call "host code" -- everything that happens BEFORE the .drv is written) is wildly impure.
Guile code can access the network, write to the filesystem, heck it can even pull bytes from /dev/random. It can delete your home directory or email your ssh private keys to Zimbabwe.
The Nix language, by contrast, is incredibly restricted in order to make evaluation a deterministic function of the .nix source code you give it, things whose cryptographic hash is in the .nix source code, and nothing else. There is an --impure flag which lets it read from (but not write to) the filesystem but nixpkgs does not use that.
That is a pretty big rift that I find myself unable to cross. I can eval Nix code from any random bozo on the interwebs without having to trust them. If I trust the nix sandbox (which I mostly do) I can even build the resulting drv. I can be sure that evaluating that Nix code will produce exactly the same drv two years from now that it did today. Guix doesn't offer those things. Because scheme. I'm sorry but scheme just isn't the right language for this, it's too powerful.
That's a bug not a feature.
Every language these days is trying to force you to use its own badly-implemented imitation of Nix. Just look at what cargo does with the target/ directory and wonky "build fingerprints".
It's madness.
i'm not certain of the ideal approach. i would be content with an agreement that our shared spaces be neither overtly pro nor anti military -- to the degree which this is possible or enforceable. but it is extremely difficult to actually establish consensual agreement on that, and attempting to force it (in any direction) leads to the type of escalatory situation you're watching unfold now.
my most honest takeaway is that NixOS doesn't deserve to be some monolithic thing. communities grow and reshape into loosely connected smaller communities as a pretty natural effect of success every day, and do so peacefully. there are plenty of spaces occupied by people i don't get along with (say, hyprland, or lemmy.ml), and i simply keep my distance. but nixpkgs is a monorepo, with intense infrastructure needs that require a foundation/governing body to meet. for as long as all of our work is so closely linked to that governing body and brand, there's little way for us to arrange ourselves into the more socially intuitive structures which allow for that type of "live and let live" approach wherein we all flourish even without finding consensus.
How is what I said a "slippery slope"? And what makes it fallacious?
> Facism / bigotry are catch-all terms for a broad range of things
Why not then drop those terms, and replace them with more specific terminology?
Hygiene, folks.
Also could be the fact that the entire reason OpenBSD exists is that De Raadt got cancelled out of NetBSD: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/1994/12/23/0000.ht...
Sure, but what does that have to do with the Civil clause that you mentioned? It doesn't say anything about sponsorship, but it does say about "used by": "Any participation of science and research with military use or purpose must be rejected". Obviously, this cannot be true, since it can be applied to anything that is used by the military, including paper, towels, pens, computers in general, water, etc.
> Are you even aware, I am referencing the issue of a Nix conference hosted at a German university
I am, and? I think you missed my point?
> I linked a Wikipedia article, read it, if you're genuinely interested and not debating in bad faith.
I did. The Civil clause of some universities does sound fine ("strive to", "focused on"), but the others make a blanket statement that is very hard to take seriously. Obviously, they don't take the statement to the letter, and in fact it's hard to tell what they aren't supposed to do (if anything), unless perhaps you look at the other universities. Even then, none of those clauses say anything that can be applied to hosting a conference with military sponsorship but not to contributing to Nix.
Regardless, I don't think what you linked to is well known outside Germany. You can judge by the extent and completeness of that Wikipedia article. I'm European (EU), went to a European (EU) university and I had never heard of such a clause.
To answer to your point:
> To even think of the sponsorship as a valid idea is US centric ignorance. Outside the US people don't get the "Thank you for your service" indoctrination and are way, way more reluctant to work with the MIC.
I think you're generalizing a wee bit too much -- I'm not from the US and I think there's plenty of indoctrination to go around, and yet I don't think rejecting this sponsorship is in accordance with open source and Free Software values, philosophy and spirit. You can go read about it here -- and notice how it says several times that the point is to include everyone: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
To be honest, I think the mistake with Nixcon was not Anduril, but rather, to host the conference at a German university.
If you want something to be open, you have to accept it will also be open to entities and ideas you don't like. If you don't want that, you don't actually want "open".
One way out of this specific situation would probably be a fork, which I suspect is what will happen. But forking is interesting, because in one way it's only possible with open system and on the other hand it's kind of an admission that the openness has failed.
> i would be content with an agreement that our shared spaces be neither overtly pro nor anti military -- to the degree which this is possible or enforceable.
I live in Switzerland. In some ways, this is our official stance in regards to neutrality and I don't think it works very well. Some things are just binary and you can't really be neither pro or anti, unless you're lying to yourself and/or others.
Also, I brought up the PATRIOT Act because it's so strikingly similar. Any rule that is broad and vague can and will get abused. Any prior assurances otherwise have zero effect. Yet, looking at discussions in RFC 98, there was strong opposition to making the rules clear and well-defined in scope. It's no wonder the community was unable to reach an agreement. Also no wonder that the whole thing is blowing up even further because the moderation is effectively operating in this way regardless.
Except that's not what I'm doing. It's more like I'm telling anti-capitalists not to trade stock options in order to buy Porsches.
sure, but i worry people see a single label like "open source" and derive a book-long prescriptivist explanation for the thing instead of seeing that it's just an incomplete, fuzzy short-hand. i don't care about "open source". i care (among other things) that when my environment isn't the way i like it, i have the power to improve it -- and in the digital space being able to access/modify the code is how i do that. if one were to bring that interpretation to a physical space, people would apply a much different label to it, even if it meant the same thing to everyone involved. "open source" is just a label: not a map.
> One way out of this specific situation would probably be a fork, which I suspect is what will happen.
one final thing from me: i believe hyprland (mentioned earlier) is a fork of sway, and despite the lead devs of the two being rather at odds with each other... the projects in fact still collaborate, just at a distance, on a common upstream (wlroots). alternately, `rofi` is very adamant to remain X11-only, and there's a sustained fork of it for wayland. but because it's plugin-based, a very large amount of contributions happen in areas completely unaffected by this split.
"forking", in the colloquial duplicate-the-codebase sense is just the most callous manner by which to provide separate spaces for those who can't share a space. plenty of projects out there are full of the same type of disagreements we see in NixOS, and have effectively forked (i.e. provided separate spaces or brands where there otherwise would be only one) but either did so very early on (by adopting something like a plugin model) or did so in a behind-the-scenes manner (by splitting components into separate spaces). i hope that's not too wishy-washy: i believe the technical structures and the social structure of NixOS will eventually settle into some convergent equilibrium, and i believe the result will be better if we're intentional in that process.
I was just giving an example of a wider sentiment on MIC involvement outside the US. The specifics don't matter at all. In much of Europe working for or with MIC is not widely accepted and makes many people uneasy.
To point is cultural ignorance in an international project.
Airbus alone employs 40,000 people in the defense sector and there are many, many more MIC companies in Europe where many people are happy to work at (for the record, I'm not one of them). Also, all European countries have a military and buy weapons, and probably all of them also manufacture some weapons or others (microstates being the exception). Some of them even have mandatory drafts, I think.
As an example, I'd be shocked if an Airbus sponsorship would ever be rejected in Europe (perhaps Germany being the exception now that I'm familiar with the Civil clause).
Honestly, you sound like someone with a heavy anti-US and anti-MIC bias (and admittedly, I'm also known to take pleasure in anti-US and anti-MIC prejudices, but my concerns don't intersect this particular scenario at all).
To me at least, there is even a difference between the military and private companies profiting off war and suffering. I would rather have the Bundeswehr around than Anduril. Just because it's something of a necessary evil, doesn't mean I respect the people who seek this career, who want to engineer and sell death.
My stance on the issue is irrelevant. The devision caused in the Nix community was predictable. It was objectively an idiotic idea considering cultural and consequential differences. Even a pro-MIC person should realize this.
And let's not forget the conflict of interest of Nix's VIPs here in this particular matter, greatly shading any presumption of good-faith arguments. It's been wildly stupid.
And lastly, FYI, these sponsorships do have strings attached, especially when money matters:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1338390/darpa-pulls-fu...
One that comes at the expense of 1000's of years of marginalized and disenfranchised groups. One that comes at the elimination of entire branches of the family tree.
It's a coin toss that you have neanderthal and densoivan DNA. Those ancestors that we raped and murdered off the face of the earth. And then did that to each other for 1000's of years...
Regardless of what political or social values you believe the reality is that no matter how you envision the world working we're going to have to get in line. Be that for food or iPhones. And a line means there is someone at the back.
It's poor form to complain about the millions of people in front of you when there are billons of them looking at your asshole.
When its naming was honest, the Department of Defense was called the Department of War. It's that notion of 'defense' we should have in mind when we ask whether the 'defense' industry should have a role in policing the border.
Maybe a handful of them. One of them was an extremely prolific (#3 contributor to Nixpkgs) and active contributor that no doubt everyone will miss. There's at least one other name I recognize on the list. But most of them are pretty small-time maintainers so far.
> I also don't really get it; are they going to use a different (worse) OS because of this?
They're saying they're going to fork. There's one fork emerging already, but idk if it'll be the one. I hope a productive and usable fork does arise (and that eventually it can rejoin Nix) but I'm pessimistic that any will survive.
Border Patrol isn't out there rescuing thirsty migrants. In fact, they're known for destroying life-saving water caches and brutalizing activists who try to provide water or medical aid to people wandering that part of the desert.
People who donate to Trump are mostly people who are fed up with the way the USofA is being run by the current incumbent, i.e. they are people who are fed up with the bullshit. The mere fact that you don't like Trump as a person does not make those people non-'democrats' (you forgot the quotes around that word, 'democrats'). The type of rhetoric you're spouting polarises the discourse and does nothing for the democratic (sans quotes) process. May the best candidate win, granted the choice goes between two sub-optimal candidates [1] but that seems to be the way things go in that/your(?) country.
As an aside, can you tell me what irks you so much about Trump's policies - not Trump as a person, his policies - which makes you think so bad of people who support him? I think it safe to assume those people support him because they liked his policies, not because they are enamoured of his personality. Now that even CNN - not directly a MAGA propaganda outlet - publishes that More than half, 55%, of all Americans say they see Trump’s presidency as a success while [r]egarding Biden’s presidency so far, 61% say it’s a failure [2] there does seem to be a majority of people who support those policies versus the current ones.
[1] Biden being a long past hist due date habitual liar and grifter who has made his family profit wildly from his near half century in government, Trump being an egomaniacal billionaire who likes nothing better than to be at the centre of attention and is more than willing to let silly details like truth slide to get to that position.
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/28/politics/biden-trump-nost...
FSF donor listing/sponsorship listing is... spartan at best.
Compare this to Linux Foundation and LLVM Foundation, and generally wide swaths of both corporate and personally interested parties contributing time and money and tell me that trying to be idealistic is good for FOSS. The evidence I see is to the contrary.
Seems like a pretty easy win for a majority of voters. Militarization shouldn't be the only imho, but some kind of process needs to happen there. People paying coyotes and dying in the river and desert is wrong. People being stuffed in cages and treated poorly is wrong. Letting everyone in unchecked and unfettered is also wrong.
As it is, the rust-in-Nix and bazel-in-Nix stories are both pretty terrible, while the Python one is actually not too bad: https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix (barring these 4000 lines of horrible hacks: https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix/blob/master/over... and these 27000 lines of telling Nix which Python buildsystem every package ever happens to use: https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix/blob/master/over...)
It's just a fucking circus to prove to everyone on your Instagram how much you care. You really think people give a shit if it's true or not?
Let's take Gaza. Save the dudes who use babies as human shields. Destroy the universities if they resist! Ridiculous.
Before this drama started I had no idea they even existed. Now I know they are a big Nix shop.
Those people who are creating the drama (and looks like they are a small minority) are trying to turn a tech tool into a social movement. This will kill the project.