zlacker

Dolstra nailed it:

> 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.

>>ordina+(OP)
Isn't that exactly what the free software movement is based upon? You can only use our software if you agree to share your source code modifications with the binary (death to proprietary software, very ideological) and you can only contribute if you agree if that.

>>danhor+W
The free software zealots are a tiny fraction of the open source community.

>>ordina+(OP)
It's very reasonable to not want your work used by arms dealers, and it is in fact your purview to "ideologically police" the uses your work is applied to.

"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.

>>ordina+(OP)
> 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.

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.

>>danhor+W
> Isn't that exactly what the free software movement is based upon? You can only use our software if you agree to share your source code modifications with the binary (death to proprietary software, very ideological) and you can only contribute if you agree if that.

"Well, you see... just keep all politics out of FOSS except for the important FOSS ones I agree with" ;)

>>ordina+(OP)
Stallman covered this in a (IMHO) very well thought out article: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

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.

>>ordina+(OP)
I don't see anything in the article that indicates ideological policing. Did I miss that part?

It seems like these are questions of conflicts of interest and how the organization is being run. Those seem very relevant.

>>giraff+o1
But the software licensing explicitly allows your work being used by anyone (as long as they adhere to the license). If you don't want your work to be used by entities you disagree with you can not contribute to the project or advocate for use of a different license.

>>giraff+o1
I mean... if you license your work under nixpkgs license (MIT), you no longer really have the right to police who uses it. Of course, you are free to maintain your own nixpkgs and share your changes with whomever you want under whatever license you want.

>>Pareto+p1
> Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.

I might be misunderstanding, but I thought Anduril was repeatedly rejected as a NixCon sponsor?

>>danhor+W
but free software and open source aren't the same movements and don't have the same ideologies. There's some overlap, sure.

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.

>>giraff+o1
All major open source projects are used by arms dealers. It's a big industry. Any business has customers they ideologically dislike. I get how that's annoying but it is what it is.

>>neuron+p2
It's a bit more complex than that. They applied to be a sponsor twice; the community objected twice; the Foundation approved both. In one of those cases, the sponsorship was eventually rejected because the venue where the conference was held did not allow it.

>>danhor+W
Exactly. Source with caveats has long been a celebrated part of open source. I find it entirely understandable that some people are not happy with contributing to the project if their contributions go towards producing weapons. Anduril could have made an anonymous donation, but they specifically wanted the publicity. They have had employees asking to hire people to "fill the gap" left behind by people who have decided to move on due to the lack of stance in disapproving of Anduril's sponsorship. This has always been more than "I don't want them to use it" and quickly has become a takeover of the community due to how their employees and others have been pushing the policy decisions.

>>rgrmrt+c2
This is a great point, and perhaps we do need a new popular license or set of variants that exclude certain industries. "MIT-Peaceful" perhaps.

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!

>>ordina+(OP)
Funny how the software community could not separate software from politics two years ago when the conflict started in Ukraine! Most GitHub projects started including the Ukraine's flag, and some companies like JetBrains closed their offices in Moscow!

>>joepie+U2
Thanks for providing more detail and context. When you are well-versed in this Nix sponsorship/conflict of interest issue it can be had to disentangle what context need to be included to help other fully understand the situation.

>>danhor+W
>I've stated above some parts of my views about certain political issues unrelated to the issue of free software—about which of those activities are or aren't unjust. Your views about them might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might license a program to allow use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan's program might allow only use for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.

>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...

>>ohwell+X2
There are two licenses that include restrictions like that that I know of:

- https://github.com/raisely/NoHarm/blob/publish/LICENSE.md

- https://firstdonoharm.dev/

>>dzogch+k1
My understanding of your comment is that "free software zealots" are people who belong to the "free software movement" [1]. If that's correct, where did you get the impression it's "a tiny fraction of the open source community"? This article [2] from 2022 states that 22% of software project have a copyleft license. Is that a fraction you'd deem "tiny"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement

[2] https://www.mend.io/blog/open-source-licenses-trends-and-pre...

>>Hideou+22
Bridging Stallman's article to the issue at hand of sponsorship, I find it hard to believe that because he's fine with say Oracle using his code that he would also be fine with giving them a platform as a sponsor.

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.

>>Hideou+22
That is about licenses, not about community participation, let alone community policy or sponsorships. Those are all very different things with very different considerations.

(Signed, someone who absolutely does not want military contractors in their community, but feels that a license is the wrong place to enforce that.)

>>duxup+82
I have never heard of the company in question and don't know anything about them other than what was mentioned in TFA, but a main portion of the conflicts that have happened seem to be about whether a particular company should be allowed to sponsor or not. If it were special treatment for that company that others wouldn't get then that would be a different story, but it seems mainly that people don't like what the company builds and don't want them sponsoring, at least explicitly. That seems ideological to me.

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"

>>Pareto+D4
You've already commented ten times in this thread. If you don't know, maybe don't say anything?

>>rgrmrt+c2
The license allowing for something does not mean you are okay with anyone being part of your community.

>>Pareto+D4
If Oracle wanted to give a bunch of money to the FSF and sponsor them? I would think RMS would be overjoyed by that development. The beauty of *GPL is that it can't be used exclusively to the benefit of one party (Oracle). It respects the freedom of the user. That's the whole point.

>>danhor+W
No. e.g. BSD is considered Free Software despite no such requirements. Free Software is software that the user controls instead of controlling the user. If you publish code with no stipulations at all, it is Free Software. It is only when you place requirements on the user that it might become unfree. In fact there are plenty of Free Software licenses that are incompatible with the GPL.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

>>giraff+o1
I do agree it's reasonable to not want this kind of use.

> 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.

>>danhor+W
Let me translate GNU for you "The only limitation is that you are not allowed to make the software less free/libre aka you are not allowed to add "limitations".

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.

>>duxup+82
Yeah. Dolstra is responding to a letter that criticized his views, which isn't what the letter is. The letter's concern is that Dolstra is seriously harming the Nix project by forcing all decisions to go through himself, relitigating decisions that don't go his way, driving away good contributors, and generally causing friction and discord that impede communication and render decisionmaking ineffective. Those are pretty dang outcome-oriented criticisms. The letter spends like half of its length explaining how the Anduril thing and the Foundation are concretely harming the Nix project and how conflicts of interest are contributing to the problem. The least objective thing you can point to is the complaint about the Foundation having terrible minority representation, and even that has quite a bit of real-world support. It's the least ideologically-policing open letter I've seen in a long time.

>>danhor+W
the term you’re looking for is “license agreement”

>>joepie+85
Sure, but that's an orthogonal point to the one OP made isn't it? Contributing to open source projects is incompatible with not wanting someone else to use your work based on ideological differences. Perhaps contributors don't think about this until they're faced with a situation that makes them uncomfortable and I sympathize with that and maybe we should start adding disclosures that say "your work may be used by entities you do not want using your work".

>>salvia+j4
I'm a free software advocate, but I'm not a free software zealot. I think nonrestrictive terms of use is the only way to remain ethical. However I'm also a pragmatist and understand the value and use of non-free software. Zealots famously allow for no such exceptions.

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.

>>danhor+W
There is a very narrow set of restrictions that is generally agreed upon for it to be free software still, and that restriction is generally to the effect of "you can't remove other peoples rights".

That seems extremely different than targeting particular company for idealogical reasons and trying to remove their rights.

>>danhor+W
No, its exactly the opposite actually. You're thinking of copyleft. The Free Software movement was a direct response to corporations attempting to restrict what users could do on their own computer via dumb terms of service agreements. It guarantees 4 fundamental freedoms:

>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

>>Pareto+p1
What's the issue people have with Anduril? Is it just that they make defense equipment?

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?

>>rgrmrt+c2
The software licencing is also completely irrelevant here, nobody said that Anduril can't use Nix. The issue was that the community largely did not want them as sponsors. There is a very big difference to allowing someone (or some company) to use your software and wanting to participate in a conference where the same company is a sponsor.

>>Hideou+O3
People want them not to be advertised at official Nix events, not to bar them from using it. That wauld be impossible due to licensing so isn't on the table.

Would you require the FSF to accept a sponsorship from anyone and to advertise them in return?

>>Pareto+I1
Yes, when you scope a movement to just the thing it's about, you'll get a greater intersection of people who can agree on those ideals (i.e. actual intersectionality). If you check https://stallman.org/ you'll see that he's very opinionated on politics, probably moreso than almost all people (he has multiple things he writes about across the world every single day going back decades and maintains a list of assorted topics that mostly have nothing to do with software where he thinks we should change the law[0]. He's encouraged many boycotts over the years, and goes way further than most people to stick to them), but he wisely kept that movement focused on the thing it was supposed to be about, and in doing so was able to actually accomplish something.

[0] https://stallman.org/there-ought-to-be-a-law.html

>>bin_ba+28
> What's the issue people have with Anduril? Is it just that they make defense equipment?

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.

>>ordina+(OP)
It's like he didn't even read the letter. It's fact after fact, sourced and linked and screenshotted, demonstrating that Dolstra, the Foundation, and Anduril are engaged in toxic leadership that are concretely limiting the Nix Project's ability to build good software. It's not even about Anduril's business, it's about how they're at the center of a web of conflicts of interest that are producing poor software engineering decisions and driving away good contributors. The letter's authorship clearly understood that the obvious response was going to involve tone policing and complaints about "ideology" and went well out of their way to write the letter to address that avenue of attack - the whole first paragraph is about how it's not about ideology, the first sentence is that it's not about ideology, there are dozens of points about how it's not about ideology. It's all about observed cultural dynamics and results.

>>cycoma+d8
I honestly don't understand what objecting to them as a sponsor does. Sponsorship benefits the project for everyone. Is the objection to both the sponsorship and their presence in the conference? Folks who don't want to engage with them at the conference can simply not engage with them.

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?

>>giraff+o1
>It's very reasonable to not want your work used by arms dealers

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.

>>bin_ba+28
Contributors to open source projects aren’t asking the question “should the thing be done,” they are asking the question “should I do the thing.” I think lots of people fall into the general bucket of “sure, the military is necessary for a country, but I don’t personally want to work on 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?

>>bee_ri+8b
If you want this in formal terms: "pulling the trigger" and "living with yourself after pulling the trigger" are both skills that some people have and other people don't, those skills exist on a continuum of both directness and effectiveness, and comparative advantage applies all the way down at the level of individuals and their personal skillsets. Even if you support your polity's military aims your polity's military aims may be better accomplished if you aggressively refuse to work on military projects, thereby allowing yourself to contribute more effectively in other areas and freeing others up where they can contribute to military projects more effectively than you could. That's one of the things that tax dollars amortize over, if you're looking at it from high enough up.

>>saulrh+Aa
When the whole first paragraph is about how it's not about ideology, it's about ideology.

>>powera+25
Do you know if Stallman would platform Oracle by allowing them to be a sponsor?

>>rgrmrt+Ea
People don't want Anduril to benefit from the NixOS they work on via publicity or association.

Most wouldn't have a problem with Anduril donating and asking for no sponsorship or other benefits in return.

>>nallla+29
Should Microsoft be allowed to sponsor the next FSF convention?

Fuck no

>>danhor+W
Only in a very limited sense. Look up what happens when you try add a restriction of "You can't use this software for evil", or "You can't use this software to make nuclear weapons" to OSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Software_lic...

>>saulrh+Sf
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Somebody could think about maximizing the effectiveness of society at doing war, while admitting that their competitive advantage doesn’t lay in directly doing violence. I don’t think I’ve seen that before, and I don’t think it is how most of the people who come to the conclusion that they’d rather not contribute directly to the military come to that conclusion. But it is an interesting line of thought.

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.

>>ohwell+X2
> perhaps we do need a new popular license or set of variants that exclude certain industries.

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...

>>Pareto+p1
> Contributors to Nix have a problem with contributing to Nix and then seeing sponsors like Anduril advertised.

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?

>>duped+w9
Most US citizens seem to agree something needs to be done there regardless of political lean? 74% according to NBC polling (surely not right wing crazy land) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24172785-230343-nbc-...

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.