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.