I believe Snowflake is one of Jake Hamilton's projects. He's trying to make Nix more approachable through GUI tools etc.
Unfortunately, he's also part of the mob that chased the founder out of the Nix project and decided it should be yet another battleground for identity politics.
Like you, seeing the community entertain these stupid political fiefdoms makes me want nothing to do with NixOS.
However, I might stick with it out of laziness though until SteamOS runs on 3rd party hardware. The Jovian project is a Nix-based SteamOS clone that's been working well on my Legion Go, and I don't want to spend the time back in tinkerland finding something to replace it.
Let me be very direct - I disagree quite a lot with your characterizations in this post. If anything, I am probably much more closely aligned with Jake's "personal politics", since I also signed the first open letter about rejecting military sponsorship for future events. I felt the second open letter was not well thought out or well argued, so I didn't sign that one, but I do think it's clearly a net positive for Eelco to step way way back and that he has been in no way contributing to healing or progress during this debacle.
I resented people building fiefdoms because they're often commercially motivated and used to drive consulting engagements. They fragment the community on a deeply technical level, ruining code reuse and interoperability, for negligible technical improvements. I don't have any idea what the authors' views on project governance or human rights are, that wasn't a factor for me.
> it's clearly a net positive for Eelco to step way way back and that he has been in no way contributing to healing
Just let people do their thing. You’re not a bad person if you have nothing wise to say about people being hurt, and lots to say about resolving dependency constraints.
> fragment the community on a deeply technical level, ruining code reuse and interoperability
Most Nix consultancies I encounter make highly reusable flakes. flake-parts, flake-utils, fenix. They have a small commercial spot in their package’s namespace, and the first reason you look them up is “I wonder if they’re doing other smart Nix things that I can copy”, and they usually do.
You're not a bad person, but you might be a poor leader in that situation, which, as I understand it, is the main focus of the complaint. There's a difference between letting people do their thing, and letting them lead a large community of developers despite that not being their strength.
> While the foundation board was never intended to lead the community, we cannot deny that it is perceived to be in that role by many, and we therefore take full accountability. [...] Eelco is the principal author of Nix and undoubtedly a central figure in the ecosystem that grew around it. We confirm that Eelco showed no intention to be perceived as or act like the BDFL of the Nix ecosystem, or the Nix code base. *To commit to that in a timely manner, he has decided to formally step down from the board. This decision was made amicably and in mutual agreement with the board that this is the right thing to do.* Our collaboration was always characterised by our deep respect for Eelco’s work and our awareness of his lasting impact on our lives.
Fwiw, I'm not a Nix user nor am I really following the whole discussion here. I'm not trying to spread "FUD", just point out that there's a difference between "bad person" and "bad at the role one is currently in".
That said, as a complete outsider, the quote "the foundation board was never intended to lead the community" is wild to me. It sounds like the director of NASA going "I never intended this role to have anything to do with space". I think I understand the meaning behind the sentence - they wanted to support the community, but that the community leads itself in some way - but I can also see why the community would see them as having that leadership role that they apparently wanted to avoid. I also don't understand why someone who wanted a purely technical role would ever be on that board in the first place.
Like I said, I'm not really following this debacle, and I don't know the details. I'm just amazed at that quote, which seems very revealing to me.
You seem to be unfamiliar with the situation, then. The sponsor wasn't for NixOS itself, but a related in-person event. NixOS had existed for literal decades prior to this.
I highly doubt he would reject DARPA as a sponsor for NixOS. This was just celebrated by a bunch of safety people that have significant overlap with NixOS security goals: https://www.darpa.mil/program/translating-all-c-to-rust
You don’t understand that meme. DARPA is direct military money for a bunch of tech people are happy with supporting. They just pretend it’s not the military so they don’t have to have any hard moral conflicts.
Sponsorships are generally acknowledged with quid-pro-quo advertising opportunities - otherwise they'd be called silent donations.
In the case of tech conferences like the inciting incident, that means your logo everywhere, maybe an ad spot in between talks, and booth space. You might get some intangible reputational benefits from whatever other sponsors are present if they are viewed as highly prestigious or respected. Might even have opportunities to do a talk by one of your employees, we've all been to conferences where a vendor conspicuously also has a talk that coincidentally features their products heavily. All in all, it can elevate your perceived legitimacy in various ways.
Advertising might get you more business or more applicants and thereby grow your reach and success.
In terms of my personal values I'm a pacifist. I don't want to see something I like(d), something I made modest code contributions to, used to advertise for a commercial military organization that manufactures equipment for violence. It's the same way a vegan probably doesn't want to see advertisements by the beef farming industry or that someone who cares about renewable energy and sustainability doesn't want to see sponsorship by someone whose holdings are a huge stake in coal mining and fossil-fuel power plants.
In the case of the inciting incident, it wasn't a case of massive dollar amounts, it was ~$5k USD and it wouldn't have jeopardized the conference at all to say no thank you.
Yeah, it makes sense if you're a pure pacifist, the "all violence is wrong" -type.
I'm more of a pragmatic pacifist myself, which allows or even carefully supports violence for suppressing violence. I believe the USAF is generally speaking aligned with me on that. Which is why I'm not unhappy when they work with FOSS.
I think the opposite of pragmatic pacifism is the military-industrial market. The expansion and brinkmanship of weapons development brings out the absolute worst qualities in privately owned businesses. If you think lock-in is bad when it's your phone or email account, imagine how horny investors get suggesting DRM for hand grenades. This escalates because the goal of defense companies isn't to defend America, but to make as much money as they can get away with.
I'd like to think that I'm pragmatic as well, which is why I won't deny that NixOS would likely get used in conflict with or without event sponsor deals promoting it. However, if your in-person events pivot from a technically-focused gathering of like-minded individuals to a war council bankrolled by Anduril, I'd expect most attendees to be angry. Especially once you consider that the United States sponsors the export of weapons to countries that don't use violence for justifiable or proportional causes.
The second letter saying TL;DR "fuck you Eelco, kind regards". I'll never understand the motives here. Never. Please let me know when you've spent decades creating something and I'll be sure to shit all over you in kind.
I don't know much about it but that summary seems completely unreliable:
* it reads like the result of 'there was a power struggle and my side lost'
* it falls back constantly to overly simple cause-and-effect answers to complicated problems
* it clearly is trying to paint certain people as villains and dissecting their imagined motivations while excusing or ignoring the motivations of others
Interesting, but not convinced of its impartiality. There's a strange attempt here to link labour union organising to social activism, which is incorrect and ahistorical. And also irrelevant to nix, which is a community rather than an employer.
Individual union organisers might also be social activists, but effective union organisers know that they need to a appeal to all employees regardless of their politics. And historically unions have been just as socially unreconstructed as companies, and subject to the same process of social activists pushing for their reform.
> Individual union organisers might also be social activists, but effective union organisers know that they need to a appeal to all employees regardless of their politics
One need only look at labor's reaction to the Teamster's president's speech at the RNC to realize that this is clearly not the case.
When a person is deeply involved with something that turned into a conflict and then they write their history of it, as is the case with the link above, then I would say that framing them as a 'reporter' is not accurate.
Out of curiosity - what makes you think that the author of the link above, Chris McDonough (incidentally an author of the Pyramid Python web framework), is "deeply involved" with the NixOS conflict?
It is a firsthand account of someone in the community. They referenced no sources and gave a description of events based entirely on memory. They claimed their own involvement and interest in the outcomes.
If the person is involved in a situation and recounts a history from their perspective it is not reporting. It doesn't matter whether you think they did a good job or not. A combatant in a war writing their evaluation of it afterwards is not 'reporting' and neither is what he did.
An analogy is not a literal comparison between two things. It is a way to describe something by pointing out relationships between things and comparing the relationships. It does not literally compare NixOS with a warzone.
Putting aside the accusations of activist ideology, this paragraph seems key:
> At a properly run company, if you are caught eating someone else's sandwich from the fridge, your boss will confront you and say "hey, Bob, don't eat Ted's sandwiches." That will be the end of it. In an organization with weak leadership, however, the entire company will receive an email from HR in the afternoon dictating a company-wide seminar on sandwich theft prevention, a #sandwich-theft chatroom will be created, posters depicting sandwich thieves in an encircled red X will appear on the walls, etc. The latter is more akin to what happened in the Nix case I outlined. There was no leadership in place to deal with an isolated sandwich theft, so it now needed to discuss policies with the goal of ending sandwich theft forever and punishing all sandwich thieves globally.
As an outsider, it looks like Nix had a weak leader who refused to mediate differences between people. He didn’t do what was right and just. His problem, and his irresponsibility, became everyone else’s problem and responsibility. A power vacuum but also a moral vacuum.
> As an outsider, it looks like Nix had a weak leader who refused to mediate differences between people.
As someone who closely observed all of this over the months, I can confirm that this was exactly the root cause of the whole issue. 4 out of 5 of these leaders eventually burnt out and quit.[^1]
The new governance structure, despite the rough start[^2], hopefully will solve that and create an actually caring leadership.
Without knowing the specifics: I doubt a governance structure will produce good leadership. I've seen Rust people place their hopes in abstract, convoluted processes, and they've failed repeatedly.
Rather, I see the problem as character. The chosen leader(s) need the internal, personal qualities necessary for getting volunteers to cooperate well. External structure won't save the project if leaders lack character, it will just slow the damage they can wrought.
Relatedly, I was uncharitable before in emphasizing the weakness of Nix's leader. I think we all lack the moral (apolitical) education necessary for just leadership.
Power tripping. Ever wonder why projects become "foundations" with heavy emphasis on non technical bureaucratic bloat, committees, forums, "community managers" with way too much power and so on?
The main reason to become a foundation is to have some legal entity to deal with money. Some times projects get grants or donations or google summer of code mentor payments, and that can either go into a random account of whoever happened to be in contact with the donor, or it can be properly managed by a foundation with agreed-upon guidelines on where to store money and what it can be used on.
The end result is fragmented projects, worse developers and less activity. Congratulations. You got your social point across to the detriment of everyone.
Bazzite and ChimeraOS are good contenders for that use case if you weren’t aware of them, to the point that I am plannng on using one for setting up a system as a “gaming console” for a family member and an email howto should be good enough for minimal tech support on my part.
Just setup ChimeraOS on an 8845HS box this past weekend and really liking it. I do wish there were a few more emulators configured in the box, and there are some rough edges (the second activated controller is always controller 1 in games for some reason). It's been relatively nice all around.
I do wish there was some slightly better platform specific documentation though.
Thank you for illustrating the problem with the Nix community so succintly. When someone brings up those words, I know immediately to distance myself from them.
I suppose that's the American led industrial military complex?
I bloody hate war and the military, but I have to agree with that one. While Russia, China & co. keep moving closer and closer to the fascism of pre-WWII world, the collective West seems to be the only force countering that, though parts of the US politics is showing signs of also falling into the seductive philosophy of fascism.
These people wouldn't know what a fascist was even if Hitler took a dump in their cornflakes.
Meaning of the word has been twisted and manipulated to refer to anyone who has a different opinion on something, to the benefit of actual neonazis and fascists.
Unfortunately, he's also part of the mob that chased the founder out of the Nix project and decided it should be yet another battleground for identity politics.
Like you, seeing the community entertain these stupid political fiefdoms makes me want nothing to do with NixOS.
However, I might stick with it out of laziness though until SteamOS runs on 3rd party hardware. The Jovian project is a Nix-based SteamOS clone that's been working well on my Legion Go, and I don't want to spend the time back in tinkerland finding something to replace it.