open letter to the NixOS foundation
save-nix-together.org

this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

  • self@awful.systemsOPM
    4·
    7 months ago

    oh wow, somehow I called that Standard is a fascist land-grab for control over the Flakes standard library (and it also just really fucking sucks to use)

    they really are doing their damndest to reframe all of this as minor drama, aren’t they? it’s kind of amazing how limited the techfash project takeover toolbox is — cause it doesn’t take much variation in methodology to succeed, unfortunately. for better or worse, what’s going on in Nix is probably going to be worth writing about in the end.

      • self@awful.systemsOPM
        4·
        7 months ago

        “popular Linux distro gets taken over by nazis” does have a ring to it as an article title

          • antifuchs@awful.systems
            10·
            7 months ago

            It’s funny, by some metrics it is intensely popular: GitHub contributor count and daily commit volume would be two… but it definitely is a vanishingly small user base compared to Fedora or Ubuntu or, lol, Android, ofc.

            That contributor count metric is also a fun one to consider when people complain about politics in OSS - this is the size of a small municipality, of course there’s going to be politics.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        kinda surprised it hasn’t already seen some coverage

        almost half makes me want to point Cox at it too…