Yes, it’s a lot to read but I’m just the messenger and not capable to do a tl;dr.

• Posted because the blog author is a person that I’ve seen blog posts from before, and maybe it fits with the previous posts on Lemmy about NixOS. Here a video of what the person made with NixOS booting an old Super Mario 64 game https://cdn.xeiaso.net/file/christine-static/static/blog/boot2mario.mp4 which shows the magic of NixOS. Related blog post https://xeiaso.net/blog/super-bootable-64-2020-05-06/

Thank you. Reading the article was a complete train wreck that left me more confused then informed.

I’m not gonna read this person’s Evangelion analogy, but I did go to the trouble to hunt down what Jon Ringer actually did.

Here’s a link.

Thanks. From the same page I found this which has a tl;dr which is maybe useful for other readers.

The open letter is very vague at some points. It tries to outline some real issues that require years of context to fully grasp. Without having this necessary context - it is very hard to follow some of the points made, and evidence seems very poor.

This repository aims to list some key points that are easy to understand without all of the context. This is a compilation of damning evidence for Eelco’s leadership, essentially.

If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:

• Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power

• Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like

• Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority

• This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community

• Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community

I’d just like to remind the passing reader that creating an open source project does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to “make their own thing” if they don’t like it. Open source projects are the result of a massive collaborative effort and the resulting work is the product of a whole community laboring to make it happen. Signed: someone with a major mental illness.

This is a basic represention and inclusion issue. Unless you are actively seeking out voices of those minorities and addressing their concerns you will have a reinforcing loop where behaviour that puts people off engaging will continue and it will continue to limit people from those minorities being involved (and in the worst case causing active harm to some people who end getting involved). From what I understand the behaviour that has been demonstrated and from who those people leaving it is clear this is active issue within Nix. Having a diverse range of people and perspectives will actually make the outputs (software) and community generally better. It’s about recognising the problems in the formal and informal structures you are creating and working to address them.

Additionally, but just to clarify nepotism would be giving positions based on relationships with people in power and not ensuring that your board contains a more representative set of backgrounds and perspectives.

Not the drama itself should influence your judgment, but how they will deal with it.

Whenever people work together on something, there will be some drama, but if they are dealing with it, then that should be fine.

Nix and NixOS are big enough, that even if it fails, there are enough other people that will continue it, maybe under a different name.

Even it that causes a hard fork, which I currently think is unlikely, there are may examples where that worked and resolved itself over time, without too much of burden on the users, meaning there are clear migration processes available: owncloud/nextcloud, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo, redis/valkey, …

Why are identity politics even allowed to be discussed in an unrelated field (software development) in the first place? Seems it always just leads to people getting upset when you can just not talk about it as it’s really not related at all to my knowledge.

I can kinda agree here. In the open source community, identity politics should be especially irrelevant. The FOSS licences are explicitly designed in a way to not discriminate based on such factors like race, religion, gender, nationality, biological sex, political views, etc. However, from what I can gleam from the blog, it seems somehow related to the COC and maintainer behavior and a lack of transparency rather than “identity politics”. In what way, idk because the article doesn’t seem to specify any specific verifiable incident, at least from what I can tell. But I will say, that if it is a matter of the COC, that the COC is supposed to be a protection of the right for an individual to be able to express themselves in an environment that won’t prosecute them. So, in this regard it’d make sense to if say someone was being miss gendered maliciously, it’d likely violate the COC. In this regard, the right for one to express one’s self doesn’t give one the right to harass others because you don’t agree with how they’re expressing themself.

What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development? Software development is deeply entrenched in politics. It’s just that, just as in most topics that don’t have politics as their main thing, a lot of people would rather pretend it’s not.

Any community of people presupposes politics. If it doesn’t show, most likely it’s a very narrow or homogeneous group of people, which involves excluding/shunning others to defend this narrowness. So that has its own sort of problem too.