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102 sats \ 8 replies \ @TheWildHustle 29 Apr 2024 \ on: A leadership crisis in the Nix community NixOS

Welp, that's spicy.

TLDR

  • Anonymous authors published an open letter calling for Nix founder Eelco Dolstra's resignation due to alleged problems with the project's leadership.
  • The letter accuses Dolstra of repeatedly strong-arming the board and other teams to overrule their decisions, acting as the de facto BDFL even though the NixOS Foundation's charter doesn't grant him such authority.
  • The letter also highlights several instances of perceived conflicts of interest related to Dolstra's employment at Determinate Systems, a military contractor using NixOS.
  • The call for action includes suggestions for Dolstra to resign and disengage from the project for at least six months, allowing the board to reform its governance structure.
  • If Dolstra doesn't step down, the signatories plan to switch to and support a fork of the project.
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50 sats \ 7 replies \ @nym OP 29 Apr 2024

Yea it is dividing things

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111 sats \ 6 replies \ @TheWildHustle 29 Apr 2024

I had a super strange interaction on the nix os discourse site.

I made a comment about not liking diversity equity and inclusion mandates and my comments were flagged and taken down three times.

Strange community, but nix kind of magical, so I deal.

How much contact do you have with the nix community?

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116 sats \ 1 reply \ @bataroot 29 Apr 2024

It happened to a friend of mine when he mentioned bitcoin in a nixpkgs group, it kind of started a flamewar with typical anti-bitcoin arguments... A part of the community seems very woke...

Probably why the nix-bitcoin project exists, and why we need to learn flakes to be more independent from the package repository watchdogs. 🤷‍♂️

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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 29 Apr 2024

Yeah, I can certainly see a malicious bitcoin core being pushed to nix packages. I do like the flake system, but apparently it has some problems.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-are-flakes-still-experimental/29317/4

Also, I noticed the nix software center (the frontend flake I found for installing nix packages and flakes) doesn't find the fort-nix-bitcoin project. Its probably unmaintained. I don't know how to fix it though. Flakes themselves are very often used with many layers of abstraction (like with dream2nix)

I myself have been thinking about forking NixOS, but I know there's no way in hell I'd be able to do that especially on my own. I had momentarily thought of making a "RubyOS" that installs packages using the Gem package manager lmao. The problem of course being if there are any breaking changes between ruby version (which I have never encountered myself, but the fear of that is problem enough)

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83 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym OP 29 Apr 2024

Not too much really, I'm just an end user learning. I usually stick with more mainstream software for important things, but I always like to experiment.

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56 sats \ 1 reply \ @Lumor 29 Apr 2024

Been following those kind of threads/comments. Seeing them become broken out, rate-limited and then hidden.

Culture war is prominent, but both sides of the schism above are either woke or "woke-flagging".

Would leave if the tech wasn't so damn compelling.

Eelco Dolstra should probably stop pretending to let go of power and just be a transparent BDFL.

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6 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheWildHustle 29 Apr 2024

I honestly wouldn't mind. But I may be too much of a nix noob to weigh in. I'll sit back and watch the drama unfold while learning and enjoying the tech.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym OP 29 Apr 2024
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