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.
Yea it is dividing things
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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