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I wonder if this is social engineering along the same vein as the xz takeover? I see a few structural similarities:
- A lot of pressure being put on a maintainer for reasons that are not particularly obvious what they are all about to an external observer.
- Anonymous source other than calling themselves KA - so that it can’t be linked to them as a past contributor / it is not possible to find people who actually know the instigator. In the xz case, a whole lot of anonymous personas showed up to put the maintainer under pressure.
- A major plank of this seems to be attacking a maintainer for “Avoiding giving away authority”. In the xz attack, the attacker sought to get more access and created astroturfed pressure to achieve that ends.
- It is on a specially allocated domain with full WHOIS privacy, hosted on GitHub on an org with hidden project owners.
My advice to those attacked here is to keep up the good work on Nix and NixOS, and don’t give in to what could be social engineering trying to manipulate you into acting against the community’s interests.
Don’t know anything about this particular case so while “social engineering to create a backdoor” is certainly a possibility, so is the more straightforward explanation that it is drama about real or perceived problems in the nix community. I think that it’s dangerous to dismiss this altogether because of the recent xz debacle.
I think you’re right to be suspicious. The XZ attack has showed that there are people and organisations out there that would love to get hold of a piece of trusted critical infrastructure like Nix. They’ll go the long lengths to do it, manipulate people, and exploit the maintainer’s desire to do the right thing.
And if the person can’t stand by their critism and can only give wooly examples, then best to ignore it.
Too many people involved I think, someone will have to check this but all those members with names attached look like real developers who were significantly contributing to the project. It is perfectly possible for a dictator for life to have festered a toxic culture that got worse over time, and has happened multiple times before.
How much of those are actual people? I count half a dozen git links in the signatures. Those could belong to a single attacker. Everyone else either has an email or an unlinked handle. Who knows if they are Nix devs?
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How do you know that’s “KA”?
I agree. This immediately jumped out to me as a social engineering attack when they started spouting off about “more people with commit access” and otherwise being anonymous and most of the signatories not on the contributor list, especially at the start.
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So unfortunately the usual toxic bro-culture stuff … 😢
So… why don’t they just write that people (or they) want a more progressive NixOS management?
Would be more to the point.
Edit: if you doubt, just check all the examples in the letter.
Honestly, without concrete examples of why this is a problem, I just wish people wouldn’t do this. Open source projects aren’t democracies. They are do-ocracies. People get “positions” by getting off their arse and contributing. Nix OS surviving doesn’t depend on how many users it has. It depends on how many developers it has.
If critisism is coming from the developer base, fair enough. If it’s coming from the user base then all they are going to do is stop the developers wanting to do what they do, and then the project is dead.
I know there was the poor choice of sponsor for one of the live events recently, but I suspect this has opened the flood gates for people to pointlessly criticise from any direction.
People get “positions” by getting off their arse and contributing.
I have a lot of issues with the letter, but it’s hard to deny that certain demographics get better opportunities to have the free time & will to contribute. Does that mean you force other demographics in or not? I’m still on the fence as it the upsides have some drawbacks, but discussions should be had–especially by those other demographics & folks better educated on the topic than myself.
I know there was the poor choice of sponsor
It was a defense contractor I believe. I’m not pro-autonomous drones or anything, but it seems odd to hone in on a single sector. Defense makes obvious tools for killing in the form of weapons, but we wouldn’t have GPS or the internet, etc. without research from the sector either (also see dual-use technology). It’s easy to criticize the military industrial complex, but we have just as many non-military corporations & industries absolutely putting their profits above folks & the environment which is just as destructive–just not as immediate/obvious. If you start kicking out all unethical sponsors, you’re gonna end up with no sponsors under our current capitalist system that doesn’t put any value into or reward being ‘ethical’ or even giving the correct value for labor.
Considering the Internet, GPS and weather satellites, three widely utilised and ubiquitous global services rose out of DARPA, whilst I’m not American, taking issue with investment in a Linux distro is closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Wait until these people figure out where computers came from.
From reading the letter it seemed that they were more concerned with the lead developer’s conflict of interest with said defense company as their company, Determinant Systems, may or may not work with them. They can’t say due to an NDA which implies that they do work with them.
My thoughts exactly. Also, these are a lot of words for very little content, feels like an attempt to obscure the actual intention.
Because they don’t
We have heard from multiple people in multiple unrelated contexts that they are hoping for a hard fork of the entire community over the continued inaction on the toxic culture in the Nix project.
Oh yes, please. My experiences on the nix community forums and matrix have been soured by the actions of high-level contributors. They are simply unable to view things from another perspective and harshly defend their perceived territory. I accept that they make mistakes as we are all human, but they are aware of their positions of power and happily take advantage of it.
My major problem has been the documentation of the project and how top contributors are unable to accept how bad it is. Discussions about improvements and attempts at improving it at regularly shut down or impeded. Coming back to the “harsh defense of perceived territory”, it distinctly feels like existing teams are supposed to be the only ones making changes to the things they own. Contributions from “outsiders” never exit nix review hell and are nitpicked to death.
A hard fork doesn’t guarantee existing problems won’t be copy-pasted into a new community (humans be humans), but at least if a new one started there’d be an attempt at resolving existing problems.
(no, I’m not xz’ist - this is a real person with a real opinion)
Edit: I realise I don’t have the same issues as described in this open letter which seems to be focused on Eelco. There have been no interactions with the dude, so I can’t judge, but interactions with some high-level nix members haven’t been pleasant.
My major problem has been the documentation of the project and how top contributors are unable to accept how bad it is. Discussions about improvements and attempts at improving it at regularly shut down or impeded. Coming back to the “harsh defense of perceived territory”, it distinctly feels like existing teams are supposed to be the only ones making changes to the things they own. Contributions from “outsiders” never exit nix review hell and are nitpicked to death.
I made a one time contribution to the nix docs, I also got the impression that managing documentation could be better but it did got accepted after a few changes.
With that said there are alternative projects that provide a form of documentation to nix.
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Could someone share the contents of it? Have newly registered domains blocked by default.
Someone has to rewrite this…
You have to read thousands of words past Executive Summary to see what’s going on, which eventually turns out to be the usual left-right culture war (aargh…) The worst is that this actual theme is hidden in the links and is never directly mentioned in the letter.
The letter also stops short of taking side between left and right although the links clarify it’s obviously the former.
It instead accuses the NixOS platform of having “systemic” problems in “leadership,” “structure,” etc. etc. I was like, “just say it, you simply believe in a more progressive NixOS team.”
They only say “bad behaviors,” then define bad behaviors with abstract terms using one paragraph. That’s shortly after the text uses the metaphor of “missing stairs in a staircase”, without explaining what these missing stairs are about.
So abstract, without examples for all this depth of abstraction.
They go on with their “bad behavior”, bad behavior, bad behavior, and finally there are links. If you click on the first (?) of these links, you finally see that this one example was about minority representation in NixOS development. In the rest, you see examples of the usual conservative vs. progressive culture war.
There are proper ways to do this.
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WayBackMachine copy : https://web.archive.org/web/20240421184131/https://save-nix-together.org/
Thank you 🙌
You’re not missing anything. Also I’d like to know how you’re blocking those.
NextDNS. Has a setting to block all domains that’s newer than 30days. Which imo is a very very good idea to have on, considering malware and scams. And I very rarely visit such new sites, and if I do (I learnt now) I can just shive the url in Archive and it will show it to me that way.
Fork it, maintain it, and move on. RHEL was forked into Alma/Rocky when the original provider’s goals, and their community’s goals were not in alignment. So far, the forks have improved the ecosystem over all. Fork Nix/NixOS and build the community. Its no different than the Debian derivatives like Mint or Ubuntu.
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Can someone ELI5 what’s going on? Seems like they are still fighting about Nix allowing a defense company to sponsor their conferences, and trying to ad hominem the project leaders.
Nix is already beyond fucked because they actively dismiss the need for appropriate security measures to prevent supply chain attacks. There were multiple discussions about this over the years that appear to have succumbed to neglect.
I wouldn’t trust nix, just like I don’t trust pip, brew, or a whole plethora of other package managers and repositories. They are just too neglectful
I can’t say I care much about this. It sounds like they are just making noise
🥱
