https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236
Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :
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
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Half the article, or more, is a description of evengalian plot. That’s some wild shit man, none of that was in any way relevent. Imma use this tactic myself.
“I’m sorry, but I am breaking up with you. You do deserve an explination as to why though but to properly convey my emotions first I’ll have to describe the entire through plot of blues clues”
I didn’t understand a thing about what the actual issues were.
Based on comments I can see that Jon Ringer objected to inserting gender minority person as a requirement for committee board.
So, why is he wrong? I totally agree that gender minorities deserve recognition, but making it a hard requirement for having a committee board sounds like nepotism.
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.
Suppose I have 1000 people from community and 10 out of them are gender minorities. I then have 5 projects, each with 10 members on board committee, and I want a representative of gender minority in each of them. And I choose hard workers based on merit, the best of the best.
In such case I will be choosing 9*5 = 45 people out of 1000, and specifically I add 1*5 = 5 people out of those 10.
So the board committees will have 45 members each with (worst case) 955/1000 = 95.5% percentile performance, and additionally 5 members of gender minorities, each with mediocre 5/10 = 50% performance.
The gender minorities will perform worse, because we specifically singled them out of the crowd. This is not how you improve diversity.
That reads like someone with minor mental illness. Rambling. Evangelion. Rambling.
I clicked their resume and there’s no evidence they contributed a single line of code to the project. Yet they demand the person who wrote most of it step down? Yeah.
Write your own project and manage it how you want. Don’t threaten others. Do your own thing.
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.
Hopefully this is satire.
If I create an open source project I can run it however I want. I do not have to create a board to manage it, there are plenty that have a single developer doing all the work, like VLC, and like Sqlite they may or may not even accept PRs. It doesn’t stop it being open source.
If I do create a foundation, I can fill it with whoever I see fit. If there is a board, then generally they have the last say but there are plenty of projects, like Python used to be, where there might be a board but the founder remains the benevolent dictator for life and will stop them doing stupid things that distracts from the core project. Look at Linux, the project is mostly self maintained but Linus will gatekeep anything that doesn’t meet his definition of success.
If my rules for my project is that all board members have to be a furry, then that’s my right, and maybe the board of furries will vote to overturn that. Or maybe they won’t. But you can’t tell me how to run my project, this isn’t a democracy.
The flipside of this is that you as the BDFL are not in any way entitled to community contributions. If they decide to not like your furry board, they are free to fork the project, but splitting the development efforts could very well kill both projects, so sometimes it is better for the project to listen to the community.
Of course I’m not entitled to community contributions. Just as a user, you are not entitled to me fixing your big reports.
That doesn’t stop it being an open source project, and a lot of developers don’t want to deal with a needy community for their own mental health. It was an itch that they scratched.
does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to “make their own thing” if they don’t like it.
He not only wrote it but made it open source so if anyone doesn’t like what he’s doing they can take all of his work and make their own project.
The author of NixOS couldn’t have been more generous. If anyone doesn’t like it, they can take all his work that he did for free and make it their own project.
Threatening the creator is wrong.
I understand that and it is indeed a good thing to publicly license your work rather than keep that to yourself. Still, no matter how virtuous one’s actions are, that does not mean the people who come to deposit their time and work for a project should accept everything that person does simply because they started it.
People are entitled to argue about the project they participate in, and that is even more true for open source software, where the contributions of the community eventually become much greater than any single human can accomplish. I really do not understand this mentality of “this person created it, therefore if you don’t like any of their decision suck it up or go make your own fork”, it is very narrow and a horrible way to conduct anything, really anything, much less a collaborative project.
should accept everything that person does simply because they started it.
They don’t have to!!! He gave it to you for free to do with it what you want.
Giving you something for free doesn’t entitle you to threaten him.
I think you are missing the part where the community also gives back to the project. At some point the project isn’t really the creation of the original author anymore.
Which doesn’t matter because he’s already given everything to the community. If they want to take it in another direction, he’s already given it to them.
