This is a position that I find difficult to understand. If it’s important to you that you never contribute to source code which gets utilized, even indirectly, by companies affiliated with war/defense, what gave you the idea that you could contribute to an open source project under a license that allows it while still meeting that goal? The license of nix and nixpkgs is completely incompatible with your ideals. We all made a decision when we started contributing under the existing license. If any of us didn’t understand the ramifications of that decision, we only have ourselves to blame.
Where does this leave you? You have exactly two options:
- Change your ideals. Accept that some people you think are bad are going to use and contribute to the project, with the understanding that if it wasn’t Nix, it would be something else, and take solace in the fact you’ll continue to play a part in making the world a better place by creating an objectively useful software tool.
- Stop contributing to the project and make a new one. Create an alternative nixpkgs tree from scratch and license the entirety of it under your new anti-defense license which bans all usages and contributions from your political opponents. You may need to hire a lawyer to draft this correctly, it won’t be easy. You may not relicense any existing code without contacting every nixpkgs contributor.
You seem to want a third option:
- Continue to contribute to the project, but engage in passive-aggressive tactics to make life a living hell for certain people, depending on their employer, even when it’s completely irrelevant and they’re posting totally benign technically-sound patches back to the community.
I don’t speak from a position of authority here, but I trust that the majority of nix/nixpkgs/nixos users and contributors agree with me when I say: that’s completely unacceptable. This is an open source software packaging solution, not a political arena. If you can’t find a way to bring yourself to embracing Option 1 above, please don’t try to keep one foot in the community so you can try to rehash this nonsense yet again in a few months, please go reread the license you agreed to, and then go get a new hobby. This is not participating in good faith in creating a better Nix, which is why the other 98% of us are here. Whatever technical contributions you’ve made or will make, someone else will fill in.
This shit has to stop.