Anduril's threat is existential

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I’m sorry, but I honestly can’t take you guys seriously…

also runs for SC, a position of power, despite being called to not do that

Why wouldn’t he try to do that? If ‘he’s not welcome[d] in the community’ then he’ll probably not be voted at all. If so, why shouldn’t he at least try? Also, this raises an interesting question. What if he gets a seat in the SC? Then that means that the large part of the people that voted him are actually not part of the community either?

That being said, who exactly put you in charge to decide who is ‘vetted’ to candidate for a position and who is allowed to be part of the ‘community’?

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I wrote this on May 12, 2024, about the last great upheaval:

There is an absolutely non-cynical argument for the set of “principles” Cal introduced. It is this: "We want to have a tightly knit community that gives maximum meaning to everyone who pledges to uphold its principles. If we can all share a similar set of values that name the outgroups and ingroups, however incoherent those values may be, the meaning that we get out of making the software will be greater. And if we if we don’t specifically name our friends and enemies (imagined or real) in our values, and we simply name behaviors, then the amount of meaning we get out of this thing will be less.”

And they are right!

But I’m not looking to maximize meaning from my interaction in an open source community . I want to be governed by a body that says something like, okay, don’t call each other horrible slurs, threaten each other, or creep on one another, or be extremely pushy or disruptive. If you don’t do any of those things, you’re welcome here, pull up a seat. I just want to be professional, write some software, make a living wage doing something I love, have fun, and avoid assholes.

The people that are arguing for Cal’s fundamental principles who are operating in good faith really do have a point: having everyone align politically really does increase meaning . They would like their participation to be quasi-religious experience. But that’s not what I want . I don’t want my experience here to be gated by a pledge to be a warrior in a noble struggle against a shared set of enemies and I certainly don’t want to be governed by people who do want that . That is a cult .

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I’m not sure whether or not Tom and people who defend him are welcome in this community. If it truly is the case that Tom and people who defend him are not welcome in this community, then that would be quite a shame. I think that it would be best if Tom, the people who defend him and the people who vehemently disagree with him were all welcome in this community.

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Yes.

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In all likelihood, it is the Nix ecosystem, not Anduril, who more greatly profits from PRs being upstreamed and ancillary ecosystem strength created as Anduril employees acquire Nix skills and Anduril successfully uses Nix to succeed in their endeavors.

Walking down the street on Halloween, one may walk straight past the costumed Palmer Luckey without even knowing it. The incentive of both parties is, locally, to use the sidewalk without bumping into each other. This example demonstrates how only the incentives in scope necessarily effects things.

The Anduril we can even see within the context of Nix is Anduril the software company, providing dependencies for building programs that they ship to their customers. Our mutual incentive alignment is completely natural and compatible.

There is an understood detente on the sidewalk. Anduril steps off the sidewalk and builds killer robots. You may step off the sidewalk and work to politically destroy Anduril and other arms developers and forces driving global arms races generally. However, both may still use the sidewalk in peace.

There are innumerable conflicting, mutually exclusive interests in open source. Competitors who are incentivized to damage each other also use the sidewalk. The victory of the Linux coalition in the Unix Wars is testament to the fact that identifying cooperative plays is the winning move.

So, what are the cooperative plays? Technically, we are naturally all very aligned and it is difficult for this force to become distorted. Bad code is often not very subjective. In terms of using Nix as a political platform, as Anduril uses Nix as a hiring funnel, why not also should their political opponents use Nix events for free speech to recruit political allies who may conspire to their heart’s content to damage the very need for Anduril and every company like them?

Looking a little further ahead, there is an underlying pattern to the issues we are experiencing that make those of us who support Ukraine happy to see Europe acquiring and developing AI enabled arms at breakneck speed. Weak, low-functioning democracies and divergent authoritarian governments mutually create real security threats for all of us. The opportunity to fight both of these underlying causes lies in demonstrating a sophistication of governance, creating a functioning process within NixOS that may be readily emulated across open source and within state governments to the extent that open source succeeds in becoming more useful and ubiquitous globally.

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Hm I’m not quite so sure about this.
I feel there are a lot of people who are actually fully okay with them.

I think Anduril is quite a thankful example, as they are much more “black and white” than other companies.
IMO the hard part will be to define a line for companies that are more grey (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Amazon) and how to find out who decides this.

For me, the most important part is that a company can’t point to us and say, “Hey look Nix(OS) thinks we are good; we are even on their website, NixCon booths, talk videos, job board, etc.”
Having a Git email address with the company domain would be fine.
Posting a link to the company website on any of our platforms wouldn’t be.

Second is taking money and resources like servers from them, but as long as they don’t have a say over it and are not the main source of our income, I have fewer objections, but it is something to keep an eye on (regardless of the company) and, in the case of problematic companies, ideally avoided altogether if the project can survive without it.

Lastly, I think it is okay if they employ people to work on the project as long as it benefits the project overall, but I’m not so sure about positions of power.
Unfortunately, these usually happen automatically for people that can spend a lot of time on something, which paid employees can compared to volunteers.
So it might be better to allow it upfront and then put up proper checks and balances.
For the SC there might be some improvements necessary.
E.g., someone recently wrote that having two people from the same company on SC wouldn’t be such a big problem because they couldn’t vote on issues with CoI.
I’m not so sure about this; there might be a lot of small decisions that could lead to a death by a thousand cuts.
There are probably other issues as well.

There first two should be easy to implement and are sort of already happening to Anduril, at least to a certain degree.
The third one is probably the hardest to implement, but we don’t have to solve all issues at once.

For me that would be to not violate human rights, and a company doesn’t have to have lost in court in order to violate this.
Harming people is already enough in my book, and I don’t just specifically mean Anduril here.
Violating privacy, fucking with workers, meddling with elections, and similar things go into the same bucket.

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E.g., someone recently wrote that having two people from the same company on SC wouldn’t be such a big problem because they couldn’t vote on issues with CoI.
I’m not so sure about this; there might be a lot of small decisions that could lead to a death by a thousand cuts.

I think I said the original proposal without properly documenting the issue. Sorry about that.

The current Nix constitution mentions that only one (1) member from the same company (or same payer for Nix work) can be part of the SC. That being said, I think that we are pretty good when it comes to guardrails against a specific company taking over the SC.

That being said, if someone knows, can you point me to the guardrails the moderation has against a hostile takeover? Do we have this documented somewhere? I’m genuinely asking because I don’t know and haven’t found something for this yet. Thanks in advance!

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AFAIK, this is the sole set of guidelines about moderator succession:

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(…) make those of us who support Ukraine happy to see Europe acquiring and developing AI enabled arms at breakneck speed.

Interesting. I wasn’t aware that I was happy to see Europe do that. I really thought I supported Ukraine, but I must have been wrong.

Anyway. That’s a fun analogy. Some minor adjustments, to better reflect the situation:

Palmer Luckey and individuals like us are different because he is head of a large, well funded company, so let’s reflect that by making his house a skyscraper with a pent house on top for him.

Most of us live somewhat differently. Some own their own house, while others share an apartment or have no house at all.

As he’s not personally engaging in the community, replace him in his costume with a group of costumed individuals he employs. He also stated that he intends to extend the number of his employees. We know he’s up there, but only hear of him when his broadcasts his opinions over the radio.

These people he employs are also not just ordinary neighbors. Instead at least one of them is one of the elected heads of the local home owners association, deciding who can live here, what rules apply, etc.

It just so happens that our good neighbor Luckey’s business also does some stuff off the sidewalk. Some of us have their own, much smaller companies. They are mostly doing stuff helping the community, trying their best to improve it.

For him and his company that’s the creation of surveillance towers at the border of the state to make sure poor people get captured and incarcerated or worse.

Oh, yes, also the production of weapons for the war against an authoritarian regime, though his boss, the head of the country, seems weirdly cozy with the head of said regime.

Luckey and his boss also happen to help in the attempt to eradicate our trans neighbors, along with a list of horrible things too long to list.

So now, with a bit more context, let’s imagine ourselves on the sidewalk again. We’re walking along, doing our thing. No sight of Luckey, just his employees, who are well behaved enough.

His skyscraper is a bit looming and casts quite a shadow, but only some of it falls on our neighborhood. Lots of our neighbors think he shouldn’t be allowed to behave as he does and have protested his rising influence or left the neighborhood in protest or out of fear. They think that the sidewalk would be a more pleasant and more functional space without Luckey and his underlings.

Others think as long as his people behave fine while on the sidewalk, we have no reason to complain and that anybody who does is in the wrong. They say it’s the complainers that make the sidewalk unpleasant and less functional, with all the noise they make.

They say our community is supposed to only care about what happens on the sidewalk. We are free as individuals to drag people off the sidewalk and kill them or enable those that do and we’re equally free to organize to stop that, but not on the sidewalk.

The sidewalk is for walking and people complaining about anything not related to walking are distracting from its purpose. They’re the actual danger to the community.

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@kfearsoff, you don’t speak for anyone but yourself. No one employed you as NixOS bouncer that determines who is welcome or not.

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I suppose we can split hairs so finely that one is unhappy to see AI be used in weaponry but also supports AI weapon use by Ukraine to the extent that they are incidentally available. Is that really introducing a new point or just splitting hairs? Alternatively, may we ask Ukraine to unilaterally restrain from using AI, echoing previous calls for Ukrainian restraint that come at a certain cost of Ukrainian lives and an uncertain abstract benefit of some other kind?

Let me be more explicit.

Firstly, as I’ve been saying, what can be accomplished against Anduril through NixOS is at best token gestures, things that don’t actually accomplish any goal. The goal is to exclude Anduril, which is a token gesture because it will inevitably not have that much effect on Anduril downloading Nix like any other user and then upstreaming changes under pseudonym if it must be so. Tom quitting or being voted out will only affect Nix insofar as the next user is more or less technically and politically capable. It would again have only token effect on Anduril.

Some have said “we just want to be heard.” Just being heard can be done by holding signs and standing on the grass. We hear you. We are aware of who Palmer Luckey is, what he believes, who his political allies are, and what Anduril builds. Mission accomplished. Being heard is clearly not the only thing being asked for.

In order to accomplish the exclusion that is being asked for, some want to obtain authority over the NixOS foundation. Total control is necessary because a fair amount of other users are against that exclusion for a wide variety of reasons and principles in spite of the intentionally misleading framing being used to create and normalize moral blackmail.

To translate this all back into the extended metaphor, let’s make a map:

  • The NixOS foundation is the city council
  • Materially harming or impeding Palmer Luckey as a political entity is dry-cleaning a shirt
  • Excluding Anduril is building a carwash

What is being campaigned for is a full takeover of the city council in order to approve building a carwash on the sidewalk in order to dry-clean a shirt. Does this sound like a great plan to stop fascism and authoritarianism?

It’s not just about noise. The moral blackmail uses untrue framing to make people uncomfortable. The intent is to create intimidating social pressure so that opposition is silenced and those doing the blackmail can take what they want from whoever they want, including ever more political support. This is not merely being heard or raising awareness. It is lying, fabricating, and brigading. It is throwing paint on every passer by unless they wear their loyalty armband and empower the accusers. That is a set of behaviors and political tactics named after disgraced US Senator Joseph McCarthy.

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With apologies for the noise in this thread, I think you are illustrating the type of difference in “what the same words mean” that I’m talking about. If I take your claim that “there are a lot of people who are actually fully okay with them” at face value, it is still orthogonal to my previous post.

Even tomberek has argued that he would put the needs of this project over the needs of Anduril.

I still don’t think you will find any particularly deep support in this community for the notion that NixOS should be putting the needs of any company over the needs of it’s own community or project goals. To me, it seems like something analogous to self-sovereignty could be a point of consensus, even if what exactly that means seems to differ for a lot of people.

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Well I don’t care about how it affects Anduril, I care about how it affects this community and it seems like it’s affecting it plenty. I haven’t seen anybody here implying they think anything we do in this small community would have much of an effect on this very powerful and politically connected arms company.

They seem to be striving and don’t even need to pay people to come to their defense here.

I find the continued use of the term “moral blackmail” a bit weird, as I’ve never heard it before and haven’t found a good definition.

Going by what you wrote here, you’re accusing me and others of “lying, fabricating and brigading” and equate our behavior to McCarthyism.

As that’s nothing more than an accusation without any substance, it’s easy to turn it around and call you vehemently attacking me and others as engaging in moral blackmail. I certainly feel like your framing is untrue and aimed at making those you oppose uncomfortable.

I’m sure you find that as convincing as I do.

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It is this platitude that reveals how extreme and politically unviable your attitude really is. It doesn’t matter if you ask a Democrat or Republican, a member of the Chinese communist party or maybe a left wing representative in any of the world’s #1 democracies on human rights, they will all be in agreement: the national border must be kept secure.

If you are going to insinuate that it is a “war crime”, “genocide” or “murder” to build surveillance towers to prevent the smuggling of drugs, illegal border crossings or invasions by foreign armies, you will find support for your views in only the most fringe political groups. It is laughable to suggest that any country would stop monitoring its border, and the USA is no exception.

The appeal to “targeting the poor” or “minorities” is just the icing on the cake, as if those categories gives one the intrinsic right to break the law. Why don’t you start quantifying your extraordinary claims with facts instead? Show us the innocent migrants blown up by Anduril’s war criminal drones or quit it with the hyperbole already.

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Our colleague here–not to put words in their mouth–is probably concerned that the same tools made to keep the wrong people out tend to also have an obvious application towards keeping the right people in. I don’t think that that, by itself, is a completely unreasonable concern.

That said, I will note that these companies are more than capable of (and likely, currently are) hosting their own caches, hydra, and secure versions of the subset of nixpkgs that they care about. That being the case, I’d much rather that we find ways to coexist and get the same benefits from tooling that they do–if for no other reason than I’d hate to be the side without those tools.

The choice is very much between tolerating their presence in the community and getting benefits from their work (and perhaps sponsorship) and in turn helping others whose causes we deem more palatable, and not tolerating their presence and being strictly worse off and not having any benefits for those causes.

For the financially minded, even 1% of the 2.5B raised for their new Detroit plant is 20M, and that’s like 80-something Nix foundations. Finding some way forward that would let us get funding from Anduril (or Rheinmetall, or BAE, or KBP, or Hanwha, or Baotou) would put us in a position to do a lot of good for other projects and stakeholders.

An explicit solicitation of those funds as a sole revenue stream is not something I think we should pursue, but if there’s a chance to get the MIC to spend money on us and help us in our mission to make computing more accessible and easier for everyone instead of spending it on men and material that stay inside their campuses, I believe that to be a win for humanity.

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Can a mod just close this thread already. WTF.

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So did you go find a definition for moral blackmail or is the first statement a bit of winging it?

You’re not being attacked. I’m using deductive reasoning (of which syllogism is an elementary technique) and I can’t reproduce your conclusions by using valid arguments transforming true premises. I observe a lot of invalidity and unsoundness.

This is an example of moral blackmail. You are framing the choices as if we either exclude Anduril or else Palmer Luckey will take over the NixOS foundation governance. The reality is that one SC member is allowed to share the same COI. Another reality is that founding and running companies is hard. From Palmer Luckey’s perspective, being excluded just means “Oh, so they want us to freeload?” if anything. With so little incentive to take over the NixOS foundation, why is it considered such an obvious goal or even feasible?

The OP claims there is “dominant war hawk rhetoric”, another clear example of moral blackmail. Either we are in favor of the exclusion of Anduril or we are war hawks? This is easily disproved by construction. I can simultaneously campaign for the political destruction of Anduril in national and international politics, where it actually matters, while also being in favor of the PRs, revenue, and industry recognition that Anduril can bring in to NixOS, where it creates value for many organizations, including mine, which is active in the development of new social finance and social decision models, things I consider to be the most potent weapons of democracy globally, a powerful force against armed conflict.

Some in favor of the exclusion have disagreed, stating that it was better to create nuisances for Anduril than to do nothing. You have argued against their position by conceding that Anduril has essentially no material interests to defend or advance or for the NixOS community to harm. This again forces us to ask why Anduril would seek to corrupt the NixOS foundation or how Anduril’s interests in Nix are misaligned with everyone else’s interests in Nix?

We all agree that the community is being affected. However, isn’t this self-inflicted? If Anduril has no material motivation to corrupt the NixOS foundation and therefore cannot be expected to put any serious effort into it, did the people who quit the Nix community successfully avoid contributing to immoral uses of Anduril’s weapons or did they also fall victim to the improper framing of the issue as an indefensible choice between excluding Anduril or else committing genocide against Gaza etc?

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Yes, you can prevent certain companies from using Nix. All we need is change licenses. It will be their responsibility (and legal risk) to use Nix in their lovely toys. We need not start from scratch either, POSL comes to mind, as does JSMIN’s vague use restriction “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” I particularly like the latter. If for nothing else, if Anduril or other such company wants to keep using Nix, they will have to ask us for a special license, to which we can reiterate “no, you cannot use Nix for evildoing.”

As a side note, there’s an interesting post from Benjamin Kuipers on why he doesn’t take military funding. It’s a great read, and even more so I would argue for those considering a career in the military industry. There’s also the chapter “The military can use your research anyway, from the open literature. Why not have them pay for it?” All valid points there. I would add, the short answer is a license with a “good not evil” restriction (let the courts decide what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘evil’). Simple and effective.

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Changing the license requires all code copyright holders to allow it (in all Western countries anyway). Some projects have contributor agreements that assigns half ownership of the code to one body and half ownership to the contributor, which allows all the code to be relicesensed by the body that has half ownership of allthe code. Nix isn’t one of them, so doing it legally would require tracking down every contributor and asking their permission to relicense. Since there are thousands of contributors, this job would require lots of time and money, and would require throwing away any code by contributors that can’t be found or who don’t give permission. It’s basically infeasible.

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