I’m a regular Nix user, whilst I hate war as much as many on this thread I know a world without it is always a distant dream and understand why militaries need to exist.
I think it’s makes a good out of a bad situation if the tax money I pay which goes to the military, ultimately ends up being used to support open source projects such as NixOS rather than closed source alternatives (which I’m sure Anduril has the option of). It turns a negative into a positive.
Well it doesn’t do that. It would still be bad if it did.
“If we don’t believe in open source being used by people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
― Noam Chomsky
Let’s not misquote Chomsky. He was talking about “freedom of expression” and I’m not convinced that’s the same thing as open source.
While we’re at it, I found this Chomsky quote to be interesting in the context of this thread.
Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.
He surely has many more that don’t support the side you think you’re supporting by misquoting him.
It’s rather the other way around, your tax money ends up in the military, why should you contribute with your time and efforts on top of that? Dan Koditschek thought that it would be fine getting in bed with the DoD until he wrote the above mentioned letter too. At the end, I guess it doesn’t matter if Nix code ends up killing innocent people? Not unlike those lovely Predator drones that use open source software to blow up weddings? Also, Anduril surely has the option to use closed source alternatives, it’s just way profitable to use open source (meaning unpaid labor).
I partially disagree. I do not think that it’s the other way around. Instead, I think that it goes both ways. Open-source software is like a rising tide that lifts all ships. When I contribute to the Nix ecosystem, there’s a chance that my contributions will benefit Anduril which is bad, but there’s also a chance that my contributions will benefit a bunch of other people and organisations which is good. At the same time (as p1u3o has pointed out), when Anduril contributes to the Nix ecosystem, there’s a chance that their contributions will benefit Anduril themselves which is bad, but there’s also a chance that their contributions will benefit a bunch of other people and organisations which is good.
That being said, I do agree with you that contributing time and effort of top of my tax money is a bad thing. Do you have any ideas for how we could continue to contribute to the Nix ecosystem without contributing time and effort towards bad actors like Anduril?
I’m glad to hear that you agree with p1u3o that Anduril has the option to use closed source alternatives. From p1u3o’s perspective, it’s better if Anduril uses open-source software instead of closed-source software. What is your perspective? Would it be better if Anduril used open-source software or closed-source software?
I do. Change the license of nixpkgs to only include non-military use. To be honest, I don’t care about that being non-compliant with OSI definitions.
PS: You are mixing “open-source” and “FOSS” which is not interchangeable.
Changing the license of nixpkgs to a made up non-open license is obviously a non-starter. You’ll have to make your own package collection if you want to impose such restrictions. The nixpkgs project is MIT licensed.
OK. I just edited my post so that it no longer uses the term “FOSS”. Do you think that it looks better now?
You just removed the parts about freedoms, cutting it down to only be about open-source, congrats.
Working towards changing the license, making it difficult or risky for them to use Nix related code.
You don’t own the copyrights.
Working towards changing the license, making it difficult or risky for them to use Nix related code.
Fork plus rebranding and relicensing. Not that unusual. Redis comes to mind as a good example in that a substantial amount of contributors were not employees. The fork was created by these contributors and rebranded as Valkey.
No, you can’t “just relicense” it. You’d need explicit agreements for that from all significant contributors, as they have copyright, and that’s practically impossible at nixpkgs scale.
Redis is a project with a CLA, at a glance. That’s just a different case where copyright has been kept centralized all the time.
I don’t know if I speak for anybody else, but for me, the fundamental issue is how we handle Anduril and its employees in this community.
I’ve seen people trying to derail the argument by saying it is about whether Anduril benefits from Nix or not.
I’m not saying the people that are now discussing a relicensing are trying to do that, but I think this is a different matter with a potentially much smaller group of supporters.
I understand the thought behind adding ethical clauses, but it is a fact that those make them fundamentally incompatible with traditional open source and free software licenses. Not saying that that makes them wrong, just that that’s a big step.
I personally doubt whether such a change - were it even feasible - would have any practical benefits. I’m sure Anduril has enough resources to fork, should the unlikely event happen that the official nixpkgs actually changes its license. I also don’t think anybody will check the source code on their weapons and successfully sue them should they not comply with an unproven license’s ethics clause.
Anyway, I think any discussions of a new license would fit better in a new thread. I think this one has run its course for quite a while.
Totally agree with your arguments and this part as well.
I brought up the proposal because the whole problem with MIC actors trying to influence the Nix community is not as much of hopeless dead end, as some try to make it to be. Of course a license change would be hard to do, also not always feasible to go into an unfree direction. They would have the resources to fork their own nixpkgs, but investing in governance and policy changes that favour Anduril seems more like what we are experiencing right now.
Maybe it’s time to fork nixpkgs away from the influence of (IMHO) bad actors.
There was a single entity that owned all the copyright in the Redis case, which allowed a fork and relicensing. No such entity exists for Nix. Valkey forked from the originall-BSD licensed Redis code and is stiill BSD ilcensed, while the copyright holder relicensed.
They seem to be interrelated. Anyone up to starting a new thread? How would it be framed?
Why give this example (Redis/Valkey) out of many other options? The answer is in the linked article for @chrism’s last post: Like any open source project, Redis is the product of hard-working community members. So is Nix with its large community of contributors and maintainers. A community-driven fork will not drive Anduril away from the original project, nor is that the goal. The goal is to drive the community away. It will make the original project Anduril’s, while making a dent on the profitability (free labor). Also, by creating an incentive for independent contributors and even other companies (not MIC) to move away and work on the fork. That’s what happened with Redis and Valkey (the latter ending up with more ‘organizational diversity’). All analogies stop there though.
Not necessarily. Sure, they can pay three-figure paychecks to a few people willing to push Anduril’s agenda and capture the project for their own purposes. However, without that hardworking community, there goes the cost-efficiency reason of using an open-source solution, which is why Big Tech and now MIC love free (non-pecuniary) open-source as it means unpaid labor. That love has a number (or two numbers): for all OSS used, it was estimated to be close to $4.15 billion supply-side and $8.8 trillion demand-side by a team of researchers from the Harvard Business School. So, how much would companies like Anduril have to spend if it wasn’t for OSS? They would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist. The original research can be read in the 2024 working paper The Value of Open Source Software.
That’s for the Nix package manager only, which is LGPL. Now, it is my understanding that the Nixpkgs repository and NixOS are MIT, which is permissive. So, no problem there. You can fork, keep original notices. Any new contributions are licensed under a less permissible (non-free) license.