Announcing Determinate Nix

[Anomalocaris]

@crertel

Re: 1, I’d note that there are open efforts to improve the security story in the Nix ecosystem. There is also precedent–the whole debacle with puck–for sloppy disclosure. It’s useful to say “hey, we all need to do better” and it isn’t useful to act like this is a problem for only one actor.

Sure, but disclosing a security issue publicly rather than reporting it to the people who would fix it and giving them time to do so, is a major mistake at best. Especially since to my understanding, this is common cybersecurity practice.

@crertel

Re: 2, I understand your frustration given your work on Rime for something like a year now. That said, nothing is preventing your solution–or any other similar solution–from winning out in the marketplace. If your issue is simply that they’re charging money, well, unfortunately that ship has sailed in open source for decades now; it turns out that sometimes people need to make rent.

The issue is less that they’re making money and more that they’re intentionally keeping functionality proprietary to reduce competition with the entirely free, open-source version of Nix. There are also still ways for companies to make money off of open-source projects, such as providing commercial support like Canonical does with Ubuntu.

@crertel

Re: 3, there are plenty of folks that were or are working on “competing” documentation solutions for Nix. Again, calling out DetSys ignores other people (in that very thread you linked) that were similarly acting (under the best of intentions) in ways that caused fragmentation. And again, as before, if there is a better docs solution out there it will win out.

According to the post @cafkafk linked regarding this, the leader of the documentation team deleted the starter templates and not long after, Detsys launched their own documentation site. It is at the very least suspicious. Also could you point out specific examples of people acting “in ways that caused fragmentation” in that thread?

@crertel

Re: 4, DetSys likely has NDAs with their some portion of their customers. Even without NDAs, many companies are cagey about who they work with. They do not owe you or me or anybody their rolodex. As Nix gets more commercial adoption and we see more industry involvement–which has already happened, is going to keep happening, and I believe for the sake of Nix should not cease happening–we’re going to run into this more and more frequently and as a community we’ll need to navigate that new state of affairs with an open mind and with grace.

Does that exempt them from disclosing conflicts of interest? I would say DetSys’s ties with Anduril were especially relevant during the sponsorship fiasco, for example.

@crertel

Re: 5, DetSys is a business and frankly they probably have better uses for their time than getting involved in internet culture war arguments (for example, shipping a flake service). Further, considering their position, the investment of time to handle these things with the proper care and delicacy–assuming that everybody at the table is acting in good faith, which the various heated discussions in the project spaces, unofficial spaces, and fediverse suggest may not be the case–has a very unclear payoff to them as a business and runs the risk of prolonging drama in the community. Better to leave the arguments to people who have nothing better to do than call each other nazis and marxists.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think @cafkak was referring to things like sealioning in discussions of diversity measures rather than a “culture war.” Considering how DetSys placed themselves squarely in the center of the Nix community, I think it is a reasonable concern that they remained silent rather than making a statement.

@crertel

Everything you mentioned, in short, is some combination of unfortunate or inevitable, and while I see your annoyance it seems to me to boil down mostly to “These people I don’t like for whatever reason did things I don’t agree with in ways I don’t approve of and aren’t functioning with the same logic and exact moral calculus that I do.”

Since you’re somebody running for the steering committee, I think it’d be helpful to recognize that there are other value systems and contributors outside of your natural grouping and preferences, and to realize that you’re going to have to serve the whole community, not just the subset you like most.

In my humble opinion, denying that there is a problem and blaming the person bringing it up for having a problem with it is not a particularly compelling or productive argument.