Very concerning that Detsys paid to get top result, is there any response to this from Detsys, regarding the ad.
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While nice to give DetSys the benefit of the doubt, it does seem like they’ve had plenty of opportunities to engage with the community on some of the tougher questions already, but chosen not to, so maybe don’t hold your breath on this one either.
At this point it does some pretty pointless to ask and expect answers to any hard questions from DetSys.
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How about a commercial entity impersonates community output, and drowns out the original by way of money?
Strong words, but the theme with DetSys and grahamc for past couple of years has been subtle redefinition of what specific words and terms mean in context of Nix ecosystem. This article is the first one I’ve seen with such and such amount of brazen redefinition.
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It’s pretty standard SEO and marketing in industry to make sure your company comes up in search terms. It’s even more standard to pay for advertising. There’s nothing interesting or notable, really, for anybody who has any experience with business.
What response are you imagining?
"Hey, why did you run an ad?
“Er, to get our product seen?”
“Well, why’d you pay to get the top spot?”
“…why would we pay to get the bottom?”
You realize how silly that line of questioning is, right?
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I suspect that this is the value that we disagree on.
Personally, I don’t view Nix as a business - I view it as a community project led by countless passionate volunteers. Therefore, I think the community comes first, and everything else second. So I call the value of the “industry” into question - sure, it will bring new people to the community that will work on the project, but what good does it do when we have so many issues even with as many people as we have now?
I and many others have spoken out against this, and DetSys representatives (founder Graham and co-founder Eelco) chose to stay silent about it. So it’s clear to me that our values fundamentally diverge, in a way that is incompatible with this time and place. So I think it’s best to part ways. DetSys already parted ways at least with the open-source aspect of the community, and they keep trying to use the community to market themselves - so I think it makes sense to take a strong stance of banning them, to essentially say: the Nix community IS NOT DetSys community, and we fundamentally differ and can’t come to an agreement.
And yes - what I said was toxic. I tried to be civil, but I failed at it. This is my shortcoming. But it’s also not the whole story - this toxicity has long history behind it, and is caused by the unwillingness to listen from DetSys side, and the feeling of powerlessness at protecting one’s community from my side.
Ultimately, I’ll try to stay out of the DetSys conversations. I put the effort into this before too, but Domen’s post was too brilliant to pass by. I no longer want to give DetSys recognition, whether good or bad.
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I am fine with companies advertising, but advertising their Nix Installer over the official Nix Installer seems like they’re trying to become the de facto official installer instead, which I don’t agree with any company doing, detsys or not.
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It’s pretty cut-and-dried from the Nix community valutes:
We treat each other with respect and civility. No matter one’s individual identity, circumstances, level of contribution to the project, or status, everyone has the right to respect, and everyone has the duty to treat others with respect.
Constant kvetching about DetSys, Eelco, Graham, and whoever else does not show respect. I will also note that this constant abuse and sniping–and make no mistake, anybody reading this, that the last year has been nothing but a pattern of abuse at those folks–is not respectful (though the mind boggles why this must be highlighted).
We are here, first and foremost, as individuals working together. Our priority here is to work on Nix projects for the benefit of all their contributors and users. We value building excellent software with a vibrant and diverse community. Individuals gain trust and status by doing the work. Organisations gain prestige by funding the work of individuals and providing resources to support the project.
DetSys has funded the work of individuals and has provided resources to support the project. People here may be pissy about how though resources are applied. They may be unhappy with which work of which individuals is being funded and how much communication is happening there. That’s fine–adults and professionals need not like everything or agree on everything to be able to function successfully in a cooperative endeavor.
They may have listened and simply have nothing to say that you want to hear–that’s fine and normal and the world is replete with people who do things and say things differently than you or I or anybody would prefer. That does not excuse your–or anybody else’s–shitty behavior, and on the balance this year’s crybullying and insistence on “It’S oKaY tO bE tOxIc If It’S tO hElP tHe CoMmUnItY” has done orders of more harm to the community and ecosystem than any damn fool thing DetSys has done, not done, promised to do but failed to deliver, or whatever else.
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Back in Apr 2024 I suggested Consider applying Ostrom Principles to Nix organizational structure
And the 1st principle is
- Define clear group boundaries.
and then another relevant one is
- Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.
If the boundary of what is a community led “commons” is not clear to everyone, then disputes will arise.
If disputes arise, and the community has no support for conflict resolution, the outcome historically in all of human society has been either a total collapse of the “commons” or major dysfunction as people start fighting one another based on individual interpretations.
Are the boundaries of the community led commons that is nix/nixos clear to everyone? Probably not yet, and it’s not always an easy feat to achieve. Or, if they are among a significant amount of people, there probably is not consensus built for the majority of people who would be present to discuss, or carry out actions in the community.
But it would be a benefit to this community to define these things as much as possible, and create a larger consensus around that. And, it would benefit this community to have some fair dispute resolution as I stated back in April, too.
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So what?
If DetSys actually comes out with a better installer, better than the community installer, and people use it instead, so what? If I search on Google for “linux installer” right now, I get Canonical’s Ubuntu. The next entry is linux.org. The next entry after DetSys is nixos.org.
The objective is to get people using Nix and growing the community–that’s what matters more than a nix measuring contest.
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That’s a poor example. There is no “Linux installer” (I’m sure you’re aware that there’s also no ‘official’ Linux distribution either) but there is an official Nix installer for the official Nix distribution. Despite what DetSys advertising misleads people into believing, theirs is not the official installer nor the official Nix distribution.
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I dont understand why everyone is so upset.
The Nix ecosystem needs better administration and that seems to be lacking in the community. If a company decides they can do it better, they can try. Just because its FOSS doesnt give the project a stamp of “immune to competition”. Its not even really competition, theyre upstreaming their code. They’re contributing a better installer that enables flakes by default, theyre contributiing a more up to date nix distribution. Quite frankly this is what nix as a whole needs is people who are actually making changes. Look at how long we’ve been waiting for NixOS to be ready for new release.
Nix is a far superior technology than docker, ansible, salt, etc. But it has nearly no adoption besides home labs and enthusiasts.
If companies wont touch nixos for the enterprise its because the ecosystem is not reliable enough.
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I google “install nix” vs “nix installer” and get different top results, because detsys installer is refered to as “installer” everywhere, it comes up when searching for “nix installer”, surprise surprise.
And paying for seo is the standard practice. I don’t see any problems here which deserves to get a company banned, (not on this point at least)
As for the flake stabilisation issue, I think pushing for quick immediate stabilisation is stupid given the amount of instances people reported on how unpolished it is.
If Eelco Dostra is really blocking the flake stabilisation as people are alledging, I suggest to ignore the existing prs and rework them, so if not now, in the next few years flakes will be stable.
The idea of flakes being a plugin developed by Determinate Systems out of mainline nix suggested in one of these announcement threads, is great too. So I don’t see why people are getting so worked up and demanding to get this company banned. It just feels like hate without real substance.
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Flakes aren’t enabled by default because of their still experimental status, despite that Detsys in my eyes, has continued to pushed them to try to be official despite their experimental status. This is one of the problems I have with Detsys. The lack of better administration will hopefully be solved by this upcoming SC we are going to have. Another of my concern regarding Detsys is that Detsys is seemingly trying to push the ecosystem towards an open core model and corporate controlled model. Rather than an open source and community controlled model via their proprietary offerings such as FlakeHub and now Determinate Nix.
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I agree with this, it is a great resource and idea. Thank you for sharing. Somewhat similar, I posted something about how Apache projects work, which I also find inspiring: Nix deserves great governance.
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You (and others) keep ignoring the actual problem, despite it having been pointed out a million times.
The problem is conflict of interest. You can’t hold actual power in organisation A (e.g. the NixOS foundation), while being financially invested in organisation B (e.g. Determinate Systems), when B is benefiting from A being held back.
Also, please go read Domen’s reply.
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I don’t think B is benefitting of A being held back , that is at best an illusion, and I don’t think B (DetSys in this example) see it that way either. At the contrary.
Nix mindshare is currently a small, small fraction of what it could be, if adoption was increased as much as the technology deserves.
Do we not all want to see Nix becoming more mainstream, more popular, more successful? The way I see it, interests align much more than they conflict. And therefore it makes me surprised how often I see “conflict of interest” invoked as argument in this community.
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detsys wants to make money while reducing the reach of the original project. I don’t see much alignment there. That’s also different from just about every other company I know that uses or builds on nix.
Besides, I am personally not a software religionist or evangelist, I care to see the software that I use get better, not just inflate numbers for venture capitalist investors or so on. I am sure various members of the community each have their own vision here. If there was a unified vision, I didn’t hear about it yet.
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In the case of the installer, the DetSys installer is open source and the same license as the Nix install script, and it has already been noted that there is an effort to upstream it, if the community wants it. It’s hard to see how NixOS is being “held back” by being offered, free of charge or license encumberment, a better solution to a problem, that has already been field-tested with real users.
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I don’t think this is accurate. Their business model presumably is aided by nix adoption.
Can you unpack this more?
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The use of the subjunctive tense here seems premature to me! Devenv is already useful and pleasant to work with, plus easy to contribute to. As you mention, it’s also unencumbered by any unattractive attempts to lock users and contributors into proprietary tools. I don’t see any compelling reason why it can’t yet become the premier way to define and manage Nix-based, per-project development environments. Its universal availability might make it attractive even to customers of other Nix-centric platforms! (You don’t even need devenv-the-binary to use devenv-the-library. Devenv’s official docs make clear how you can use it with a flake.nix file and no special tooling, and presumably thus any Nixlang implementation you like, although devenv-the-binary does add nice functionality around garbage collection and speedups for direnv integration, etc.)
And I think this is a strategy that can pay off regardless of anything these other Nix startups do or don’t do. My team at work uses devenv for our own projects, and I know there is some interest in Nix adoption on other teams. Cachix will doubtless be the first option I push to evaluate when we come to need private binary caches, because our pleasant experiences working with Devenv have set our expectations for Cachix high.
That’s all. Just wanted to butt in to say that I remain optimistic about Devenv’s place in the ecosystem. 
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