Yeh I get your point now. Thanks for clarifying. I agree the blog post should be adjusted. Both can be true: private builds are useful. The blog post spreads unnecessary FUD about cno.
Also delroth thanks for the very thoughtful rundown of the issues. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.
(In the following text, “You” refers to the members of Determinate Systems, in plural.)
Okay, since what you said is quite long and includes a lot of content meant to prevent people from assuming the worst about your intentions (which I understand is necessary), let me summarize it more clearly:
In a trust-based business operation model, if we are to trust
cache.nixos.org, we first need to trust Nix, then the infrastructure’s software and hardware configuration, and finally, the operators of the infrastructure. However, the infrastructure operators, in a rather subtle manner, replaced Nix with Lix, so a significant new factor was unexpectedly introduced into our trust model, which is why we no longer consider the current model to be generally trustworthy.
Is that correct? I think your criticism has some validity. As Silvan pointed out, the infrastructure maintainers should have explicitly stated this change. However, their configuration has always been publicly supervised, so if you are responsible for your clients, you should also be auditing this configuration, including any additional changes.
Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the configuration itself will remain largely unchanged. That being said, if you don’t contribute labor to the project, you can’t expect to have a seat in the room where decisions are made—that’s the common logic of community-driven projects. The infra team has previously stated that they lack manpower, but DetSys did not choose to allocate more paid staff to this work.
So, just like with Determinate Nix before, you have once again chosen not to contribute resources to improving the community. Instead, while still occupying part of the community’s resources, you decided to start from scratch, reimplement another part, and place it under your company’s less transparent management.
Up to this point, I was still willing to defend you with the argument that “this is just a normal business practice, and we should have enough tolerance for companies making a profit by deriving our work, just like in other mature ecosystems.”
However, you went further by writing articles that promote your approach in a way that is almost directly undermining the community’s solution, arguing that yours is simply better and explaining “why people shouldn’t use the community’s solution.” To make matters even worse, you repeatedly pushed these commercially-driven promotional articles into the community. Despite receiving no positive response—only criticism and causing extra work for the Mod team—you kept doing it again and again.
The current situation is clear: you are alienating more and more people in the community, that’s not a good sign, even strategically. There used to be some older, more pragmatic individuals, some of whom doing the same kind of work as you, and some of whom never had a particularly strong ideological commitment to free software, were willing to remain ambiguous in their stance or simply stay silent. But now?
I seriously doubt how much value you can gain from your current approach. At best, you might convince some customers—those introduced to Nix through your product—that “the community is bad, and you are good.” But what about everyone else? What about your potential customers? Do you really think they don’t use Nixpkgs or interact with the community at all? If, on the other hand, this is just a grudge match against the community—an attempt to outcompete the people you dislike in a fight that ultimately doesn’t hold much significance—then how does that serve your business model in any meaningful way?
At this point, I don’t think there’s any need to keep saying about this, as everyone is just repeating the same arguments over and over. So instead, I’ll offer you some advice as a neutral observer, without injecting my own or the community’s emotions into it.
Firstly, you could stop pushing these articles into the community for a period and be more mindful of the existing developers’ sentiments when writing them—avoiding extreme or divisive language.
Secondly, you could proactively reach out to the Steering Committee (SC) for discussions and publicly express a willingness to reconcile. Of course, this would require the next step—apologizing for past actions that sparked major backlash in the community (you may not truly believe you are wrong, but still a marketing strategy, isn’t it?), and committing to concrete improvements, such as allocating more staff to help maintain community operations, setting clear goals for implementing long-requested features, and increasing regular donations to the project, and so on. Given your financial and technical resources, these steps would not cost you much—but they would be enough to turn the page on this issue.
Finally, you—especially Eelco Dolstra—can engage more actively in community discussions, openly explaining the technical reasoning and considerations behind key decisions while listening to feedback in a timely manner. This would help ensure that people don’t alienate you or perceive your actions as hostile. It would also align your efforts with those of other community members, ultimately increasing efficiency and driving progress on both sides.
Finally, I want to say that the majority of the community should have been welcoming toward your presence. Your leader, Eelco Dolstra, as the creator of Nix, has always been someone the community naturally respects. You have also contributed to the establishment and maintenance of several projects that have supported the community’s growth, and these efforts deserve recognition and respect. If Eelco’s and Determinate Systems’ reputation within the community is not maintained, this will become a lose-lose situation—harming both your company’s business reputation and the community’s cohesion. From my personal perspective, I sincerely hope that people are willing to give you another chance to resolve this situation so that our progress is not held back by these conflicts.