Call for full re-election of the Steering Committee

[JasonYundt]

@jaen

Well, yes. Except in a thread where he was explicitly tagged by DHH saying things like:

I really hope the nix community can recover from this infiltration of nut jobs and their nonsense

Anduril are big users of nix. Maybe @PalmerLuckey can help turn the ship around

That’s retarded. Anduril should have been CELEBRATED for supporting nix! And I think it still could be, if @PalmerLuckey and others with a stake in this technology decides to get these nut jobs out. I know he will have the support of @mitchellh and @tobi too (my nix pill pals!).

And what they decide to respond with is that they want to use nix for american dominance. They’ve been explicitly tagged, we know they share the same politics of wanting to remove “woke” and the only thing they talked about is how they will ensure Nix can be used for creating weapons so that america can stomp its boot on the face of the world, forever. At the very least that’s tacit endorsement. And given history of *nduril in this community and other tweets about planning a counterattack on “woke” in OSS projects it’s very hard not to read it as a statement of intent.

Sure, maaaaybe that’s just how righties banter nowadays, I wouldn’t know, I don’t talk to people. But if they are not, the only time to act is BEFORE they can get claws in the governance. After they have taken over the only recourse is forking. But why should we — as in the project before the hypothetical take over — have to fork, instead of them? If they really want “nazipkgs”* the Fork button is right there, no need to fuck up the existing community for that.

I’m still kind of confused here. Let’s say that the hypothetical takeover happens. What would they do in order to take over the project, and what would they do after they have successfully taken over the project?

@jaen

Okay, explain this one to me, because I can’t figure it out — how overreach in favour of one political option is supposed to be bad, while overreach in favour of the other political options is supposed to not be bad?

I think that the premise of this question is flawed. In this situation, there’s two opinions that someone could have (one was from this post, the other was from this post):

1. It’s OK for the people in this thread and people like the ones that are in that thread to have a sway over this project.

2. I think that it’s bad that the mod team banned people because they were not in line enough with their leftist views.

From my perspective, there’s an infinite number of reasons why someone might have opinion number 1 and there’s also an infinite number of reasons why someone might have opinion number 2. Some of those reasons involve overreach, some of them do not. I think that the premise of your question is flawed because it assumes that overreach is relevant here. For some people, overreach is definitely relevant here. Other people might not even believe in the concept of overreach.

Additionally, I disagree that both of those opinions imply overreach. Opinion 1 does not imply overreach. Allowing that group of people to have a sway over the project does not necessarily mean allowing that group of people to have an oversized sway. If they had an oversized sway, then it would be overreach. I think that opinion 2 probably does imply overreach although I’m not so sure. Personally, I don’t agree with opinion 2 because I’m agnostic as to whether or not the mod team banned people for not being in line enough with their leftist views. Maybe, the mod team did that. Maybe, they didn’t. I don’t really have enough information to know one way or the other.

@jaen

I suppose, which is I’m specifically saying “project governance” — what I specifically care for here is for the project to remain self-sovereign. Nobody should tell Nix how to Nix other than us chickens. And certainly not some pigs that think they are more equal than other animals (“Animal Farm“ reference, not calling any human beings “pigs”). Any external actor trying to influence how the project governance is effected, should be considered an existential threat to the project.

It’s one thing to submit a PR that fixes Nix segfaulting building their internal modnukeit that doesn’t break any existing use case, and another is being able to decide unilaterally “from now on we only accept contributions that have signed CLAs declaring they condone what israel is doing in Gaza”.

Or one thing to fund improving dynamic derivations because they want to have better iteration times when developing their “Loyal Wingman” drone with their only return being the Nix team choosing on their own to focus on improvements on those Nix features — features that will then also be useful to the whole community — and another is to be have a say over which features are implemented at all, and prioritise their own and shoot down those they don’t like.

Of course I’m choosing very contrasting stances and what they actually do will be probably less bad — just in the context of the twitter thread and rather lukewarm response of the SC towards it, I have little trust the project would be ready to stand it ground, had such a company decided to go pedal-to-the-metal on the takeover.

I disagree. I think that if a company decided to go pedal-to-the-metal on the takeover, then the community would simply elect Steering Committee members that would oppose the takeover.

@jaen

That is also true, but as long as the company doesn’t have direct influence over anyone in the governance, I think that’s acceptable. Because this means that the governance is entirely free to decide that they’re going to upset the company.

I would say that the governance would still be free to decide that they’re going to upset the company, even if the company has direct influence over someone in governance. After all, you can’t have more than two people who work for the same company on the Steering Committee, and members of the Steering Committee must recuse themselves from voting when there’s a conflict of interest.

@jaen

It’s just that it’s a relatively new development and america had been blatantly boasting for a while what they think of self-sovereignty of others[…]

I haven’t heard of this before. Could you post a link so that I could read more about this?

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@psionik

This thread and all others like it asks us to engage in an extra-democratic pressure campaign that will at best erode representation, fail to achieve any meaningful goals of its proponents, fail in the wider election it seeks to force, and fail to bring an end to the governance instability weighing on the community.

I mostly disagree with this statement. I don’t think that this is extra-democratic at all. I think that this is exactly how democracy is supposed to work. Some voters strongly believe that we need a full re-election of the Steering Committee. I’m not really sure if I agree with them or not, but if they believe that a full re-election is very important, then they should make their voices heard.

@psionik

The desired outcome, exclusion of Anduril, is a token gesture that will not affect Anduril or any other weapons developers in the US or Russia or Israel or any other nation nor change the policies or actions of the US. The correct place to affect US politics is through US elections or your representative national elections via the creation of effective multilateral influence on the US. How can we ask a broad coalition of the NixOS community to support an action that will have zero effect on the issue they seek to effect while also disrupting development of NixOS and requiring us to gatekeep an otherwise open exchange of code and ideas? The minority interest gains nothing of real substance while the broader community loses.

I totally agree. The community is right for hating the military–industrial complex, but they’re using that hate in a counterproductive way.