Call for full re-election of the Steering Committee

Announcements
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I think that the link did go where you wanted it to. I say that because the image that you posted is something that I have already read multiple times. The most recent time that I read that X post is when I clicked on the link that you had posted.

Yes. I had already taken that X post into account when I had said what I had said earlier.

I think that the premise of this question is inaccurate. So far, I haven’t seen anyone say that they want to change the NixOS project to be more effective in facilitating American dominance. Instead, I have seen Palmer Luckey say that he wants to use Nix in order to help build weapons for American dominance. His statement was about using Nix, not changing the project.

That being said, let’s say for the sake of argument that Palmer Luckey did say that. Let’s say that Anduril really does want to change the NixOS project to be more effective in facilitating American dominance over other countries with their military. I still think that someone with that opinion should be allowed to have some influence over the NixOS project, but only if people who have the opposite opinion are also allowed to have some influence as well. Perhaps, the people who oppose the American dominance idea should have more influence that the people who support it.

I disagree. I think that one can hold both opinions at the same time. That being said, I don’t really know whether or not the mod team has ever banned people for not being in line enough with the mod team’s leftist views. How could I figure out whether or not the mod team has done that?

This is where I’m a little bit confused. I agree with almost everything that you wrote here, but all of that sounds like having an influence on the project. From my perspective, if a company was to contribute issues and pull requests, participate in the community and donate to the project, then that person or company would be influencing the project and potentially its governance. I say potentially because it depends on how much the company does. If the company contributes lots of good issue and pull requests, creates a lot of helpful posts in community spaces and donates lots of money, then the project governance is certainly going to think twice before doing something that would upset that company.

I totally agree with what you wrote here. I think that any person who works for a company that is a threat to the Nix project’s self-sovereignty should not be allowed to be on the Steering Committee and should not be allowed to vote in Steering Committee elections. I just don’t see how Anduril is a threat to the project’s self-sovereignty.

It’s not a democracy LARP. It’s an actual democracy.

The Steering Committee doesn’t have some semblance of legitimacy. It has actual legitimacy.

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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 think that one can hold both opinions at the same time

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? Unless you explicitly prefer one over the other and want it to win that tug of war, that is? I think ideally no faction should inject their real-world politics into project governance — or more realistically speaking, as little as possible, because it’s not always easy/possible to dissociate from one’s political leanings.

having an influence on the project

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.

the project governance is certainly going to think twice before doing something that would upset that company.

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. The option is there, and the only deciding factors is a risk and benefit analysis of this move for the community. Sure, maybe you will lose some project support over that, but that is what governance is for — it should plan ahead on how to best ensure this project’s survival and self-sovereignty. They should work toward achieving diverse funding sources, a diverse pool of active contributors and representation of diverse community interest in the governance. And then — if some nefarious external actor thinks they want to rule the project — they will be ready to cut them out if push comes to shove.

To put it in american terms — it’s a difference between between being able to carry a gun and decide how and when to defend yourself and someone taking your gun and saying the will decide for you how and when you can defend yourself P:

I just don’t see how Anduril is a threat to the project’s self-sovereignty.

Well, if my arguments don’t convince you then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For what it’s worth, with the recent installer move by DetSys I also think they might merit consideration for that status. 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 (instead of at least trying to pretend they don’t) and *nduril CEO had shown support for that. And in the context of those tweets how am I supposed to assume he’d suddenly respect self-sovereignty of this community. I don’t think I can.

Hence why I want a clean slate and hope to motivate people towards voting for people who will staunchly guard this project’s self-sovereignty against takeovers like that with my rants. I can’t change the world, but maybe at least I can draw someone from a more milquetoast option to one that wants this community to stand up for itself with regard to external threats.

* — for the record, I don’t think they are nazis (yet, at least) but the pun was too funny to pass over.

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Yes. I can. And I have followed through with it before. Here is what I said during last year’s election in 2024:

I have been in the situation where difficult decisions had to be made, and also when a moral choice took precedence, regardless of the personal cost.

Ref: What is your stance on sponsorships in the Nix community? · Issue #17 · NixOS/SC-election-2024 · GitHub

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In the interest of transparency, Tomberek DMed with a question on how to register his personal integrity statement. At the time I was trying to see if I can get my SC candidate question posted and replied as much to him, that I will let him know if I can do that and otherwise he can post here. I managed to get the question posted and told him as much, but he ultimately posted his response here.

Now, I’ll readily admit my question didn’t seem to have ended up coming across as I wanted it to — the thread was mostly linked as a motivating example of people seemingly wanting to hijack this community for their own gains. It wasn’t mean as “quick, we need to ban those people” or anything reactionary like that, but that there are groups that say they wish to subvert the integrity and self-sovereignty of this community, because they don’t like who it consists of. And what I mainly hoped to see is what each of the candidates think the SC can do process-wise to guard against hostile actors that specifically want to subvert integrity and self-sovereignty of projects governance. Sorry, that I’ve failed to get that across, because I really think it’s an important matter to have clarity on in this vote.

Ultimately, I think that’s nice, that Tomberek had previously shown integrity in his line of work and plans to continue to do that, however I still think it’s better to re-start the governance from scratch and vote for people who are willing to try building a governance that is more resistant to takeover attempts that what we currently have.

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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. This is at best a haphazard effort to confirm representation that will instead result in greater risk of further chaos. Some of what some people want can be achieved. Processes can be improved. But this is not the way.

Forcing Churn in Representation is Anti-Democratic

All of us understand computer science. Asking every community member to be active in every single decision has poor computational complexity, growing in costs proportionate to both proposals and community members. It is also an inefficient use of expertise and knowledge on specific subjects, allowing disinformation to rule more easily. These ad-hoc campaigns rely on completely inefficient participation that is smartly tuned out by most of the community because the process is so inefficient, prone to misinformative political tactics, and hopelessly unfair.

Representation is the foundation of fair, efficient participation and the creation of legitimate authority that can be recognized broadly throughout the community and can concentrate authority with expertise. Calls to reconstitute representation over and over without mechanisms to improve the efficiency of its creation are a mechanism of wearing out participants until representation becomes sufficiently disproportionate to achieve disproportionate outcomes.

Organizing on Discourse to demand repeated reconstitution of representation is extra-democratic, bypassing existing representation. It leaves the community vulnerable to employment of inflammatory tactics and engineered overreactions that demand for rash actions outside the normal process. When those rash actions demand damaging representation instead of actions to be taken by representatives, the result is not a democratic function but instead a move towards populist mob rule or something else less democratic and less representative.

Narrow Pressure Campaigns Fail at the Polls

Anyone expecting the vote to swing significantly, especially if convinced by narrow-interest activism in ceaseless Discourse threads, is likely to be rudely awakened when the selection bias is removed. Purported members of the “go back to sleep” vote are, by virtue of being involved here, activists, demonstrating the depth of lack of self-awareness or perhaps just plain old political dishonesty or self-deception.

Token Gestures Accomplish Nothing

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.

Majority Rule vs Minority Rights

The correct way to balance majority rule versus minority rights is to constitute coalitions of minorities, recognizing a clear understanding of several niche interests, honing proposals through the inherent robustness afforded by collaboration among several other independent minority interests. This means minorities need to understand each other’s niche interests. Together, they can support passage of interests specific to each minority even when those interests are not yet popular overall. Attempting instead to concentrate authority with a minority denies other minority interests of an important ally while threatening to ram through other untested policies that might even go against the direct interests of a majority, meaning no minority coalition could ever get them to pass.

Only Those Who Want the Process to Work Will Succeed

We have normalized overreactions to pressure campaigns, partly because the original BDFL model was not representative. What instead must be normalized is allowing representatives to represent, at most demanding specific policies to be adopted by the representatives through organizations of users with proven representative backing.

Until people want a working process and want to let it work, they will never earn the trust from votes that can be found on Github but rarely vocal in these threads. Those users have a strong incentive to vote against factions that will ask them to vote over and over or else lose representation. They have a strong incentive to vote against those who appear to be fomenting endless instability.

Twisting the arm of the community by forcing everyone to watch ceaseless turmoil until your stated objectives are achieved, especially token gestures, is very likely to attract significant blowback to the point that people begin asking instead for disruptive influences to be removed if they won’t use the legitimate process.

Focus on Process, Not Outcomes

Specific proposals to improve the function of the representatives or the constitution of representation inherently serves many interests. Specific outcomes such as excluding Anduril have a more narrowly interested political base and are always less likely to pass than improvements to the upstream processes. Process improvements can include improvements to the dynamic constitution of natural political alliances that represent enough niche interests to constitute a multilateral majority.

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TIL that not wanting to actively collaborate with weapons manufacturers who supply fascists is immature.

I wonder if “Refusing to invite the Italians and Germans to my auto-factory to redesign our trucks for their purposes would have been undemocratic and ‘tokenism’ - if they didn’t get armored trucks from me, they’d make them elsewhere.” held up at Nuremberg?

People vote because they desire certain outcomes. Convincing them to not focus on outcomes and instead focus on anything else is an attempt to convince people to vote again their own interests.

You can call anyone who suggests railroading Anduril’s involvement in Nix immature or “virtue signalers” with far less hand waving about representative democracy.

Railroading accomplishes a lot. It means Anduril has to use more of their time and money on engineering infrastructure and security if Nix contributors aren’t steered towards patterns and policies that work well for them.

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@Growpotkin It’s perfectly legal to maintain a private fork of GPL-3 software. But I agree with your sentiment.

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@psionik congrats on being the cause of another nixpkgs committer adding his name to the list of signatories (once wolfgangwalther sees my DM & updates it).

SC candidates: you can have my vote by publicly pre-committing to a vote of no-confidence if the resulting SC is found to have an Anduril employee on it. that’s not rhetoric, i will give you my vote, just for that.

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This is one of the most important takeaways from all these threads in my opinion. As soon as enough people find something (getting rid of a moderator, or an employer etc.) important enough, you will hear about it. No matter how often we hear a form of “just focus on the code!”.

A considerable part of people that elected the SC have problems with it, evidenced by the (respected/productive) signatories. Dismissal, by trying to reason why the endeavour is invalid, doesn’t matter.

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Duh? But does that mean one should never try at all? That we should forever resign ourselves to whatever strange attractors form in the fabric of society and never raise a peep even if they are detrimental to the continued health of our civilisation? That we should resign ourselves to the fact that decisions just happen, instead of being made? That we are at mercy of powers that be?

I mean sure, why not. I hope you enjoy not having a 40-hour work week or any worker protections. After all, that we wave this creature comfort is a product of “extra-democratic pressure campaign” after “extra-democratic pressure campaign” until Powers that Be buckled and were forced to show an ounce of humanity. But that was activism and we can’t have that, right?

So let me get that right — the “go back to sleep” voters should never voice their discontent lest they stop being “go back to sleep” voters and become activists? In that case, in your anecdote about South Korean constitutional crisis those people with the “We just want to go back to sleep” signs were not “go back to sleep” voters either — they were activists, because they protested instead of being asleep. If that’s how you define the “go back to sleep” voters, then don’t really exist in any material way — you either have people who don’t give a fuck about the change, or activists.

For me, I feel like a “go back to sleep” voter, because this is precisely what I was doing the past few dramas* — only this one finally woke me up, because that twitter thread did strike me as an indication of a potential thread to self-sovereignty of the project. I don’t think I will be able to sleep well if *nduril or DHH or whomever infiltrate the project and steer it in a direction that’s more in line with “american dominance”, so I finally woke up. If we can set up guardrails that can be used to stop such threats from subverting self-governance of the project, then I’ll happily go back to sleep again, because there’s not much more that can rouse me up than Nix being an active participant in making the world worse by enabling things like “american dominance” at a governance level.

Again, duh? I don’t really care about that — I mean, it would be better for all of us if things like that disappeared off the face of the Earth, but this is not the job of this project. I don’t want to exclude *nduril or DHH or whomever from the project to effect any change or real-world policies (I would’ve been an idiot to think that’s possible), I want to the exclude them so they will not be able to hijack the governance and mold it into a shape more in line with their aims. I don’t think it would be best to exclude Tomberek and any other *nduril-aligned candidate from SC because I think he’s a bad person or I don’t believe his pledge of integrity — I just don’t want *nduril to have any avenue of leverage, no matter how remote, over governance of this project. So if anything, I want the reverse of what you say — exclude real-world policies and politics from this project to the greatest extent feasible.

I assume you will not believe me, but I want process — I’m in general a big fan of setting up processes that facilitate outcomes you want and discourage outcomes you do not want. *nduril being able to exert influence on the governance and thus subverting the right of this project to be self-sovereign is an outcome I want to avoid. I don’t want to do this with reactionary ad-hoc actions, but by setting up guardrails that will make such a takeover harder — or ideally impossible — and processes that ensure that maintaining the self-sovereignty of the project is the outcome.

So why I am railing specifically against including *nduril employees in SC at this time? Because, based on that twitter thread, I think there is a potential threat to ensuring such processes can be set up effectively and without any backdoors. Like I said it’s not that I specifically disbelieve Tomberek about his stated intentions — I just I don’t want to have to put trust in humans, if there is a way to ensure any avenues for *nduril leverage are absent by construction. When the processes are in place and they will not incorporate a blanket ban of people associated with hostile actors running for governance, then I would be fine with them running again.

Is this extra-democratic? Maybe. But one part of deomcracy that makes it sort-of work for nation states is the scale. What does it matter that one, two, three MPs are subverted, when you have hundreds of them. The effects of scale work to somewhat insulate the governance against external influences — and even then, there are processes to exclude unfit MPs from governance, should that become necessary. However the smaller the government is, the harder it becomes and the more need for fiat there is. And I think iff we don’t have hundreds of MPs to vote on such exclusion democratically and don’t have a process to handle that in place yet, then I think it is a necessary evil to handle such exclusion on a more ad-hoc basis, so that proper processes can be built with some assurance that they are free of external influence.

So yes, I agree, we need to build processes. We just need to build them right and not as a facade a way for external actors to subvert self-sovereignty while pretending everything is aboveboard.

* — in the interest of full disclosure I participated some in the SC zulip chat and if anything, was arguing mostly from the other side as I didn’t feel that “incessant sealioning” was enough of a reason to ban Jon Ringer (at least I didn’t notice anything else from him at the time). And it was pretty lukewarm arguing, because that didn’t really clear my “go back to sleep” threshold, because I didn’t really plan to sealion anything in the community.

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I am not eligible to vote in this election, but even if I were, these are the questions on top of my mind:

  • What is stopping us from electing candidates who explicitly run on SC/constitution reform?
  • What is stopping us from electing candidates who explicitly run on reinstating mod team?
  • What is stopping us from electing candidates who explicitly run on banning MIC in all community spaces as a matter of policy?

If it is the will of the community, why not use the election that is right around the corner, the election that votes for 5 out of 7 seats on SC, who, after being elected, can all just outvote any status quo with supermajority?

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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I’ve noticed that certain Steering Committee members have mentioned wanting a call to discuss their concerns.

I’d just like to say publicly that as someone that signed the call for full re-election, and a candidate for the coming steering committee, that I’d be more than willing to jump on a call, timezone difference permitting - ideally on a workday, to help give an actual human face to someone that thinks this is a good idea.

As someone that has received death threats for my engagement with open source in the past, perhaps I can hope to understand what they’re currently dealing with.

My DMs are open in the coming week to @tomberek and @Ericson2314.

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No comment, just not to give anybody ideas P:

But figuratively - and let me make a BIG HONKING DISCLAIMER in case somebody somewhere wants to take it out of context, I’m not calling anybody a literal “NixOS Hitler” - the same Hitler had done to Weimar Republic that transformed it from a country disgruntled about its postwar lot into one supporting industrial scale murder machine.

It took years, but it worked. And this was a real, big country, with parliament, constitution, checks and balances and whatnot. We have what, 7 people on the SC? And the Conflict of Interest clause is also rather weak as far as I can tell - it talks about having the same employer only, what about a coalition (of unrelated employers, or otherwise) colluding to get themselves a voting majority to enact policies they want, instead of those that will serve the community? Voting blocks are relatively benign at scale, but if you only need 3 more people to have any decision you want go your way, it becomes a serious issue.

Sure, this all rather far fetched, but the problem with things like that is that it’s very hard to stop them after the critical mass is reached. So I’d rather yell that we need to institute safeguards now, than be sorry when it turns out they had been needed after all and we don’t have them.

Be able to decide what policies are implemented for the project. External actors deciding for us, instead of the project being self-sovereign is enough to get me to care - there are not that many policies I can imagine would affect me negatively as a person. But there are many more policies I don’t think I would want to see in the project, even though they wouldn’t affect me personally.

For 1. - yeah, no. I don’t want people who phrase this as a retributive counterattack to force “those nut jobs” out to have disproportionate sway over the community. And especially not if they phrase it as a takeover of the community by like-minded CEOs. Sure, just writing that is not overreach yet. But if they actually do that, then it will be, and that’s what I’m talking about - I don’t necessarily want to ban specifically those people a priori, I want to set up guardrails that will stop them (or any attempt like that) should they decide to actually do that. And if you disagree that actually doing what they state they want to do is not overreach, then we’d just have to disagree. Some people having this opinion is not overreach. A person with that opinion on SC is not an overreach. Actually trying to get enough people on the SC so they can take over, force the “nut jobs” out and set things up how they like it as some form of retribution on the “woke” - which is what this and related threads are talking about - is definitely overreach.

For 2. - I mean, that’s how it’s often being described by people who were against that. And seems at least somewhat accurate to me - like I said, I wouldn’t have personally banned Jon Ringer just for repeatedly discussing things from an anti-diversity point of view (unless they’ve done worse things that I have not been privy too). Srid was much more clear cut with their inane rants, but personally I would’ve probably gone with the “no political content rule” and see if it made them behave (kind of doubt it, looking at their twitter and blog). I guess whether one thinks it was overreach on mods’ part depend on they think mods’ role should be, but at least for me discussing respectfully should be acceptable, even if some argues from a point of view you don’t agree with. And at that, I somewhat agree that mod actions seemed like an overreach, at least in Jon Ringer’s case.

I take your point that there might be more clear cut interpretations than that, but it’s what it ultimately boils down to for me - decisions that are motivated by external politics should not be what this project concerns itself with and as such, both seem like an overreach to me, the one to subvert the governance definitely a worse one though than an (apparently) ideologically motivated ban.

Except there is no option for the community to recall SC members in that case.l, as far as I know. In the event of hostile external actors getting enough sway over the SC to enact policies the community disagrees with, they have no process for recourse. They have to wait until next elections, and that’s assuming they will even happen or are not rigged in some way to maintain that sway. So no, foolproof safeguards against that have to set up first, before we can be more relaxed about people like that running for SC.

Splitting straws, but sure. If we want to be autistically correct on this count then yes, I should’ve said something like “the less direct influence on the SC such a company has, the more free the SC is to decide to upset them anyway.” And sure, a single person is not that big of a deal, but the more there are, the worse it gets. And with “Conflict of Interest” being somewhat narrowly defined doesn’t stop a voting block to form, pretend they don’t vote together until there is enough of them on the SC and then flip and starting voting as a block and then the governance is hosed - after all they don’t share an employer and there’s no supermajority to force them out anymore : V

Either you’re not being serious, or you have been living under a rock for a while. Multiple rocks even. And even if we discount that, the phrasing of “ever more powerful weapons of american dominance” in and of itself suggest you want to dominate others, and that implies not giving a fuck about their self-sovereignty.

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The SC had another meeting last night. They voted against re-election again.

I wrote up a summary of the current state in:

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I’ve noticed that certain Steering Committee members have mentioned wanting a call to discuss their concerns.

I’d just like to say publicly that as someone that signed the call for full re-election, and a candidate for the coming steering committee, that I’d be more than willing to jump on a call, timezone difference permitting - ideally on a workday, to help give an actual human face to someone that thinks this is a good idea.

As someone that has received death threats for my engagement with open source in the past, perhaps I can hope to understand what they’re currently dealing with.

My DMs are open in the coming week to @tomberek and @Ericson2314.

In light of The dire state of the SC I’ve decided that I’d rather not allocate any time to these discussions.

I have better things to do with my time. Please just step down.

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To reply to the most common feedback, I want to contrast utilizing democracy from demonstrating in order to undermine it. There are designated spaces within Washington DC where demonstrations are readily held. There is a capitol building where representatives vote. These two places are separate for a reason. We utilize democracy when demonstrations are held in one part of DC and then votes in the capitol follow. If instead the unelected demonstrations are held inside the capitol building and intend to replace the elected representation, that is January 6th style democracy where anyone who can form a mob can force reconstitution of the government.

When we demonstrate to representatives that we want them to use authority for specific purposes, that is representative democracy. However, that is not where this started. The unelected mods, in response to being governed, demanded the elected SC to all resign and force an emergency vote. A single SC member then cherry picked and played up an internal SC conversation while campaigning for a specific political opponent to resign.

This thread is just the next best fallback. While it finally asks the SC to use their legitimate authority as representatives on behalf of the community, the nexus was a continuation of utterly extra-democratic pressure campaign tactics and incitement that plagued the community since the original BDFL model was dissolved, itself the result of a pressure campaign that looks more and more dishonest as the hyper-focus on Anduril has emerged as the sole remaining issue.

In a representative system, those voices already come from the representatives. That is a feature because through a small amount of people voting and making statements, we have the virtual presence of the entire community fairly represented. We already see what the community thinks in the two hung votes of no confidence. While it’s not pretty, it also doesn’t pass the threshold and we have to accept the result or else we’re just ruling by terribly unrepresentative Discourse threads.

You will not achieve your interests when you are in a minority unless you have a coalition of allies you have earned by understanding many independent niche interests and together refining your proposals so that they attract less resistance or even gain sympathy. People who behave in uncompromising hardline ways make bad political allies and are probably bad team players in other ways. The fail-proof solution for the hardliner is to go it alone and none can be blamed for the hardliner always demands to impose their choice on others without attempting to understand or seek common alignment.

People upset with US policy and current holders of office could be some of my strongest political allies. We can accomplish a lot together. We can’t do it by chasing outcomes within NixOS. We can do it by chasing process improvements within NixOS and then propagating those process improvements throughout other governing bodies and other activist pressure on those bodies. After all, the better the tools of democracy are globally, the more it will emerge and enhance itself within autocratic nations and weak democracies, eliminating needs for arms by removing political insulation for those who drive their nations into wars. If you ask me, that is the best way for open source to be political.

After writing this, I was pretty disgusted in the latest manufactured outrage thread where someone pretending to want to help immediately turned around and wrote just another hit piece against the SC. I don’t think people who want the process to fail belong in control of the process. I don’t think people who are so ruthless and cruel deserve to win, and there’s obviously a lot of them circle around in these waters. You can’t commit yourself to tearing down the elected representatives and then blame them for, in your own extremely unflattering narratives, being torn down to some irrecoverable state. This is just straight up McCarthyism, intimidation, and organized harassment of the represented SC with the likely goal of blowing up any governing body that doesn’t give a certain politically motivated sect everything they want. This has to stop, and because it lacks representative foundations, it will be stopped.

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I’m genuinely curious about something and wonder if it might be worth reflecting on: Could some of the intensity in our current governance discussions be influenced by the broader political climate many of us are experiencing?
For those dealing with political frustration or feelings of powerlessness in larger systems, it’s natural to care deeply about governance in communities where we can have influence. This isn’t to dismiss anyone’s concerns—which may be entirely valid on their own merits—but to ask whether external stressors might be affecting how we engage with each other.
Has anyone else noticed this in themselves or considered this dynamic?

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Perhaps not quite in the way you mean, but almost certainly ‘yes’ in many ways, e.g.:

  • the traditional ‘Western’ alliance is breaking down; certainly here in Europe the US no longer feels like an ally, and possibly actually a significant threat - this is going to make us worry much more about e.g. US arms companies (the global south & far east probably feel it took us much too long to cotton on.)

  • it’s becoming increasingly hard to justify neutrality / centrism / ‘no politics’ as a position. The Overton window has been sliding to the right for a long time now, but the recent acceleration into full blown authoritarianism in the alleged global defender of democracy, plus attempts to drag Europe the same way, are much clearer. ‘No (real world) politics in open source projects’ might be a reasonable position when ‘politics’ was just about rates of tax and spending - it’s much harder to justify when the same real world politics starts picking on marginalized groups as scapegoats and threatening the independence of whole nations.

(The above probably somewhat off-topic, but feels like it touches on an important issue.)

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