Yeah, sealioning is something with which I’m sadly familiar and, during my tenure as a moderator here, asked people not to do elsewhere.
Of course that isn’t proof that I’m not engaging in it here, but I can at least try to flesh out my question in a way that would have satisfied myself if I were still a mod.
Up-thread, I asked Samuel a similar question about the Nix project’s hand being forced. Turns out there was a difference in how we interpreted the idiom ‘force someone’s hand’—Samuel was using it to mean ‘apply pressure’, whereas I thought he meant ‘leave with no other choice’. Before that was cleared up, I wasn’t able to understand how he was making such a leap, because I thought he was saying something stronger than what he actually meant.
I wonder if something similar is happening with us, because I have a similar difficulty understanding how ‘Nix becomes closed source’ is an outcome that follows from DetSys’s actions here. There are things that I could imagine that would threaten Nix’s OSS status:
- Someone or ones with an interest in closing Nix off could have or get control of the Nix team (if I had to guess, this is the one I think you have in mind—maybe you think the DetSys person already on the Nix team has enough power to do this?)
- Some sort of IP threat could force the Nix team to go closed? (I don’t actually know how that would work but I could imagine it as a possibility)
- Some external event could make it necessary for Nix to choose between being closed source or just ceasing to exist, and the Nix team would reluctantly choose the former
If we aren’t in a disagreement over the meaning of language, I just want to know which of these proximate causes you have in mind (or something else if I have missed it). I’m not trying to consume your time with endless questions—these are just all very different scenarios to me, and I think they’re all pretty unlikely. I hope to learn from you what you think is likely, because I respect your perspective, and even if you don’t want to invest more time in explaining why you think that cause is likely, I would like to be able to include it in my executive summary of this thread at a level of detail more than ‘cafkafk thinks that Nix will become closed source for reasons that she says a smart person should be able to figure out.’
(I’m not at all averse to going back and reading a thread, if there’s one you can link that describes what you have in mind and you’d rather do that than engage me more directly.)
And of course, if we are in a disagreement over the meaning of language, I would similarly appreciate having that pointed out. I’m not going to fight you on what words ‘really’ mean, I promise.