Thanks, this is the closest anyone has yet come to making an actual case for how we got from ‘DetSys releases a thing, take it or leave it’ to ‘the open source nature of Nix is under attack’.
So if I understand correctly, the problem for us to solve is: how do we encourage investment in community-oriented solutions when companies are motivated to produce and market other solutions that might, simply by existing, relieve some of the pressure that would otherwise drive people to make community stuff?
One class of solution is to yell at the companies until they stop making the solutions they’re motivated to produce. I’m not holding my breath for this one, y’all. (In the spirit of @uep’s post, though, I’m not trying to tell anyone else not to pursue this—just expressing my reluctance to put my own efforts behind it, given how unlikely I think it is to change the leopard’s spots.)
Instead of using the stick on the companies, can we use the carrot on the community?
How about establishing a development fund for some of these hard problems?
How about (not the first to suggest this, I’m sure) spinning up mentorship programs to get more Nix contributors? I’d be happy to participate in that, both as a learner and as someone who could teach some of the very few things I’ve learned while hacking on it.