It’s a bit misleading to mention this without at the same time mentioning that the duo of Eelco and Graham were pretty much “the Nix community’s de facto steering committee”, at least until 2022. At least that’s my view from someone who was lightly involved in the community at that time (and who had to suffer the consequences of their disappearance in 2023/2024). And whether they want it or not, I believe that gives them a big responsibility in the leadership vacuum that’s only getting slowly resolved now. You can argue it wasn’t their problem to resolve, they don’t owe the community anything, and that’s fair - that still doesn’t mean they didn’t cause the problem. Coming back and justifying their actions as DetSys later by saying “the community can’t agree on anything” feel either oblivious to me at best, hypocritical at worst.
Well, for example by holding corporate actors responsible when they openly the community “oh don’t worry Flakehub might/will become open source” then going back on that months-to-years later after the community has started using their product. Argue all you want about whether “they just left the option open” or whatever, the net effect is that this might have reduced interest in developing an open source alternative as it would just be “a second open source system doing the same thing” when Flakehub eventually became open source. DetSys could have been clearer about their plans and weren’t. They didn’t make an announcement when they decided that FH would be closed-source only, people had to explicitly ask them about it and it was in fact quite tricky to get a proper answer about it for a while.