I’d like to try to summarize why this thread, and other products by Determinate Systems (like Flakehub) make people upset, while maintaining a good defense for Determinate Systems (DS).
It seems like the business model of DS is to take Nix, which has started as a PHD project, and is widely used by the community, and ship it to costumers along with business-class stability, along with also features not yet merged in github.com/nixos/nix, and with business-class support.
A good example of a GNU/Linux distribution that uses such a model is SUSE (and openSUSE), and I personally think it is a perfectly legitimate business model and I think many people would have liked to use a GNU/Linux distribution that is developed and maintained by paid programmers, and that the company of it is making profit which ensures the build servers etc will stay active in the far future.
However, with Nix and with DS, it is not clear exactly what is the business model and how is this aligned with the community model. For example: Who is paying the people with merge permissions to github.com/NixOS/nix? And in the companies that employs them, how is their role with regards to github.com/NixOS/nix is defined? And on the more developmental side: What are the procedures for a new feature and or a bug fix to get into github.com/NixOS/nix? Who decides what new features to stabilize and not? How is this decision making influenced by the business models of the employers of the github.com/NixOS/nix committers?
I think it is very unfaithful to be so avoidant of determining (no pun intended) which Nix features are in which stage of stabilization, and how does DS expects the development of their product to contribute back to github.com/NixOS/nix and hence the rest of the community.1
1: There could be more companies that are shipping Nix based products, and that their developers and founders intersect with committers to github.com/NixOS/nix, but I don’t know any.