There’s an interesting parallel in the Drupal CMS community.
Dries Buytaert (I salute you dear compatriot!), Drupal’s original author, founded a US company (Acquia) that sells services around Drupal. However, every single improvement developed by Acquia is integrated directly the official Drupal project, rather than maintaining a separate internal fork (and bragging about it). Acquia employees contribute exclusively upstream, eliminating the burden of maintaining their own version.
As far as I’m aware, this model has effectively prevented friction from arising in the Drupal community, and this situation is profitable for both parties. It might be worth exploring whether a similar approach could resolve our conflict here in a durable way.
[…] As a constructive alternative to the current tension, I’d suggest clearly committing either to a full fork or, preferably, to ensuring all improvements and developments are consistently contributed directly upstream into the official NixOS/nix codebase.