I strongly agree with rhendric. If I’m reading the blog post correctly, what Determinate Systems is doing here is effectively acquiring financial means to develop Nix further by fleecing corporations^W^W Providing Reliable Enterprise-Grade Features to their customers (which is my favorite way of monetizing FOSS development). The ideal series of events would be:
- Determinate Systems gets a whole bunch of money from their customers
- Pours that money into finishing all those stalled PRs
- Packages those features up in a nice bundle so their customers can test-drive them and provide feedback
- The resulting code can be merged into Nix, if it’s good
- We finally have lazy trees and all that stuff
Am I missing an obvious catch here? When FlakeHub happened, the problem was that instead of bringing semver to Nix, Determinate Systems made a proprietary, server-side semver resolver. When they made determinate-nixd, the problem was that instead of building those improvements into Nix, they instead wrote a separate proprietary daemon that interacts with Nix. I don’t see how something like that could happen here. Are they going to redesign flake schemas so that they’re somehow only usable on MDM-enrolled macOS devices?
The announcement is written in corpospeak, which is quite offputting to me and evidently a terrible way to address this community. It takes a bit of mental effort to untangle said corpospeak to come to the conclusions I’ve made above. Either way, I’m not here to use Determinate Nix, I’m here to use Nix, and I am happy about anyone working to contribute to Nix.