https://save-nix-together.org/
I don’t believe any productive discussion will happen here and this topic may benefit from being locked right away, but felt that the intent of the letter was to make itself visible to the community and foundation. As such, I am linking it here.
As a side note, I have no involvement with the creation of this open letter. I am only linking it here for others to see.
cc @moderation-team in case you want to lock this and/or move the thread to the links section. I chose Meta since it was about the org, but will be fine wherever it ends up.
I don’t think the project nor community should interact or acknowledge ultimatums.
It is interesting that the moderation team is mentioned several times, but none of the current moderators seem to have signed this. Per the mod’s own CoC, they should “[focus] on what is best for the community” and I don’t think this open letter is it.
This isn’t healthy. What happened to working towards understanding and community resolution that was talked about with the last community outcry?
As I understand it, that’s the whole point of the letter: in the opinion of the authors and signatories, Eelco has prevented “understanding and community resolution” from fully taking place, so “what is best for the community” is for him to step down, and calling for even more discussion is concern trolling.
I agree that ultimatums are a bad precedent to set. It will probably be better in the long run if the authors and signatories simply executed on it and striked/forked. If they really have the support they claim, then the powers-that-be will recognize that they can’t go on without them and come to the negotiation table. Conversely, if the fork grinds to a halt, then they can shake the dust from their sandals and contribute somewhere their ideals are more welcome.
It’s excruciating to see, but we’re probably past the point where the problem can be solved with only discussion.
Honestly, maybe it’s worth disregarding the idea that there’s not a strong, compelling reason to merge it. Even reading the thread, Eelco doesn’t seem like they are necessarily against merging either, moreso that they haven’t gotten around to it:
I’m open to this PR but I’ll have to play/learn a bit more about Meson, since I’ve never used it.
…
… have you played around with Meson at all since? …
Sorry, no, I haven’t.
Beyond whether there is a truly compelling reason to merge it, or whether or not Eelco should single-handedly be able to block it, perhaps the worst part is that the change has kind of sat in limbo for the intervening years. That seems to be a worse outcome than either accepting or rejecting it.
That, I think, should honestly be addressed (and hopefully will be.) Taking up the role of BFDL or not is not necessarily a huge issue, but it kinda feels like maintainers can’t do their jobs if changes like this sit in limbo for ~years.
It seems you may have missed the bit where I mentioned I was not involved with the letter and was only linking to it for visibility in the community.
As for why I mentioned mods locking the thread, my only intent with this post is to surface the letter for others that weren’t aware it exists. All of the other threads about sponsorship, moderation, etc all devolved into useless flame wars. I would prefer if we didn’t do that again and instead people could see that this letter exists and reach their own conclusions without arguing with each other more. To that end, I think locking the thread preemptively is probably a good idea. Though that’s up to the mods.
I would encourage you to actually read the letter before commenting on it. The paraphrased “I haven’t read it but this is cringe” isn’t helpful.
The only technical issue is the slow migration to Meson? Really? It is so deeply internal and low priority.
It seems that the people who wrote this do not have enough experience with Nix/NixOS so do not know its pain points and the reasons why numerous (public and private) forks appear.
I haven’t read any suggestions that mil tech companies be banned from the Nix community or from contributing to the project. The discussion was solely about sponsorship, and using NixCon to advertise such companies. No one is suggesting that Nix shouldn’t benefit from their contributions or that our work shouldn’t be useful for them.
Jake turned out to be right in believing that no productive discussion would be happening here.
We agree that it is better to simply let the link stand as-is for visibility.