The steering committee and moderation thing has been a big topic with very heated discussions. As mostly an outsider, why fight each other instead of
a.) try to find common ground
b.) if a isn’t possible, leave
There seems to be a lot of energy being put into trying to pull in opposite directions, but it seems like there are major camps that agree with each other on certain things like how the project should be run, what is acceptable and what isn’t, etc. Why not form groups that do things the way you want to and only communicate when necessary via bridges or PRs or something?
For example:
group A could have their nix community on some other domain and create a project that builds on top of nixpkgs
group B could contribute to nixpkgs but have their discussions and so on all on different media and be otherwise disconnected from whatever politics are going on in the nixos community
group C could fork the project altogether and have nixpkgs as a source for packages but nothing more
group D could hard fork (wasn’t there a hard fork some time ago named after an animal or something? )
There’s a nix fork that has a lot of pink on its website and I can’t remember the name and also another fork that’s rewriting the whole thing in rust and using mailing lists for development. They seemed to be having a grand ol’ time last time I checked. Wouldn’t it be more fun to join them or do something similar than fight each other here?
I don’t think that an honestly fringe and legacy group of people should get to run the project however they see fit.
If your response to any sort of friction is to just give up, you simply don’t last as a community. That’s not how you build any sort of project. That’s not how you govern anything.
And honestly. The fighting is completely unnecessary. But we should be very clear here about who are the ones digging in their heels. It’s the people that have been elected to the steering committee, done a pretty bad job at it, not been honest about their affiliations or opinions, and are for some reason insistent on holding onto this power regardless of the impact on the project or the wishes of the electorate or contributors.
In a new thread that appears to trying to lower the temperature, why do try to raise it with the first response? This does not help us reach a better healthier state. Please consider things you can say that lower the temperature and bring us all closer to success.
It’s problematic because you’re splitting apart an already overleveraged group of people committing their free time. Less shared spaces means more duplicated work.
It’s also problematic because in splitting apart you make it much, much harder to share knowledge and experience. Cross-ecosystem efforts to improve UX/devex become all but impossible because we have lots of different implementations that all subtly disagree.
How would newcomers learn without this discourse? How would the existence of the ecosystem be disseminated without the central nixos.org? How do you organize events, collect sponsors, share the proceeds from such events as is deemed important by the community? Manage and pay for build infrastructure, the binary caches? Are we supposed to just splinter and hope that all the little projects pull as much attention while cannibalizing each others’ users’ attention spans? It’s impossible to solve these problems without some centralized governance, and the moment you need that you arrive at the current issue. Anarchy sounds nice in principle but breaks down the moment you need to manage shared resources.
Even if we gave up all shared resources and took the hit in usability, splitting apart will be to the detriment of the project. Imagine if the Arch wiki wasn’t the Arch wiki but like 10 different wikis with no coherent search functionality, editing continuity or SEO. The Linux ecosystem simply wouldn’t exist the way it does today. We already have issues with this with the two nixos wikis.
Eventually one fork will dominate anyway, and then you’ve lost a huge chunk of talented people. Depending on what’s left the result will shrivel up or maybe thrive without those who disappeared. More realistically we come right back to where we are now.
Alas, trying to find common ground and fighting are the same thing when ideals clash sufficiently.
No it does not, it frames those that have disagreements with how things are being run recently as the problem, and tells them to get lost if they can’t get with the recent might makes right program.
You seem to conflate tone and substance. Anyone can say something polite, and it can still be inflammatory.
There is a reason Erickson (who doesn’t seem to have found a good opportunity to publicly declare his pro Anduril beliefs, but still has these) is a fan of this post. There is a reason that you, and Anduril employee is defending it. We can all read between the lines here, this fake neutrality isn’t being diplomatic.
I also do find this kind of amusing. Do you not see that group B, or whichever group retains existing community resources in your scenario, “wins”? It’s just telling everyone else they’re illigitimate and not allowed to contribute to the project. This gives all the incentive for fighting, you probably couldn’t come up with a worse mediation strategy.
I’m trying to see this as someone not particularly savvy to people behavior asking a question. Maybe you’re quite young and just don’t see the world for what it is.
But it’s very difficult not to just write this off as trolling. The thread should probably be locked already, nothing productive will happen here.
Well, the old wiki guy chose a weird hill to die on. It’s just that it was the OG wiki, before the official one, that it creates an illusion of “10 different wikis”
I’m aware, that’s why I’m using it as an example. This thread is effectively saying “why don’t we all just be like the old wiki guy, that sure went well”.
Personal attacks are unnecessary and most certainly against the Code of Conduct. Reading into what post someone likes and then belittling them is hostile. Please stop.
People fight for many things. Their country, their family, for survival. For projects they put a lot of blood, sweat and tears in. People fight for things they care about.
Fighting is not inherently a problem or a bad thing. But maybe getting nowhere is. What you’re suggesting is to give up. Giving up is what one do after they’re tired of fighting and getting nowhere.
Don’t blame people for being fighters, even if disagreeing about the tone they employ. Listen to what they say, not how they say it.
I can’t disagree factually with any of this. But it’s important to recognize that telling someone that you aren’t going to listen to them until they calm down is also dishonorable and erosive.
It doesn’t help anything to just complain about how things are being said, and not be willing to engage with the underlying problem. People are hurt and disappointed. You don’t fix hurt and disappointed by slapping people on their wrists for talking in a way you disagree with.
I think that pointing out the oppinions of SC members are not a personal attack, they’re the most powerful governing body of official NixOS projects according to their constitution, it’s holding them accountable.
That said, fair, saying they’re not brave enough is a personal attack, I will edit that.
Still, if you compare it to e.g. how Robert will say steering committee members have “betrayed” him, or how Ericson speaks of certain whistleblowers, I think it’s not a bigger deal after I’ve corrected that.
This is a common excuse for toxic behavior. “Having a point” does not justify toxicity. Being angry does not justify toxicity. You do not always have all the facts. You should not assume you have the best or most correct answer. Just because you think you have the right solution does not mean you can hurl abusive words at others. There is no excuse for harassment, deceit, or abuse.
