I don’t really know what the original post said, because it is hidden, but for a few months now, maybe a year, I’ve seen a constant stream of random drama in the Nix community. I’ve mostly watched anything happening from the sidelines, because I never feel like dealing with any of it, but it is pretty annoying to me, because I honestly feel like it undermines Nix(OS).
For me, the practical impact is what’s most frustrating. A lot of energy spent on fighting just seems to paralyze the project’s governance. Progress slows down, and in some cases, it feels like things were getting worse, not just standing still. The fact that forks started popping up, and the community itself started to fracture was sad.
I can understand the impulse to try and improve the world, even if it’s just in the small space you have some influence over, like the Nix community. But I genuinely believe this isn’t the right venue for fighting some of these larger, systemic battles, like trying to control which corporations can or can’t use Nix, for example. These are problems far bigger than any one software project can solve. Nix should be a software project first and foremost. In my honest opinion, the focus should be on making it the best it can possibly be. That’s the tangible thing we can realistically achieve, but we can’t fix the world with it.
The ironic thing in all of this is that I’m a member of a left-wing political party, and I probably hold more radical views than many of the people in these discussions. But that’s exactly why I know this isn’t the place for it. For this project, I would choose pragmatism every time.