I’m a Nixos user and as such pretty happy. I just recently got aware of all the drama that has been going on and that deeply disturbs me.
As an outsider, I cannot easily judge who is right or wrong, but that’s how things are in life all the time, so I have to make up my mind based on the information that is available to me, and I tend to do that carefully.
Like most everybody, I have moral, political and social convictions that grew over the years and I am comfortable with mine. That confidence is fed by the observation that I have friends with vastly diverging ideas and convictions and I would defend them as decent people, even though I strongly believe their convictions are garbage.
When I read through threads and look at which people get banned, who is leaving and who stays, this does not make a good impression.
I am a lefty, I believe in core values like justice, fairness, freedom, security. That makes me a strange mix of conservative and progressive. I would prefer not to mix politics with my hobbies or my job (the tech world), but politics has a tendency to interfere with my personal reality.
I am German and in my generation, we were shown Holocaust videos in school. Most Germans of my generation do not like, tolerate or sympathize with Nazis. Contemporary generations apparently are more receptive to them, 20+ percent of voters have no issue to the closest you can get to that ideology in the political sphere. 45+% of Americans see that similarly. But are these actually Nazis? They could very well be. But I would not make such categorizations lightly. Calling somebody a Nazi has to have more substance than just them being on the other side of the political spectrum.
The SC vs. Moderation-Team drama was irritating to me. Their democratic argument has a lot of weight that does not seem to be acknowledged. I often saw requests for accountability of the moderation team being denied by those who disagree with them (that’s in the nature of the setting). To me, an institutional conflict (checks and balances) seems to be a just as natural consequence.
OSS projects are strange beasts. They have users, contributors and some kind of governance body. Nix is not the benevolent dictator model, it’s not a corporate appendix and maybe not quite yet democratic. To me it looks like the person who could (but didn’t want) to have the dictator job is gone. Democracy is still in its infancy. The moderator team looks quite oligarchical and to be operating under their self defined model. There seems to be no applicable law (CoC).
I am a lefty even in my European cultural context. For American standards, that makes me a radical, I guess. But I find myself increasingly adopting right-wing talking points. That’s not because my morals decay or because I start developing racial, sexual or gender phobia in my old age. My values are pretty solid the same they have been ever since I first thought about what values are and what mine should be. I don’t like to sound like my political opponents. I don’t care about races, genders or sexual habits of other people. I don’t condemn them, I don’t defend them, it’s just none of my business. I defend people whom I see threatened or abused. I believe this is my duty as decent human being, my self defined moral standard.
In a software project, all these things should be secondary issues. They come up at times and they are pushed by interest groups because software projects are interesting playing fields. But they should not become the focus points. If they do, it’s not a coincidence. Most likely it’s a conspiracy, in theory at least. It’s unhealthy.
As a user, I could safely ignore this nonsense. But the more I use Nix, the more I feel the desire and obligation to return some of the favors. Becoming a contributor is the natural next evolution.
Right now, I want nothing to do with the Nix project, because it really feels like the wrong side is winning. And this is not a left/right polarization, it’s more like a mafia thing, at least as I perceive it. Am I wrong?
I saw the account of Joe Ringer on YT. That’s of course only one side of a conflict. It’s a typical account however. I saw many of them presented by the loosing side of a conflict in which at least one side did not allow for a compromise. I cannot tell for certain if what convinces me to see merit in the account is actually the truth. This is the uncertainty we outsiders have to live with.
But this looks very decisively like an accurate account. The reason for that is that the other side controls the communication. The court of public opinion has no judges, juries or procedures. But in this case, it does not even have a neutral ground. It’s hard to believe in value driven fairness, if one side can win by definition, banning the other. That’s how the rule of law works in Russia.
It’s 2025 now. There is a war in Europe again. More than a Million died there, that’s more corpses than Americans dying in WW2. I did not expect this to happen, when Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to end the cold war (in a manner of speaking). I did not expect all the OSS companies to go evil with such consistency. I did not expect a company with the slogan “don’t be evil” to become what it is today. All of the things I believed were real progress since the time I learned about in school seem to dissolve.
Should a project like Nix not be better than this large scale nonsense? Are we engineers not naturally grounded in a mostly rational result oriented mind set? How can it be acceptable that one project member tells another they have no right to speak? Not because of anything concrete they said, just because, well no reason given.
I hear arguments like “a certain minority cannot feel safe if […]”. But as a consequence, another minority (each affected individual) no longer needs to feel safe in order to shift the favor. Is this not obvious madness? Values, rights and obligations are often in conflict to each other. That’s not a defect, it’s just reality. These conflicts need to be resolved in a way that is acceptable to everybody who is willing to comply with a social contract (or any kind to be defined). Those who cannot comply with that, belong to a different society. The question who gets to define the contract and who enforces it is essential for any project. It’s not as much fun as hacking. It should not be necessary to create a legislation, we all learn the rules in kinder garden. Or that’s how it was when I went there as a toddler.
I expect this post to be moderated. It’s probably just steering up more bad blood. I almost certainly will annoy certain people. But rereading what I wrote, I believe nothing I said should be controversial. Even if my evaluation of who is right and wrong would be completely wrong and I bet on the wrong horse, I admitted from the very beginning that I cannot really know. This should be a valuable contribution, because if what I say has merit, Nixos should change. The situation is not sustainable, it’s not healthy, it’s not civilized. Maybe it’s changing already and I just don’t see it, but it really doesn’t look good.
