NixCon NA 2024 is getting sponsored by Anduril, what to do about it

[cleeyv]

The matrix discussion also includes a link to the NixOS foundation minutes that were posted a few weeks ago that included a discussion point on the Anduril sponsorship at NixCon NA:

• Anduril-
  • People don’t make the distinction between NixOS Foundation and NixCon.
  • The foundation doesn’t discriminate so comply with the local organizers
  • there was a proposal from Tom with an Apache-like policy which is pretty basic for the entity to be legal
  • do we have community values that we can flesh out as guidelines?
    • must not be hostile to the community and goals and must align with our code of conduct
  • make it transparent how we made the decision and communicate
  • The decision is approved after evaluating the code of conduct, notes, and bylaws of the organizing entity (SCALE)

This clarifies that the “interim” policy of the NixOS foundation that Tom mentioned on Matrix is based on the Apache Software Foundation sponsorship policy. He had shared this policy idea on the discourse thread of the NixOS foundation’s report on the sponsorship controversy following NixCon 2023:

NixCon 2023 Sponsorship Situation from the NixOS Foundation

To bring this back to a policy, we don’t have to figure this out from scratch. Lets look at an example: Here is how the Apache Software Foundation does it: Roughly, the sponsor is legal by the law and is committed to open source software. Please read the whole thing. I think this is a reasonable starting point for a sponsorship policy.

At the time, I replied to this proposal and pointed out that a potential problem with the Apache Software Foundation policy is that it explicitly avoids evaluation of ethical concerns with potential sponsors. I referred instead to the sponsorship policy of the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, which has a sponsorship policy that includes a clear process for Sponsorship Approvals: ACM FAccT - 2022 Sponsorship Policy

To quote what I wrote at that time:

In short, to ensure conference sponsorships advance the FAccT principles , everyone on the steering committee for the conference has a say over whether a sponsor is accepted and the policy outlines a clear process for the necessary notifications and decision-making.

I think that the NixOS foundation and conferences should follow the lead of the ACM FAccT and develop a sponsorship policy that does not exclude ethical consideration from the decision-making process for accepting sponsorships.