Yeah. I think the Ukraine war is making a shit-ton of money for some big corps. I even wonder if the US like it this way.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if almost every single time the US “helped” another country, it was only for their own interest (dominance/$). I might be wrong, but I think the US has a history of replacing elected officials with dictators because it suits them.
In that case it is worth considering some subsidiaries in less heavily regulated territories. There is a lot of good money being left on the table by sticking with a subset of, specifically western, law.
That’s what Ukrainian people thought when they got rid of most soviet era weapons. Guess what happened next. The military exist for preventing wars, I’ve learned this the hard way on Feb 24 in Kharkiv
This one-sided, strawman, argument furthers nothing.
@adamcstephens I agree it was somewhat of a strawman but the person has already agreed that they consider:
I’m just trying to get them to double down and reveal how morally bankrupt their actual opinion is.
That’s a bit harsh to say about someone who is just blaming Russia and the military-industrial complex. I don’t think I’m the enemy you think you have.
Morals are subjective and can be quite nuanced. For example, my learned morals have informed me that we can only achieve peace through peace and not war.
“It is not enough to say ‘We must not wage war.’ It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but the positive affirmation of peace.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Anti-War Conference, Los Angeles, California, February 25, 1967.
So you’re blaming the military-industrial complex for starting the war in Ukraine? (You didn’t describe who you’re blaming for what.)
Anyway at this point I think I’ve made my standpoint clear. I think it’s quite clear to me now why NixOS community is so out of touch with reality that they made this decision.
Edit: Iraq is completely and utterly irrelevant to anything I’ve said or the conversation.
I think what’s clear is your inability to have a nuanced discussion on politics. Your knee-jerk responses, attempting to “out” members for your disapproval of their morals, and strawman arguments are still not moving the argument forward. I suspect there are quite a few Iraqis who would tell you where to put your moral righteousness, so please save it for a different forum.
Not everything is black and white, right or wrong, but you treat it like it is. That holds true for the decision we’re talking about, as much as anything, but your tact and treatment of others is not furthering your side.
A trip to Wikipedia should prove illuminating:
Autonomous weapons have been considered controversial in Silicon Valley, but Anduril aggressively courts business from the government and military. […] Anduril provides autonomous sentry towers used by US Customs and Border Patrol to surveil the southern US border, and the use of its products by the CBP has been criticized by immigration activists.
(And that’s just one specific point.)
Yes, let’s. And in the same vein, let’s stop pretending that defending this sort of thing is a “neutral” position whereas speaking out against it is a “radical” or “provoking” one, as has been the theme in a disturbing amount of commentary above.
Incidentally, past attempts were made at doing such definition, in the various Code of Conduct processes. These processes were constantly frustrated by a number of community members that I shall not name here, to the point of burning out those working on them. Not coincidentally, said community members doing the frustrating subscribed to exactly this sort of “keep politics out of tech” and “doing nothing is neutral” belief.
Silicon Valley is not a representative of the larger Nix/NixOS community. You can’t have a small minority of Americans dictate what’s good for the world at large.
I am personally of the opinion that we should not be sponsoring any weapons manufacturers; that “defense” is just a rebranding of “war” (in the context of the United States); and that although I support Ukrainian independence, the war will end one way or another, and I can’t say for certain I’ll support whoever Anduril decides to sell weapons to next.
The “apolitical” thing to do would be to not take the sponsorship in the first place. That ship has sailed and either we keep the sponsorship as a show of endorsing Anduril or we reject it as a show of condemning them.
I’m generally in favor of establishing a code of conduct and ethical stance for the Nixos community. But It’s a particularly nasty can of worms. I don’t think we should come to any hasty conclusions. I’d be open to participating, assuming it doesn’t imeadiately get sabotaged by bad faith.
It may not be possible to reliably identify all code contributors who are military affiliated. Fake identities, Sybil attacks, etc. sometimes get through.
The only realistic option is for Nix maintainers to adopt a constant adversarial mentality toward all pull requests, specifically toward to the code itself rather than the contributor. Assume any given code contribution is malicious and evaluate carefully how it might compromise the system, regardless who submitted it.
I’m sure the maintainers already do this, as it’s SOP for any widely-deployed FOSS project, from the Linux Kernel to Bitcoin and everything in between. They are all targets for nefarious code injection. Defending against that should not depend on knowing anything about the contributor, but on analysis of the code itself, which is the only thing the maintainers can really know anything about with certainty.
Are you sure you are including morality considerations here?
Added slow mode to give you more time to think.
For complicated topics like morals and ethics, it’s normal that we don’t have all the same opinions. In fact, it’s a sign of a healthy and diverse community that we don’t.
Also please consider that most of us want to enjoy the conference without all of the drama. I think we should have a conversation, but it can wait a few days until the event is over.
Thanks for your understanding,
Jonas
Alright, this is not productive.
I promise that we will address this once the conference is over. It will give the NixCon team more time to write a proper statement of the events that transpired. We tried doing one. It turns out it’s tricky to do that under pressure 
Thanks for your understanding.