I have no interest in open-source per se. It’s just diet free software.
okay, but it seems like a lot of people are making the assumption that everybody in the community subscribes to an FSF style view of what nix should be. I would point to the fact that we derivations for unfree software in nixpkgs as evidence that this is probably not the case, or at least that many do not have militant views about this.
The person who originally wrote this seemed to be implying that simply by making something open source (read: not necessarily free) the issue of whether or not the nix community should be political is already settled.
I think that if you perceive this as the main issue that people have with the save-nix-together contingent, you’re arguing against a strawman.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I absolutely want protected demographic minorities to be welcome and feel safe in the nix community.
However, it is my perception (and I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong about this), that the nix community has actually done a pretty great job at doing this (I would point to what seems like a higher than what we see in the general population proportion of non-cisgender members of the community as evidence of this), and it seems (to me) like we may actually be doing a less great job of making members of non-protected, non-demographic minorities (e.g. political minorities) feel welcome.
For those of you on the other side of things, I have a genuine question:
Assume for a moment that it is, in fact, true, that a significant number of people of lets say political minorities (within the nix community), have, fairly or unfairly been made to feel unwelcome by:
- the use of reporting as a downvote button
- what they (fairly or unfairly) feel like is inconsistent moderation
- Accusations of sealioning/concern trolling levied against them, which do not meet the intention requirements in some cases
If those people feel unwelcome and/or anxious about being banned and genuinely just want to continue to be part of the community and have never said anything personally disrespectful to anyone: Is that something that we ought to care about?
For those of you saying that everything is political and therefore we should not care about neutrality:
Is there really no principal of neutrality that we ought to care about?
For example: I’m sure that even within the save-nix-together faction, there are probably varying beliefs e.g. soc dems vs out and out socialists.
Would you not see it as going too far if the nix foundation were to take a stance on which one of those it thinks is better?
What if the foundation took a stance on police abolishment that was opposed to whatever your position is?
Its hard for me to imagine that many people would bit the bullet here and say that you want the foundation weighing in on stuff like that.
What that means to me is that the community’s official engagement with politics is almost certainly not a discrete, binary thing, but rather, a question of degree.
For me personally, the line that I end up drawing is that I’m okay with the community perhaps taking stances on issues that relate very directly to its primary enterprise (the distribution and development of software), but when it starts to get far afield from that, it doesn’t make sense to me that the community and those in charge of it should take official stances.
EDIT: For the record, I DO NOT believe that something like respecting the humanity of trans people (and more generally all people) is something I would regard as political, and I really am totally onboard with including language in CoC’s etc. to that effect. With that said, I do think that there are things that are sort of adjacent to stuff like this that CAN start to feel a little bit more political.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding here, but it seems like a lot of people are making the argument that “everything is political” and therefore there should be no limits on the extent to which the community/foundation/governance/moderators engage in politics.