It would be nice to see the conflicts of interest addressed going forward. Is edolstra still on the Nixos Foundation board? How will the legal relationship between the Nixos Foundation and the upcoming steering committee be, if the former has a legal entity whereas the latter does not?
edit: this thread was split off from Announcing Determinate Nix
Is it really though? I have a feeling we’re reading a different blog post.
They announced a hosted caching solution with automatic authentication using an agent. Sounds like a solid competitor to cachix. (Which nobody has issues with existing)
They announced a signed installer of Nix for MacOS. I don’t mind this being proprietary. Notarizing Mac apps and especially integrating them with MDM costs a lot of money (requires a apple enterprise developer license to test and develop anything MDM related. As opposed to a normal one). Makes sense. I’d charge money for it too.
All the nix-specific features they announced (but didn’t ship yet) have active open PRs to nix upstream (better authentication primitives, parallel evaluation, nix schemas)
Edit:
I think your feedback about Semver and flakes is fair. There is no need for this to be a server side abstraction in flakehub and it is weird. Has also rubbed me the wrong way.
Eelco stepped down from the board in May NixOS Foundation board: Giving power to the community
That’d be news to me
Ah. Thanks.
I’m going to apply Occam’s razor and assume they haven’t removed him officially yet as they’re still busy finding new board members for the transition and that in the meantime Eelco refrains from foundation decisions. But yeh would be nice if they can either proactively update the registration to reflect reality or hear some statement from “inactive” board members that they’re indeed inactive (especially w.r.t Steering Committee stuff).
in the meantime Eelco refrains from foundation decisions
All since May 1st, latest 2 weeks ago:
@delroth I don’t usually participate in discussions on Discourse, but I just couldn’t pass by this time.
Holy shit, was the board statement just a lie, then? Is there a legal responsibility for doing this?
Also: I hope you are saving and archiving all of the links with info regarding the case. Having something like a spreadsheet or a database “of shame” would be extremely convenient for any discussion, no matter how casual, as long as it concerns Foundation/Eelco/DetSys. Even with my poor journalism I already have a page or two of material on that: I imagine if we all do it together, we’ll come up with a whole book.
@KFearsoff on the topic of Eelco’s leadership specifically community members compiled an open letter before - the public announcement he would step down came not long after that was published.
It’s a bit of a stretch to call rubber stamping of expense requests “decision making” and not “ensuring smooth transition” but okay. Don’t want to be accused of moving goal posts.
@kiara Oh, I know. I signed that one, too. And it’s a good read, but it’s still an open letter, so it does a lot of explaining and narrating at to why certain things are a problem. The “database of shame” I’m envisioning is a lot more concise: have a link to Eelco resignation, have links to him not actually resigning. Quick and to the point. I’ll imagine we’ll come up with a lot.
In any case, I noticed that Eelco isn’t taken down from the official website more than a few times already - but I saw the announcement and I assumed that he will be taken down. Apparently not, lol, especially if he participates in Foundation activities still. Him still participating in those activities is news to me, and I wish it was much more well-known than a comment on Discourse. Deserves a front page, if you ask me.
Being chair of the NixOS foundation board has never been a role with any substance when it comes to decision making about Nix/NixOS/etc and the features and direction thereof. It has always been a largely legal role with a handful of administrative responsibilities (such as approving expenses, as noted above). Right now, the Nix community is in the process of figuring out how it’s going to govern itself, including holding elections and forming a constitutional assembly. You can read more about that here: GitHub - NixOS/SC-election-2024: 2024 Election for the Steering Committee. And here: GitHub - NixOS/nix-constitutional-assembly: Home of the Nix Constitutional Assembly, there to establish a community-based governance. Eelco is not involved in that process in any way and neither is anyone at DetSys. But yes, while that’s going on, the foundation does need someone to act as chair and he is continuing to do so, especially as several other board members have stepped down or left the Nix project entirely. And that role continues to be purely administrative.
If we may take semantic versioning as an example of a feature offered by DetSys’s SaaS platform, have we seen efforts to upstream such functionality, or had edolstra prematurely merged flakes using a design where this piece was missing (without using their SaaS), with DetSys meanwhile publicly declaring that design stable?
The public announcement, signed by every then-member of the Foundation and by many prominent community members, says, in h2, quote:
Eelco steps down from the board
Evidently, this isn’t what happened. I don’t care if it’s okay, actually - explain to me why the board statement contradicts the reality, and who takes the responsibility for it.
Was this assembly not selected by the board? If so, was the chair of the board not involved in that?
It is currently being decided by the Nix community what will happen to the board. There isn’t yet a decision-making framework in place to determinate that. This is the “orderly transition of responsibilities” referred to further down. These things don’t happen overnight in a large OSS community, especially one that is also in the midst of deciding how it wants to govern itself.
Yes, the chair was indeed involved in the decision to hand over control to other bodies—by definition. But Eelco has had no involvement in the upcoming elections or in the constitutional assembly. And neither has anyone else at DetSys.
Okay. So why did the NixOS Foundation make a statement? If you don’t trust NixOS Foundation to make decisions about who they’ll exclude from the team - what was the point of making a statement, and why did Eelco sign it? What authority does NixOS Foundation have to select Constitutional Assembly members to develop governance, if it can’t even kick someone out from its own team?
The statement was about a general transfer of power and a general vision for the future. You seem determined to see malice and malevolence at work here so I will no longer stand in your way 
My bad, I thought that an h2 header of “Eelco steps down from the board” means that Eelco will in fact step down from the board. Maybe I missed the part where it says that it isn’t meant to be taken literally, and is instead just a statement on general vision for the future.
And yes, I do in fact see malice in Eelco’s actions, when he has had years to clarify his good intentions, and chose to break trust, have undisclosed conflicts of interest, stick his head in the sand, and try to use the rifts in the community for his company’s PR. NixOS Community has a lot of commercial actors, and none of them have done half of what Eelco has done to look as hostile as possible.
Btw, you don’t actually have to defend your coworker for their misdeeds. Eelco’s many misbehaviors don’t make you a bad person by association, so feel free to speak out. I’ll only judge you for your own faults - such as sabotaging documentation efforts, which you haven’t addressed at all as far as I can see, and another coworker tried to do it in your stead.
