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?
(post deleted by author)
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.
I explained myself in other venues (namely the documentation room in Matrix) and made amends with all parties. Everyone directly involved has moved on from this episode.
I decided to check - and indeed, you did explain yourself in the docs room in Matrix (link (can be viewed publicly). I also saw Domen highlighting that you didn’t manage the conflict of interest correctly link. You handled the conflict gracefully and stepped down, and Domen offered apologies for being too harsh in places.
So yes - you explained yourself, and I think amends were made. If you feel like I missed something or left something crucial out for your defense - feel free to speak up. I publicly accused you, so you do have the right to have your name be cleared of doubts. Also, I feel like I owe you an apology - directing an accusation was a dirty move from my part. I have my reservations about how the situation was handled from what I’ve seen. I won’t assume your intentions - but your explanations are enough for me to think that they could be pure and in good faith, so I’ll assume that unless I’m confronted with evidence of the opposite.
However, I disagree that everyone has moved on. As Domen highlighted - the issue still circles back to Eelco, because he held the largest conflict of interest there, being your boss, project BDFL and also a member of Foundation, which was the closest thing to an authority figure back then. I mentioned that you handled the conflict gracefully. You accepted the criticism, made a statement, and resigned. Eelco did not handle the conflict gracefully - he made a statement that claims he resigns, and just continued doing more of the exact same thing.
I don’t know you as a person or what happens in DetSys internally, but I want to say this. Reading back your statement from documentation incident, you apologize for any potential harm caused by your mistakes - and that’s valid. But you also apologize for any potential harm caused by DetSys the company - and I do not accept that. You are not DetSys. You are not the company. You are not an official representative of the company. You are also not your own boss. You are also not the single largest authority figure in the NixOS community. There’s a person who’s all of that at the same time, and he has a name, and his name is Eelco Dolstra, and he is the one who owes the apology for HIS actions and for actions of the company that HE is taking charge of. This is not your apology to give, not your responsibility to take, and not your conflict to manage.
And this is precisely the problem. You might have the best of intentions - but you dance around Eelco as if he’s an infant, unable to defend himself, unable to take criticism and responsibility for his actions. I don’t blame you for it - you are giving him a good faith reading. A lot of people have done that. I’ve done that. I went ahead and tried to make Eelco a defense case that he himself absolutely refuses to give or acknowledge, because I tried to put my good faith into him. That happened time and time again, with many very different people, to the point that most people stopped trying, and the community is fractured into pieces.
So I’m sorry to say, but the best reading I can give is that your coworker is clueless and irresponsible to an astronomic degree. But I find it unlikely, so the conclusion I come to is that your coworker is malicious. So please, don’t defend a malicious person - this isn’t something noble, this is just affirming their damaging ways. If Eelco still has it in him to care, he’ll do fine defending himself.
(post deleted by author)
I’m going to opt not to engage further on this, but I did want to express that I appreciate your apology and you seeking out further information with an open mind.