I was about to write that one could help the foundation board by making concrete proposals for discussion, but adding more input may actually be counterproductive because the board is so time constrained already. Maybe the best way to really help is to distribute the load of weighing alternatives against each other and selecting one for a binding agreement to the community, and in fact run an RFC. That would not just be in line with the foundation’s stance not to impose decisions on the community but instead serve it by providing a legal entity that can do things a mere group of individuals can’t. It would also be a great demonstration of commons management, and help us refine our collective values and identity.
The board would still have to agree with the outcome to ensure the decision can actually be implemented, but that’s a small part of the total effort required for such a far-reaching issue.
Also someone would have to facilitate and drive the RFC, and for instance process inputs and curate the document. Anyone who tried it knows what I’m talking about. It’s quite a bit of work, but it doesn’t require the board’s involvement at all! Anyone can do it, and even abandoned partial results can be picked up by anyone.
One could argue that Nix is a component of NixOS, afterall the Github organization is called NixOS and there’s a NixOS foundation. If anything, I would try to move all the other community projects (r13y, nixpk.gs, nix.dev, nixos.wiki, etc.) under nixos.org.
AFAIK Matrix IDs are permanent, so we couldn’t just rename the space to be :nix.dev .
Indeed, that’s a big issue with Matrix that has unfortunately received little attention. Until they manage to make messages mxids-independent in the future, the only way to migrate is to recreate all rooms, user accounts and use a script to auto-join the previous rooms. This works well enough but all the previous room history is lost.
I don’t think the board even needs to be involved in this decision. The NixOS Foundation’s role is to support the project, so as long as it’s a well-thought-out plan that doesn’t put the project at risk, it should be fine. Link to the Role of the board.
It would be good to consult with the Marketing team.
I know they are working on a new website. I think one of the challenges they had was to create a good landing page that works for everybody. It’s hard to serve different crowds at the same time. People interested in Nix the language vs nixpkgs and NixOS. Beginners, advanced users and commercial entities. Etc.
They might also have some considerations regarding Google search ranking and other aspects I am unfamiliar with.
I’m sure they have developed a more fine-grained vision of how this could look when mixed together. For such a deep-impact change, it would be nice to have a bit more of a vision of how it will look after the transition.
That’s exactly backwards for arbitrary historic reasons, and the very source of confusion that could be avoided by more precise naming, which this RFC is partially about.
That would be a great subject for the UX workshop on the last week of November 2023. We’ll have a world-class UX expert available for two days to work with anyone interested on just that. It would be so great if someone from the marketing team could participate. We were missing you sorely in the first two iterations! It would be also be great opportunity to provide a lot of input to this RFC. We’re incorporating learnings from the governance discussion at NixCon: No binding decisions at in-person events, just work done for everyone else to see.
You mean the organization being called NixOS instead of Nix organization? I don’t think the historical reasons matter, the point is whether we consider Nix or NixOS being more important. Moving evething to nix.dev (or whathever TLD) would imply Nix is and that NixOS is kind of a side project.
I argue Nix is long-term more important because, being and ever more becoming a universal tool to underpin sustainable software development, it has a much broader scope and potential impact. At the moment, for a large but particular audience of Linux enthusiasts, undoubtedly NixOS is much more important than Nix itself. See the 2023 community survey results for a vague impression (please check the complete results, there is a lot of room for interpretation):
So it’s not wrong to drive community growth through NixOS as the entry point, but it’s not the only way. (Possibly what we’re observing is a result of driving community growth through NixOS to begin with.) Looking at it from the inside, NixOS as an end-user product is much less well-maintained than any of its constituent parts. I strongly doubt NixOS is the driving force of the ecosystem.
In my opinion, it’s not at all about NixOS, but tooling to make software finally stop sucking – I’d even agree with your provocative claim that NixOS is but a byproduct of that endeavor.
Can you elaborate? It doesn’t seem like anything critical happened as your comment implies.
Ah I didn’t read properly. Here’s the relevant section:
Cost of registration
Since 2003, the Public Interest Registry (PIR) charged its accredited registrars a capped price of US$9.05 per year[19] for each domain name. The registrars may set their charges to end users without restrictions.
In April 2019, ICANN proposed an end to the price cap of .org domains[20] and effectively removed it in July in spite of having received 3,252 opposing comments and only six in favor.[21] A few months later, the owner of the domain, the Public Interest Registry, proposed to sell the domain to investment firm Ethos Capital.[22] After intense criticism from nonprofit groups and significant figures in Internet history, the proposal was scrapped.[23]
Though I think it’s impossible to know about stuff like this in advance, at least .org does have a cap.
I agree with pretty much everything: Nix has a larger scope, but without NixOS we wouldn’t even be here having this discussion.
Now that I think about it, from a semantical point of view, it makes more sense to have “nix” as a domain, since Nix did and has more potential to spawn new subprojects. (os.nix.dev? that’s probably too ugly)
Still, I would use a .org, not another new TLD and especially not one owned by google.
It seems to me that “we” need to start a go fund me or some such to acquire these domains or try to negotiate the price down somewhat. Whether we use the domains or not, whatever. Acquiring them and keeping them acquired seems like a worthwhile goal / endeavor. I dunno where to start but I can contribute some USD.
I very much agree that it would be best for this to be a community decision. Reiterating on what @zimbatm wrote, the foundation will support it
I’m happy to take point on trying again to reach out to the various higher priced domain owners such as nix.com / nix.org / other variations that folks have in mind. I do expect that 3 letter domains will be quite high.
Side note - nixos can also stand for nix open source, though I highly doubt that will be intuitively accepted.
I’ve been going through List of Internet top-level domains - Wikipedia and foundation is one and so is .pizza (joking on that one but would be fun to have) - maybe nix.codes? I dunno, thinking outside the box here. nix.net works too if .net would become “cool” again (was it ever?)
