# SC member @tomberek works for Anduril

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/sc-member-tomberek-works-for-anduril/68971
**Category:** Meta
**Created:** [September 6, 2025, 5:21pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/sc-member-tomberek-works-for-anduril/68971 "2025-09-06T17:21:57Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 39

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### Author: ![withakay](https://discourse.nixos.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/f475e1/32.png) [@withakay](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/withakay)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2025, 6:02pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/sc-member-tomberek-works-for-anduril/68971/39 "2025-09-08T18:02:13Z")

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I have no historical stake in this argument (i.e. I was not a part of the Nix community at the time that this controversy occurred). However, I do care very deeply about data and the ways in which it is presented.

Apologies for any clipping of quotes; I am trying to be concise. Also from reading the linked sources, MIC is “military industrial complex”.

> [@Corbin](#):
>
> > [@RossComputerGuy](#):
> >
> > I wouldn’t say that the community as a whole is against MIC. Rather, a vocal part of the community has been against it.
> 
> “That thing” had 232 signatories; see [this archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20240506175702/https://nixos-users-against-mic-sponsorship.github.io/).  
> […]  
> When the community was asked to explain their position, it turns out that numerically over 99% of the community (100:1 ratio!) is against MICs.

If I understand your argument correctly, you are inferring from the 234 signatories to these letters (232 to the first, 2 to the second) that “over 99% of community… is against MICs”. However, the linked first letter specifically disavows that notion. It states:

> Please understand that agreeing and signing this open letter:
> 
> ```
> Is not an endorsement of a specific political allegiance.
> Does not mean you are personally against the Military Industrial Complex.
> Does not take in account past or future decisions and opinions.
> 
> ```
> 
> Signing this open letter only means that:
> 
> ```
> You do not want to see the NixOS community become vehicle for advertising the Military Industrial Complex.
> 
> ```

Additionally, 99% of the 234 people who were willing to sign 2 specific open letters is also not “numerically” 99% of the community. For comparison, there were 2,290 respondents to the [Nix Community Survey 2024](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-community-survey-2024-results/55403) and 4,619 people listed in the [nixpkgs maintainer list](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/6c3b3ba6b3b15ef785df74df421020c6c6bc534f/maintainers/maintainer-list.nix) (`builtins.length (builtins.attrNames (import ./maintainer-list.nix))`). I am unclear on what percentage of the Nix or NixOS community these measures can capture, but even as a conservative measure this is already 10x to 20x more people who have shown themselves willing to engage as part of the Nix community, yet did not engage with these letters.

I acknowledge that most research is based on statistical inference from smaller samples, so it isn’t only a question of numbers. However, such inferences are limited by how a specific methodology may or may not be able to control for factors such as [selection bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias). An open letter signatory process is poorly equipped to provide reliable data on proportionality because it is only designed to collect affirmative data.

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