It’s a shame we lost people already. Hopefully we can actually get some clarity and change through the next election.
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Almost every single post in this thread is now attracting flags.
In the midst of what is certainly going to be a divisive topic, a reminder: misuse of moderation reports for posts you merely disagree with will also be considered inappropriate community behaviour.
In the meantime, please keep this discussion constructive,.
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We do believe that all members of the Steering Committee must publicly disclose changes to their employer
Since we can’t reply on to the post directly: when do you expect that you’ll find a solution? And how do you make sure this doesn’t just become a box checking document, but actually something that gets enough eyeballs to not feel like it’s being kept hidden?
I know that’s a slightly leading question… because I think that’s what a lot of people get burned on.
However, we do not believe that any such registry of our employers would have quelled this controversy even if it had already existed and Tom had kept it up-to-date. Some members of the community seemed to expect extra public engagement from the Steering Committee on this issue beyond quietly updating some page.
I also agree that some people may have been frustrated regardless, but I don’t think that’s because they need public engagement. It’s because Anduril has historically transitively influenced NixOS governance through subcontractors.
Of course that history doesn’t just go away. That’s the price they and said subcontractor paid for their cloak and dagger shenanigans. To me that’s a fair consequence acting as a check on abuse of power. They deserve the extra scrutiny.
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As I can’t reply there, I’ll have to reply here.
A living document is just one way to notify of COI changes. It’s not even necessarily the best one - people aren’t going to check it often. A much better way would be to post an official SC announcement on Discourse - like SC usually does. This will have a lot of reach. Why hasn’t this been done?
And yes, this alone would not have “quelled” this “controversy”. The lack of timely announcement is just the top-most, easily solvable problem. What is much more significant here is the fact that an SC member now works for Anduril. Anduril has tried being a sponsor for NixCon once - on which people pushed back on. Then, it was sneakily made sponsor for NixCon NA - which caused massive public outrage and an open letter. The community made it very clear that they do not want to see MIC be handed lucrative positions in the project. The failure to decisively resolve this incident, together with a governance crisis, caused massive departure of many prolific contributors from the project.
The Anduril question was one of the most important ones when SC Election was running. Candidates were evaluated based on how decisively they speak out about it. SC was expected to lead the community forward and to restore community trust in governance processes. So I have to ask: how exactly does this incident restore trust? How exactly are people going to trust SC, when one of the SC members willfully becomes an employee of a company that is opposed by community? How exactly are people going to trust SC, when instead of siding with the community, SC comes together and defends said member with a defensive and dismissive response? How exactly are people going to trust SC, when the many SC members, who denounced Anduril in the past, are now becoming complicit in it taking more and more root in the governance?
I am disappointed.
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I imagine a community:
- where we reach out to people directly instead of witting posts
- where we speak for ourselves instead of „the community“
- where we are open for other opinions and at least try to understand them
- where we vote and/or run for SC when we fundamentally disagree with the status quo
- where we focus more on a we instead of an us and them
Disclaimer: I understand that I am way to new to the community to know the history!
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A very vocal part of the community. Though there was a not insignificant number of people who did sign that thing from last year. However, I’ve observed that negativity spreads faster than positivity. I wouldn’t say that the community as a whole is against MIC. Rather, a vocal part of the community has been against it.
Now, in the case of this thread. I think it should be locked now. There’s nothing new to be said and we’ve seen time and time again how keeping these threads open allows for the discussion to dissolve. I’d like to see an effort on the mod team to be proactive at ensuring these threads don’t keep doing that. Also, this always seems to happen around events. This thread happened during NixCon. The Anduril stuff was at NixCon NA. Why is it that whenever there’s an event, there’s always drama or negatively? I believe it is that there’s people who know that less people with power will see the lack of attention. Then when everyone is back on, it becomes a big deal. This hurts the image of the community and disincentives people and companies from contributing. However, I believe this to be a pain point in the community which needs to be resolved.
More context, nyanbinary messaged on matrix about Tom’s new employment. They didn’t like the outcome of the discussion. Then went to here, made this post. Didn’t like the response, then complained in the gender minority chat. I’ve ended up blocking nyanbinary as I don’t feel like I can have a productive conversation with this individual.
I only have this screenshot from the chat as I don’t feel it’s worth unblocking to see the rest. Now, I’m not going to respond to anyone and I’m off to head back to the US after having fun at NixCon.
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I’m kind of afraid to post this because I’m guessing that this is going to be a pretty unpopular opinion, but…
Congratulations to @tomberek for getting a new job! I’m glad that important members of the Nix ecosystem are able to get jobs where they are (presumably) paid to work on Nix related stuff.
I’m also glad to hear that Anduril is continuing to invest in the Nix ecosystem. I think that it’s a really bad thing that such a large portion of my tax dollars goes towards the U.S.’s military budget. I’m glad to hear that a small portion of that money is indirectly going towards making the Nix ecosystem better. Most of the military budget goes towards things that I think are bad. I’m glad that at least some of it is indirectly going towards something that I think is good.
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Look talking about how stuff like this should be moderated is one thing, but let’s not bring conspiracy theories into it. If there’s any sort of causation there, it’s much more easily explained by: People were interacting and talking because they were at an event. Don’t try to put malicious intent behind people’s actions when there are simpler explanations and you don’t really even have a reason to believe there’s a causality in the first place.
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I really don’t see why this tread even exists. So an individual works at a company the OP (and other members of the community) has ethical issues with. Does that outright taint the works of said individual? I don’t believe that it is the case. And I really hope that just having an “infamous” (for the lack of a better word) employer doesn’t taint the good intentions and longstanding efforts of an individual for the greater community.
I think the only real issue here is that the SC failed to notify the wider community about individual(s) being employed by employers that some members of this community might object to. And given this outburst, I’m hoping that the lessons were learnt and there won’t be a next time.
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This shouldn’t be closed. The conversation however should be steered in the direction of a solution, instead of focusing on the people involved, we should focus on the actual problem and solving it.
The main problem here being lack of disclosure of workplace for steering committee members.
Historically, nothing happens until this blows up way larger than it needs to be. If the steering committee just took an actual action to communicate these changes today, this problem would likely fizzle out immediately.
Again, we can just take actions and solve things. And the solution space is full of things that are very normal to have and should just be done… immediately. Like:
- Make a file on GitHub that logs steering committee members change of employment, that is public
- Decide on a process for broadcasting these changes to the community
- Post these things on discourse, or some other OPEN platform that people WILL SEE
These are things that can just be done, are perfectly normal for large organizations with people in powerful positions.
It’s also extremely important to note that the steering committee keeps using the argument that they audit each other. Frankly, that’s not really more than a rubber stamp, things should be transparent enough that the community can audit you. You’re obviously just gonna say whatever you’re doing is correct.
This also isn’t controversial, I believe transparency is even part of our brand guidelines and seemed a theme at the opening ceremony at nixcon…
Like why is your decision log/meeting logs repo on github private? Why isn’t it just the absolutely most sensitive things that are private? Many other nix teams have open meeting logs, why is the steering committee excempt? Can’t you just remove sensitive things, if not, why not?
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LIKE HOW IS ANY OF THIS CONTROVERSIAL
Like we can actually just do this and any other project would probably have done this before it even became “a thing”
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As a data point, in Rust potential CoI sources are disclosed to other members of the leadership council and to mod team. As far as I understand, there’s no public “who works where” board. Leadership council itself is responsible for checking its members for CoI:
https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3392-leadership-council.html#conflicts-of-interest
Council representatives must promptly disclose conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from affected decisions. Council representatives must also proactively disclose likely sources of potential conflict annually to other representatives and to the moderation team.
The Council may not waive a conflict of interest if one applies, even if the Council considers it minor. However, the Council may evaluate whether a conflict exists at all. Council representatives must raise potential conflicts so that the Council can make such a determination.
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“That thing” had 232 signatories; see this archive. Meanwhile, there was another letter which expressly took the opposite position and had two signatories; see this live version. 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. (Actually, it initially had only one signatory, but eventually a second person did appear.)
If you have any alternate evidence, feel free to introduce it.
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It also must be mentioned that several of these people have permanently left the Nix community because of the state of affairs the Nix community was (and still is in my opinion) at the date of that letter. My point is a lot of those people left those community hence why it may seem now it is the minority even though it isn’t.
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Enabling slow mode for now. Most mods are currently travelling and don’t have the time to follow this closely. SC wants to add a team page on nixos.org with CoI (like the board). I don’t think much more discussion is currently needed, processes like this will improve over time and it’s hard to get it right in the first iteration of it happening 
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FWIW: these changes are on my computer (and have been since yesterday). I just haven’t pushed them yet due to a snag or two, this definitely will be ready by tomorrow — I am just in the middle of travel.
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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”.
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 and 4,619 people listed in the nixpkgs maintainer list (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. 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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Some people seem to be implying that the Steering Committee is sympathetic to Anduril, but it is not. I want to remind people that the Steering Committee voted to ban Anduril from job postings on Discourse and I was one of the people who voted in favor of that ban. Your votes do matter and have material consequences.
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Speaking as some who
- is small time member of the community
- has a small handful of contributions to nixpkgs
- voted in SC election,
I am personally satisfied with SC response. It would have been nicer to get the heads up before being questioned at NixCon, but it isn’t very productive use of anybody’s time to announce job change for every member of SC every time that happens.
I’m happy with how the matter is handled by SC, how the question was answered at NixCon and on Discourse (I’m not on matrix) and am now looking forward to next election (If I’m still eligible to vote).
Last but not least, congratulations Tom for new job, I hope it works out well for you.
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