SC member @tomberek works for Anduril

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So… what, exactly? You say that as if silence is a virtue, and speaking up is undesired. I have led projects and communities. Getting anybody to speak up is a miserable struggle. It’s impossible to gather any feedback and get anyone to help you. Vocal people are diamonds who shine through. They care, they vocalize their care, they engage, they follow new developments, they contribute. They are so vocal precisely because they care so much, they are invested, they want to build a better future.

So I don’t understand why you are so dismissive of the vocal part of the community. Actually, I’d like to point out that you yourself is a part of this vocal minority, except that you hold a different opinion. So how do you justify this to yourself?

Any why, do you think, this is? There’s little joy in partaking in negativity. Given the choice, people would engage in something positive, instead. But when a disaster happens - it is very natural that negative news spread. Especially when those negative news not only inform people, but also mobilize them to take a collective stand.

You want something positive? I’ll give you something positive. Nix community has always been very divided and isolated. A plethora of social and governance issues, such as the consensus-driven RFC process, lack of proper community team, lack of instruments to affect formal decisions, largely informal governance process, and more - ensured that this would persist. Despite this, an open letter was made - which, if you know something about vocal minorities (such as scientists, where this practice is very popular), is a very strong call to action in response to an unprecedented crisis. And prominent community members have indeed rallied behind this open letter - hitting 232 signatories. For a community which has historically struggled with organization and power distribution, this is a very large feat, one that has broken through the deadlock and paved the way for grassroots organization.

This situation, though - it has no positives. A year has passed, and now the entire debate, which was beaten to death not once, but twice, is resurrected, and you again argue that people are overreacting. Must I draft an open letter to draw out some positives?

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I beg to differ. Processes do need time, and one might not be happy with the amount of or the direction in which things do progress. But I believe it’s hard to deny that there have been substantial improvements of the governance structures in the last year or two.

  • The SC was established and does work as intended. Talks & a Panel and NixCon gave a good overview on their current work and priorities. You and I might not be super happy about all of them, but: The SC is a thing, there’s lots of volunteer labor being put in, and the members are very responsive to questions and concerns IMO. One might think a statement before NixCon would have been better, but: There’s a statement just a few days after.
  • The Election process has been established and will soon be tested for a second time. Say what you will, but I think setting up a well-run, transparent election process for a community which - as you say - had become somewhat fragmented, is no small feat in & of itself.
  • Lots of smaller improvements, such as improved transparency around teams, no moderation team members in formerly not-so-well covered time zones, etc, etc.

I do value many (most?) critical voices in the community for their role in enabling and supportinb progress, but I believe it’s also important to see the progress that does happen, in order keep seeing meaning in our work, prevent burnout of volunteers and focus on those processes that still need improvement.

tl;dr: don’t think the “entire debate” is “resurrected”. all progress is incremental, changes had been had, elections are upcoming.

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I disagree. I think that there are some positives to this current situation. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that Anduril is investing in contributing to the Nix ecosystem. I’m glad that a portion of my tax dollars are going towards investing in the Nix ecosystem. I can easily imagine an alternate reality where those same tax dollars went towards investing in a proprietary ecosystem.

The fact that members of the Steering Committee are able to get paid to (presumably) do Nix-related stuff is a also positive.

Additionally, @Gabriella439 wrote:

For the people who are against Anduril, the fact that Anduril’s position has been weakened is a positive thing. I don’t personally view this as a positive thing, but I thought that I should point it out because some people are very much against Anduril.

With all that said, I want to make it clear that I don’t blame anyone for failing to find the positive in situations like this one. I know that I’m a lot better at finding the positives in situations than most people are. At the same time, it’s possible that I missed stuff. If anyone can think of any positives that I missed, then I would like to hear them.

Because people are overreacting.

The fact that a Steering Committee member got a new job at Anduril is a good thing, not a bad thing. Even if it was a bad thing, it doesn’t warrant such a big reaction. The absolute worst thing that could happen is that the Steering Committee could be unfairly swayed towards allowing Anduril to sponsor certain things or allowing Anduril to advertise in certain places, but that’s an incredibly unlikely scenario because a) the Steering Committee might not have to weigh in on anything Anduril-related until after Tom is no longer on the Steering Committee or working for Anduril, b) Tom might not be on the Steering Committee for much longer due to the upcoming election, c) Tom is supposed to recuse himself in votes where there’s a conflict of interest and d) if Tom does not recuse himself then other members of the Steering Committee can vote to remove him from the Steering Committee. And don’t forget: we’re just talking about swaying here. There’s a possibility that such a vote would fail even if it was unfairly swayed in Anduril’s favor. There’s also a possibility that the next Steering Committee will vote to allow Anduril to sponsor certain things and to advertise in certain places even if there are zero people on the next Steering Committee who have any connections to Anduril. And let’s say that that happens. Let’s say that Anduril starts advertising on Discourse. They would be torn to pieces! If Anduril posted a positive message about themselves, then there is a vocal group of people who would post multiple negative messages about Anduril. I don’t think that the benefit to Anduril would outweigh the detriment to Anduril in that situation.

People are overreacting in this situation. The worst that can possibly happen is an unfair sway. I can’t know for sure, but I’m predicting that the unfair sway won’t happen. I’m predicting that Tom will recuse himself when appropriate.

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I prefer the MIC wastes more money on worse systems.

The idea that Anduril employees being part of the SC weakens Anduril’s position is silly.

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I think the mods should move the majority of the discussion to a new thread. This one with a subject “Tom works at Anduril” should be closed in my opinion. Ok, we know that now.

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Hi! Welcome to the community. Thanks for your contribution! Let’s do some data analysis on your links and help Ross improve their understanding.

No worries! I’ll show you. This turns out to be easy with Bayes’ rule. Let’s do the community survey first. Of the 2290 respondents, 329-330 indicated that they were active maintainers. This means that the active maintainer list responds to opt-in requests for opinions at about a rate of 329-330 / 4619 ≈ 7.1%. This will have to be our proxy for response rate since, as you note, surveys can’t capture proportionality outside of an affirmative context.

Next, let’s consider active maintainers who signed the letter against MIC. I spent a few minutes with the Python re module and estimate that there are 191 valid GitHub handles among the signatories, including 92 active maintainers. Now, we might naïvely guess that this means that only 92 / 4619 ≈ 2% of the active maintainers signed the letter, but we can use our proxy from the community survey and apply Bayes’ rule to find that 92 / 329-330 ≈ 27.8-27.9% of the active maintainers who affirmatively respond to opt-in requests are signatories. As noted, some maintainers have left since last year, and I’ll conservatively represent that by rounding up to 28%.

The correct way to analyze common self-organizing preferences amongst groups of communicating individuals is with random permutations; WP has a summary of statistics on random permutations, while Baez has a slow and enjoyable explanation. In general, a subculture of about 1-2% is a considerable minority; they are worth considering and mentioning in relevant topics. A subculture of about 28% is one of only two or three factions in the entire system!

Oh, and one of the two signers of the other thing is also an active maintainer. That’s 0.3% after accounting for Bayes’ rule. Yes, they exist, but they are a small minority.

Let’s complete that statement. The community as a whole isn’t against MIC. Rather, approximately one in four maintainers have been against MIC when invited to self-identify, including maintainers who have left the project. Precisely one (1) maintainer is comfortable being on the permanent record as explicitly in favor of MIC.

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The MIC letter seems pretty irrelevant to whatever the complaint to the SC is. By my count, 3/7 of the current SC signed it (as did I), so clearly signing the letter doesn’t imply a belief that some sort of catastrophe is happening here in this case.

Seriously, Tom’s nominee doc made his history with and sympathies toward the military perfectly clear. Working for the company I would really rather we as a community stop giving free publicity to shouldn’t move the needle much for anyone who has been following along — I expect that, modulo Gabriella’s point about self-recusal, Tom will continue to make the same choices on the SC that he’s presumably spent the last ten months making before getting his current gig.

And while of course — as a signatory to the aforementioned letter — I do wish that the MIC didn’t even have that much representation in the SC, having one representative out of seven with beliefs that run counter to mine in this respect is a pretty darn good outcome in a community that isn’t fully in agreement on the topic.

None of this opposes constructive suggestions for how the SC can codify norms around CoI disclosure in the future. I just think anyone believing that this specific event is a bombshell either hasn’t been paying attention or has an immature (sorry to be blunt) perspective on what to reasonably expect from a representative democracy.

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This is a good point, so I’d like to add my voice to the others in this thread: I have full faith in the Steering Committee, I trust that Tom is recusing himself when necessary, and consequently I do not see any issue with him working for Anduril, much less any threat of Anduril “taking more and more root in the governance”.

I am disappointed that we had a year of blood, sweat, and tears to establish a single supreme body with the authority to set policy, and yet we still have community members making alarmist Discourse threads and attempt to raise brigades. The point of the Steering Committee is that one can bring one’s concerns to them, not to the court of public opinion, and they are the ones who decide on a course of action. If they don’t make the decision one would have liked, one accept that and move on; if one absolutely can’t, one can find another community more aligned with one’s values.

For what it’s worth, I don’t see any problem with Anduril sponsoring Nix events (at least that money is going towards making software better instead of autonomous weapons). I know Nixers with similar opinions, and all of them saw the acrimony in 2023-2024 over the topic and decided to avoid getting involved and risking getting targeted. So neither I nor any of them are going to show up in @Corbin’s statistics, which makes me doubt that those numbers are meaningful.

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This is a weird claim to make. Yes, the SC’s purpose is to make governance decisions, but why would people only be expected to voice concerns directly to the SC and nowhere else? It’s a fairly normal part of democratic systems to have public discussions.

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why would people only be expected to voice concerns directly to the SC and nowhere else? It’s a fairly normal part of democratic systems to have public discussions.

Expecting consistent participation between N people with N other people is inefficient and unrealistic. By electing fair representation and channeling our communication through a small number of people closer to other discussions and especially closer to the authority to do things, we benefit from increased communication efficiency and having useful conclusions appear in policy.

Representative democracy has a lot of strong fundamental dynamics we should recognize from computer science. Even as the Greeks sometimes used more direct democracy, they used techniques such as sortition and qualification to concentrate authority with smaller numbers of people, aiding the natural flow of consensus. We can all see what the SC does. We are all virtually at the table through the SC. That is a more efficient, effective, and fair way of operating.

We don’t need to silence people. Simply guide people along the way to being effective in their pursuits. In a free-for-all N-to-N conversation, because many people know that it is inefficient, there is a strong self-selection for activists and a variety of other behaviors and traits, making it illegitimate and finally ineffective. The level-headed pragmatists tune out rather quickly. Some may seek to become over-represented within such chaos. However, the “consensus” achieved will be illegitimate and find itself attracting only a wave of blowback as those turned off initially realize that a confrontation is now coming for them.

I will also comment on Corbin’s post.

This language is kind of sarcastic. The post you are replying to uses a very dry, neutral construction. Independently of your logic, this does tend to attract very quick judgement that will undermine your communication.

Several times you are citing a “counter” letter that received almost no attention. At the time that any such thing emerged, I was aware of a group of reactionaries whose primary motivation appeared to attack yet another even smaller minority. It is no wonder that many of us did not participate or support that effort. It is unfair to claim that the community is represented by such an illegitimate and unrecognized effort. Even if it were not organized by the most inflammatory of community members, it was surely enjoying their support, and we are blameless to avoid it. Any pretense that continue treating such a thing as representative statements of a larger body is at best poorly argued.

There is an assumption that the participation rate of the two things is consistent. If we can imagine that such signatories organized more or less effectively in either instance, that assumption will not hold, and we can say that self-selection may be stronger in either situation, an uncertainty that is inscrutable. This just demonstrates why legitimate processes that aim to have a very high participation rate are essential to creating credible representation in a community.

who signed the letter against MIC

It is unfortunate that there was a great deal of effort put into telling people that Anduril was not the heart of a matter that, as time has passed, seems to have revealed itself to be almost solely about Anduril and perhaps always was. If you want to get something done, you need legitimacy and a lot of sympathy from people who judge you to be sincere and correct, but having used one issue to further another does not aid the evidence of sincerity. Such errors have to be owned before people will broadly consider those who made the errors in an open minded way again.

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i wanted to bring some additional data that hopefully you can incorporate into consideration with your analysis

disclaimer: the only things i know about Andurial were learned from a Mark Rober video my children watched discussing what an awesome company they are, and from this community discussing how terrible they are

this mentioned vocal minority of individuals have stated that developing software is inherently political and one cannot abstain from politics by engaging in this community. i have spoken to a large number of people in this community and while some agree with that statement many, myself included, do not. writing this post is such a hassle and waste of my time. i have 3 children to raise and spend time with so getting involved with online politics seems entirely unethical for me as it takes time away from my family for something i don’t care about at all. there are so many people like me. the only reason i say anything right now is because i traveled away from home to be at NixCon and i am not back with my family for another week and a bit… so this will be my one and only statement that could be considered political - but i assure you it isn’t - i simply want to show you that you are missing data.

TLDR - at least in my sample size of the nix community there are people who simply don’t care and consider their personal lives infinitely more important than project politics… the bias to not answer will be stronger on the side that don’t care about involvement with Andurial

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I acknowledge that this discussing this topic is hurting, stressful and complicated. It is necessary though. The Nix community – in my opinion – always will be divided in fractions as political groups (such as this awesome software project), there’s no way around it.

I respect you, your work and your view of things. But silencing this discussion while being part of the Foundation Board and Moderation Team is not benefiting anyone but MIC actors.

Edit at Wed Sep 10 09:36:13 AM CEST 2025: After reading @winter’s comment and talking to them directly, I do see how this remark about silencing can be easily misunderstood. To clarify, I appreciate turning on slow mode to lead to a civil discussion, but there is a need to discuss this aspect of a huge part of our lives. I was not referring to enabling slow-mode, but lass’ sort of explanation to turning slow-mode on.

Politics must be allowed to be discussed. I do agree that this should be done civil and respectful.

I pay taxes in Europe. Germany’s biggest arms manufacturer Rheinmetall recently announced a partnership with Anduril for “a suite of software-defined autonomous systems to extend the availability of autonomous mission systems”.

Point taken, war with the US is currently not too probable. But US leadership also currently is anywhere but precise in communication, trustful in diplomacy nor rhetorically peaceful with other nations. I do not trust the current administration to not start a war.

There’s no need for congratulation if one part of a community is paid to develop weaponry that in the end will be used to kill other parts of the community or their loved ones.

Also, e.g. Anduril Lattice Software Development Kit License Agreement is not an open source license, but proprietary.

[~/git/github/nixpkgs]$ git --no-pager log -s --format="%ae" | grep -i anduril.com | wc -l
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To be honest, the number of commits with Anduril mail addresses was surprisingly high in contrast to my expectations.

Quoting Tom’s nominee doc:

I have been in both the military as well as part of founding a defense startup; then I left that world behind a few years ago.

“Founding a defense startup” (which one?) and leaving an industry “behind a few years ago” is not a “perfectly clear” history of anything. It’s vague. His sympathies a clear though, I agree.

We are a global community of mainly grown-ups. Lets act accordingly even though big money in high-earning industries may be tempting, and not work on killing (each) others.

I’d be real interested in hearing @tomberek’s voice on this discussion.

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I will note that slow mode != silencing, and that as far as I can tell the moderation team has let all(?) of the posts in this thread stay up.

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please look up what american military technology is doing around the world to children right now. to children just like yours. please stand up for them as if they were your own. please have empathy for lives these companies are affecting. we want the infinite suffering to end. we are not the vocal minority

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I want to remind people to not use excessive edits to circumvent the slow mode. Sometimes it’s better to wait a day or two to reply for emotions to calm down.
Please also refrain from attacking other people. This will only devolve the thread and we will have to close it at some point.

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Hi everyone. I figured I should have a chance to respond.

I started leading the Nix team at Anduril on Aug 25th. I informed the SC the week before and my employer the week before that. I had considered not updating my public LinkedIn, expecting it might be the target of some drama - and the unfortunate timing coinciding with NixCon - but I thought that reflecting the truth was the best course of action and updated it on the day I started. This was a busy time for many members of the SC and the SC did not have an established practice of widely announcing employment changes by any member.

This new employment does not represent any change in my views and stances about how the Nix community should engage with industry, including the defense industry; I continue to advocate for more adoption and participation from everyone interested and able to do so. I cannot think of an issue I would decide differently based on my employment. If you disagree with my approach or my assessment of the situation, feel free to reach out and we can have a longer discussion than is possible in this limited forum. I’m not going for gotcha points or to win some public debate, but trying to work for greater adoption. That is my ultimate goal.

For those who reached out to me to give words of support; thank you.

I heard from people with whom I have deep disagreements, but who still gave words of sympathy and empathy. I appreciate this maturity as it demonstrates that diverse people can still work together on a shared goal. Communities form when different people unite around a common purpose.

For those who are outraged that this entire thread has even gone this far; I agree. But do not respond in-kind or lash out or act childish, it only serves to make this problem harder to solve. Instead, focus your energies on improving Nix, maintaining Nixpkgs (I remember trying to keep the PR count below 2000… I guess I failed), joining teams, participating in voting, and encouraging Nix adoption wherever you can. There is nothing to be gained by continuing to debate in this thread - try not to get suckered into it.

For those who completely object to my continued participation or that of Anduril, and yearn for an organization which takes a stronger stance on political or social issues; I encourage you to create such organizations and wish you luck in your endeavors. I may even support some of them, but I do not believe that is the role of the Foundation.

I’ve heard from some who do not want to get involved due to the potential of being targeted by a public mob. This possibility affected their actions. Paraphrasing: “I don’t really care too much about XYZ, but I can’t take the personal or professional risk to be the center of controversy.” This means fear has become the deciding factor or at least that it is not worth the risk or their time. This is rational behavior by any individual and I do not blame anyone for it. But we must be clear; this is a failure. I’m sad to say this is a failure of the community leadership, including myself, to protect people from bullying behavior, from the fear of being targeted by a mob stirred up by a few people intent on causing chaos and drama, who then point to that very chaos as the justification for creating more of it. Instead, we are setting the standard that the community uses established mechanisms for governance, not the court of social media and not the volume of passionate rabble-rousing.

There is cause for optimism. We have a Board that is getting matters organized. We have had a successful NixCon with a huge amount of participants and sponsors - and I heard it was a blast. I apologize for missing it this year; (bad timing with the job switch, oops). The Steering Committee has been able to work together, build trust over time, and establish a governance mechanism that is functioning. None of this is as perfect or speedy or as ideal as we would like; that is okay. There were potential flare-ups that have not become a distraction for the community due to the SC doing its job. I hope we can also move forward with more positive activities, such as refining a roadmap and establishing core teams, rather than crisis control. The broader response to this incident seems to be “who cares?” and a disdain for the drama. I am optimistic about Nix’s future.

In summary; thank you everyone for widely disseminating my resume, and keep on Nix’ing.

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The actions of the SC in this matter mostly communicate that this stance is shared among its members.

This stance is problematic for at least one of two reasons:

  1. If those who are upset are not a minority, it shows a significant disconnect between the SC and the community.
  2. But if those who are upset are a minority, it shows how badly minorities are treated here.

Parts of the community are not happy with how the SC handled this situation. Rightly so. After everything that has happened in the last two years, we should expect the SC to handle this more actively than just discussing it internally and reacting to complaints afterwards.

After the community has made it very clear that they don’t want any involvement of Anduril, I would have personally expected from any SC member taking a job there to at least consider stepping down from their SC position immediately. I mean - would you have seriously expected to be elected if you had already been working at Anduril last year?

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This is not serious. No community can survive if all minority dissenting views trump those held by the majority. It is the job of everyone to decide for themselves and what is right and ethical and act accordingly, and the direction of the community should reflect the views of its majority members, and where there are irreconcilable differences the only sane thing to do it for the community to split along those lines, not to insist either the minority or the majority is subject to the whims and tyranny of the other. Of course the best way for a community to grow is to pick the narrowest consensus of shared values required to achieve the objectives of the community. The best way to blow up every useful endeavour is to engage in McCarthy-style witch hunts and purity tests for a broad range of topics unrelated to the main endeavour.

FWIW I am here for nix, I am here for the software, and to help other people adopt it, and where I can, I try contribute directly to its improvement. I am not here for anything else, and if I had to pick a side, it would be with the overall trend and direction thus far with the SC / foundation. I have zero problems with the timeline laid out by Tom (avoiding the ping because I am sure he’s over it already) and his actions, or the actions of the SC to try to reasonably respond to the blow-up.

If someday I decided I don’t agree with SC / foundation leadership I will make my dissent known, observe the outcome, and if I don’t like it I will leave.

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I beg to differ. The best way to grow any team is diversity combined with a common goal. Only then you can facilitate everyone’s strength to a combined strength that is larger than each individual. So in this case it is good to have both pro and con MIC people in the community and voice their opinions. It only becomes a challenge when both parties only see themselves as right and can’t agree that the opposing view is valid as well it is just different.

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Thank you. This is exactly the problem I’m seeing. You described the issue with this shared stance eloquently, too.

Same. To me, that’s basic responsibility and accountability - if you can no longer represent the community, you resign. There’s no shame in that.

And this is not happening, evidently. Nor does anyone demand it, nor does it frequently happen, because it is exceedingly rare for people with power to listen to those without, much less so a minority. So stop acting as if that’s happening.

And it is! If you’ve noticed, no one is blaming you specifically. What me and other people have a problem with is that SC as a whole has sat with this information and did nothing.

Seriously, it would have been FAR worse of a situation if you intentionally withheld this information together with SC. So you’ve made the right call here, even if you disagree with this being weaponized to discuss a much broader issue.

No one has suggested that you would. Actually, it’s part of the problem here: you are just being genuine and upfront about your beliefs, which I believe to be incompatible with the community at large.

I beg to disagree. I’ve been recently reading an excellent “Rebuilding Community” series, and it makes a point that community, aside from shared identity and purpose, also needs shared values and mutual concern. I remember very vividly how during the governance bootstrap discussions, even the most trivial of values such as “fascism is bad” were widely disagreed with. So I don’t think there’s much of a “community” here - maybe a few fractured ones, under the umbrella of “people interested in Nix technology” - but those people overall do not constitute a community. This is also why the conflicts persist.

As I mentioned - I don’t think what Nix has is much of a “community”. But if you believe that it is - should I take it as a flat refusal to represent the interests of a non-insignificant portion of this community? Because you are a community representative, and at a baseline, I would expect you to at least try representing as many as you can. What I see here is a refusal to consider those you disagree with.

Also, that goes without saying, but “create such organizations” is a monumental task that is better be avoided if at all possible. You should know this well. If it wasn’t such a monumental task, Nixpkgs would’ve been forked ages ago.

If that leads to a more organized endorsement of Anduril than was present before, I would say it’s a cause for pessimism.

Yes, because people who cared about this a lot have been forced to leave the community over the persistent refusal to consider their case. Evidently, they cared. They probably still would, if they held hope they would be heard out.

Just as a data point, I would be very interested to learn how many of the people who signed the open letter no longer participate in community matters or contribute.

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