Should organizations relating to the defense sector being able to sponsor NixOS?

[mrkline]

@colinsane

i really do place this one on Anduril (i say, having more than one IRL friend who works there). they had every chance to see that sponsorship would cause exactly this schism, yet they drove that wedge in anyway. morals, politics, everything else aside: that’s just irresponsible.

This presumes Anduril expected this week’s sponsorship to anger a large swath of the Nix community, yet insisted on it anyways - I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t speak for him or anyone else at Anduril, but the impression I got from Daniel Fullmer was that he didn’t feel the online outrage last year represented a majority (or even a plurality) of the folks he interacted with at NixCon 2023.

@Corbin

Don’t be fooled by Travis’ wording. The retaliation he fears is not violence or harassment, but the shame of being known as a warmonger among one’s peers.

I can guarantee that Travis and the rest of the Anduril folks don’t fear the shame from any of this. We believe in what we’re doing, and we’ll keep using Nix to do it. One of the ironies here is that the founding goal of Anduril is to change the defense industry, and curb the worst excesses of the military industrial complex.

But when the conversation shifts from “what conference sponsor policy best aligns with the views of the Nix community?” to “How can we shame other members of the community for having a different worldview than I do?”, we’ve lost the plot.