I oppose anything using the Nix/NixOS trademark from accepting a defense sector sponsorship.
A conference accepting a sponsorship from any company is not a politically neutral action; it is an explicit endorsement of that company. That’s literally the entire reason companies sponsor conferences so that the conference will endorse the sponsor (such as by prominently emblazoning the sponsor’s logo, for example) and improve the sponsor’s standing/image in the community. There is nothing politically neutral about that.
I don’t believe anyone in this thread has voiced opposition to the existence of arms dealers - NATO providers otherwise?
Nor has anyone suggested that NixOS do so.
The opposition voiced in the thread and elsewhere is to NixOS, through sponsorship deals, endorsing any arms dealer - regardless of which states and alliances they sell to.
Your confusion is understandable. There has been an impressive effort to deploy smoke to obscure that very distinction. Just as the foundation has failed to show the courage of their convictions and explicitly state the reality of the stance they are taking on behalf of the community.
I would also like to pose the question, are we creating a welcoming community for other sponsors?
Some groups within Google use Nix, would they want to sponsor with the potential blow-back around Nix “ethics board” looking into data privacy concerns?
I think you’ll find that very few in the established corporate world have their hands clean of any potential “wrong-doing”.
If the Nix Ecosystem ever wants to graduate from “hobbyists” to “force in the industry”; I think there will have to be some compromise about how industry gets involved with helping fund efforts.
The current state of NixOS is not sustainable, either we’ll need to severely cut back infra (compute, storage, CDN) or involve more entities.
In other words, do you prioritize a specific world view, or do you prioritize a technology? I think Nix should be concerned about promoting Nix first.
@jonringer I think that’s a bit of whataboutism. Those companies aren’t before us in this issue today. It’s not really reasonable to try and judge the entire category of the problem in order to address one part of it. And I think most people in this thread would consider Anduril to be in a whole other league of ethical concerns than those, due in part to the immediacy of Anduril’s relationship to conflict. It’s like a judicial system; you have to judge the case that’s actually in front of you, and set a precedent that is both effective and least likely to have unintended effects on other cases.
I’m also curious about this. Has Anduril broken some sort of community or foundation rule? Or does this boil down to “some people, comprising an unknown fraction of the ‘community,’ don’t like (what they imagine might be) Anduril’s products?”
Travis, this is hard to read as anything other than a bad-faith argument. Read the current thread, and this one, and this one for plenty of diverse opinions for and against, instead of pretending that you couldn’t possibly imagine what they are. No sea lioning, any of you.
This accusation is unfair, especially coming from a moderator. I was specifically replying to AngryAnt’s odd moral distinction between opposing the existence of arms dealers and opposing their NixOS sponsorship. I mean, if you’re OK with Anduril existing, why oppose their sponsorship?
But sure, let me throw it out there anyway, what is the specific objection to an Anduril sponsorship? Because it hasn’t really been fully spelled out.
Is it that they are ultimately involved in the business of killing people? But this is a necessary and good thing, in this case. Is it that this would be a political decision? Yes, but so what? Or is it that, regardless of the ethics of Anduril’s work, people just don’t want to be associated with even necessary and just killing? Or is it that we don’t wish to alienate people who are opposed to Ukrainian independence?
It has. In several different ways. This comment is an example from two hours ago of spelling out why that commenter is opposed to any defense sector sponsorships. The comment immediately above it is an example of spelling out why that commenter thinks that sponsorships that spark a vocal controversy should be avoided. That’s just in the last three hours, on a thread with 100 comments, among two other relevant threads where many people have made a variety of different cases.
Don’t claim it hasn’t been spelled out if you can’t be bothered to scroll a dozen comments up to look for it. That is textbook sea lioning.
I’ll agree. But in the eyes of a risk-adverse corporate entity, is there a meaningful difference? Who’s to say the line in the sand won’t move tomorrow? Effective and precise policy language may help in this regard, but multiple reneging on sponsorships doesn’t put NixOS in a “predictable and obvious marketing win” position.
I’m skeptical of a way to phrase: “We welcome everyone to participate and sponsor Nix. Unless you do the following: anything we disagree with” in a way which won’t push businesses away. If a company is awarded a large government + defense adjacent contract, would they have to re-evaluate their relationship to nix? Are they suddenly evil?
I’m aware this is a slippery slope argument, but I’m also concerned that “additive requirements” (e.g. Companies MUST also do X, Y, Z), will be added in the future. And then the “ethics committee” will need to ensure that each company is in compliance of those statues as well.
In other words, I would like to minimize the reasons for a company to “say no” when giving NixOS money, donations, sponsorships.
…Why… how could… I mean, C is just something I think most people really dislike?
A-ha! Mayyyyyybe this is just a thing you dislike but nothing is actually wrong!
Please convince me that this is not the argument you’re trying to have by clarifying what sort of reason would satisfy your questioning, because it seems to me that the comments I link do give reasons that just don’t satisfy you.
(Also, the topic of this thread is the defense sector, not Anduril specifically, so posters here are naturally going to avoid the subject of what specifically is their problem with Anduril if they want to stay on topic.)
Edited to add: Here are five more comments, this time selected from the first 20 in this thread, containing well-articulated explanations for why those commenters oppose defense sector sponsorships.
Read up! I’m not going to do any more of these round-ups. If these five don’t satisfy you either, read the remainder of the thread yourself; I’m sure you’ll find more, and read the other threads if you want even more than that.
The lines in the sand moving day to day is a part of normal business conditions. Now another question is whether the line in the sand is drawn anywhere at all, and I get the impression that opposing the idea of drawing it is popular in this thread.
I guess you could word it so that being rejected for not-stated-before reasons becomes just as advertisable as being a sponsor, but cheaper, so why not roll the dice?
I think «not pushing businesses away» is not universally accepted as valuable either, or maybe people expect some subset of businesses to be clearly accepted even if on the whole it does not look safe without policies (naturally, «not pushing all businesses away» is valued higher by physical event organisers and by Foundation who runs the infrastructure…)
In part Amazon is not in this issue because it has been accepted that actively soliciting sponsorship to Foundation from them is fine. And that giving Microsoft the power to memory-hole parts of our technical decision making (presumably this is more than endorsement via taking a sponsorship?) is OK.
So if we want to have interpretable precedents, asking about the line in the sand is very natural, and we shouldn’t forget that good cases make case law if not enough care is applied.
It’s simply about whether there is a single «we» or «community» around the project. Cohesive enough to make decisions without either writing explicit policies (and refining the drafts until the annoyance with them looks balanced) or accepting whatever suboptimal but more consistent decision a small group people with a demonstrated long-term commitment to the project will make.
(I personally is fine the Foundation mimicking Apache and adopting «ad-selling» standards here; I am not in favour of refusing to divert military resources to things that also have civilian uses but I agree that an explicit policy that can be applied universally will work; case-by-case vibe-based decision making is a way to redo the whole dance more times than makes sense)
I think some of the broader condemnations are very natural to interpret as opposition in principle to existence of the weapon manufacturers. Nobody has called to any active direct action against them, this I agree.
There are a lot of posts in this thread by now. It is quite understandable you would choose to skim most of it. Allow me to summarise the difference:
Setting aside host country/venue limitations, compare sponsorship endorsing a Chinese/Russian/Iranian medical company to doing the same for an arms dealer from those countries.
Seeing a banner with the company logo or perhaps some inspirational renderings of their products in pampflets at the event, would you imagine that regardless of the kind of company, an attendee from Taiwan/Ukraine/Israel would feel equally safe and welcome?
I have no interest in continuing in this thread beyond what I have already mentioned, but felt it necessary to reply here.
How does one come to this determination? How do we decide which weapons dealers are acceptable? Do they have to be from your country? What about Russian contributors to NixOS? Do they need to be producing weapons for countries that don’t commit war crimes? I have bad news for you…
There are no good guys.
And yet, the problem we are discussing here is that many contributors do not want their work being used to advertise the sale of weapons and tools of war. That is the only ask here and, seemingly, that request is too much for some to even consider.