I’d like to comment on this “Nix is a toxic community” idea in general from my POV. Not much of this has to do with this specific instance.
I started looking into NixOS about two years ago. There was news about some drama, I think even in Slashdot, so I was a bit scared (I think it may have been about a BDFL role). Today I’d characterize myself as being on the border of outside and inside the community and a pretty happy user of NixOS.
I was pretty surprised back then to find a community that I felt was actually quite well functioning and full of helpful people. Personally, I feel I’ve seen worse flame wars in the Python community than in the Nix community (neither is exactly unmoderated, and I personally find neither toxic). It was nothing like the dysfunctional broken family I expected from the reporting.
So, I’d rise a metalevel: From my experience, and in light of my experience of coming to the Nix community, it seems more like what is more damaging is the instinct of spreading the notion that the community is broken, unhealthy and toxic, as well as reactions to it instead of the underlying state of things. In my opinion—and, again, others may validly see this differently—a lot of the damage may originate from the “this is further evidence that we’re horrible, let’s discuss that” instinct.
What I am not saying: “We should hide our problems”. I’m not taking a position on what should have been discussed in private first and what not, especially in this case.
Now, I want to stress one more time:None of this has anything to do with this specific announcement or what has led to it. I learned of it 15 minutes ago and it feels premature for me to say anything at all about it.
i’m thankful for Alyssa and Emily writing their letter. there has been a leadership gap in this space for a while and quite a few of us are still searching around for the right model. i hope that part’s not controversial.
as we try different forms of organizing, it is valuable to properly introspect and understand which modes work or don’t work for us, and why. from that we decide as individuals and groups which forms of leadership to embrace and encourage. i think their letter does a suitable job of the first part, and respectfully leaves most of the second part to us.
i find it a tad disheartening that this is felt as a “denunciation”. the letter seems worded to highlight the different forms of organizing more than anything else. i understand how it could read harshly and won’t try to dismiss that, but i really would encourage a re-read without your SC cap on and more from the perspective of a neutral 3rd party or even “the everyday contributor” who’s trying to reason about how to build momentum within the project.
Yes exactly. thank you @rhendric. In particular, once the exit interview has happened and join statement has been posted, it have no problem with people posting whatever open letters they want.
I mean, from what the open letter is saying, the SC was difficult to work with. I don’t see how they’d have been expected to actually work with the SC and do an exit interview and create a joint statement when there are difficulties working together. To me, it’s clear that this format of open letter exists because the SC is cited as being difficult. This isn’t the first time the SC has been criticized (moderator team from a few months prior), and they cited similar reasons.
Also, as someone who has been part of the community for a few years, and has been seeing these issues pop up, I’d really like to see some proper facts. No disrespect to any one person, but this mess always feels like a “he said she said” scenario. There is no proper evidence for anything, there is different perspectives and opinions on the exact same issues, and there doesn’t seem to be a consensus or rebuilding, instead we just handle the downfall and move on. It seriously sucks to keep seeing this happen, and honestly it makes me question our governance structure in its entirety. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way, and I respectfully urge everyone who participates in the governance to take a step back and consider this.
The thing to note with this (and other similar efforts) is that the team stepping down publicly usually don’t give a lot of detail. In this case, the team made claims (micromanagement, SC being hard to work with, etc.) without evidence, the mod team had a bunch of “we have docs” without actually providing those docs for public scrutiny, etc.
It’s less “he said, she said” and more “he gave a biased complaint without evidence, she didn’t say anything because she’s still trying to maintain decorum.”
Stepping back from the situation entirely it’s hard not to see that the SC is operating under a tremendous handicap here: they have mostly refused to engage with accusations while their critics are free to say whatever they want without substantiation, and our community is more than happy to go along with those narratives without any critical analysis. Under such conditions no governance can be particularly effective–a community that doesn’t want governance can’t have it.
I do not construe the current state of affairs as a failing of the SC, but rather of an obdurate community and a minority of implacable members. Even if we were to entirely swap out the SC today–which I think would be a mistake–we’d still have the far larger other half of that problem.
Tell me you’ve never worked with the SC without telling me you’ve never worked with the SC.
These are fairly mild claims that are absolutely factually correct, and if you have specific questions, feel free to ask them of me or anyone else who interacts with the SC in a formal capacity.
The point of the original post was to explain why the core team was disbanding, not to indict the SC in the court of public opinion. Of course it didn’t come with receipts. That would have put the focus on the SC, which wasn’t the point.
Simply dismissing all criticism, evidence and critical analysis that was provided by simply stating it doesn’t exist and then turning around and calling “the community”, of which you are an extraordinarily vocal member, obdurate.
Interesting move.
You ran for the SC last year with the “keep Nix boring” slogan, so what’s your suggestion for how to handle the situation, faced with obdurate subjects as you would be, had they voted for you?
Which simply doesn’t describe what’s happening in this thread. Neither ex-core team member has participated in this particular back-and-forth at all, let alone presented claims without evidence. So which is the real subject of your ire: the ex-core team members, who were not trying to make things about the SC specifically, or the people in this thread, starting with SC members John and Christina, who are?
That’s a good question, and though gauche to stump here I can give an answer–even if I don’t run this year, I’d like to model in case it’d help anybody else out.
History:
The nixpkgs team, founded in I think the end of September of 2025, was originally four folks–k900, wolfgang, alyssias, and emilazy. k900 joined the SC and immediately stepped down from nixpkgs core in November 2025, wolfgang stepped down in January 2026. So, alyssias and emilazy have been minding the shop for a bit over half a year (and doing perfectly fine work).
They put out the call for new folks in May here, looking for volunteers from existing committers (I assume this means folks with a commit bit, not contributors more broadly).
Critically, they’ve also been on the forefront of a particularly large policy schism in the community, which is finding the answer to “How should NixOS and its community handle the advent of LLMs?” This is a thorny question with technical and political answers that are very different, and so I have no doubt (though I have no receipts) that they got a lot of heat for their policy statements. This was obviously complicated by the fact that at least one of their former members (wolfgang) has been strongly against the inclusion of LLMs (see his blocking review in the PR for a claude.md). This doubtless was a stress-causing state of affairs.
Finally, we have this stepping-down letter, which directly jumps into blaming things on the SC (third paragraph of the post specifically mentions the timing w.r.t. to the election and then is followed by a lot of thoughts on the SC and governance).
Alternate history SC:
So, there’s basically three points where (if on the SC) I think I’d do something: at the recruitment drive, at the AI stuff, and at the letter.
For the recruitment drive, we see that it’s been a two-person show for four months. Something the SC could offer would be to help with outreach. We could also start a weekly or bi-weekly recurring post for folks to join–basically, “hey, do you want us to also be trying to help remind the community that we need help as part of our weekly roundup?”.
This requires weekly or bi-weekly communication from the SC, which is something I’ve always been a fan of. I’d also ask how long they could hold out to get a sense of how urgent the problem is–if things are bad and if there are projects clearly listed out, the SC may be able to put out some contracts or RFQs to spend money to buy time and move some load off the team during the search.
For the AI stuff, I’d offer that the SC take responsibility for a final AI decision, absolving the nixpkgs team of pressure. This is the benefit you get from having a team over you (of governance more generally!): you can say “hey, we’ve given our recommendations, but if you’re not happy with it talk to the folks up there”. This is useful for tie-breaking in internal team discussions, for providing a meat shield for teams from the community, and for various other things. It’s something I think the SC should do more of…but this requires cooperation from the teams!
For the letter, there’s not a lot I’d do differently (given what external visibility I have into it). At that point, the team has already decided to leave; a thank-you-for-your-service and announcement of a recruiting drive is about right. If the team has mentioned specific issues, I think it’s reasonable to provide primary documents of the discussions so that the community can understand the context and we truth-seek together. I think that a policy of “you can be mad at the the SC, but if you want to take it to the court of public opinion instead of doing a joint statement we will provide exhaustive receipts” is reasonable and fair and democratic and transparent; if people don’t want that, they can coordinate a joint statement like most other healthy organizations.
I hope that answers the question to your satisfaction.
I don’t know if I will be running again this year–my own experience last year was unenjoyable for various reasons, and honestly I’ve got more immediately-rewarding things to work on–but I hope that there will be other candidates who see the utility in orderly, mature, civil behavior and offer to take up the cause.
For the voters–look at the minutes for the SC, look at the attendance, look at the public posts, and draw your own conclusions about who’s showing up to do the work and what work they’re showing up to do. In the spirit of the question Nadir posed, think about how–concretely, specifically!–you would handle the problems before the SC.
Oh, sorry - I managed to plan to do a reply to a specific earlier message and then in stead just hit reply to the thread in general
Though given the reply to your message here I guess it might as well have been for OP.
The notion that the exact collaborative difficulties at the core of the conflict somehow stop being a factor when figuring out communication on the exit… Or that any exit interview since the dawn of time does not hold a strong bias on narrative control and an obvious power differential?
Whether willful ignorance / naivete or sad attempts at manipulation, the stance only adds to the joke that is the nix leadership clown show ever since all this nonsense powered up with calls for more professionalism (yes, really - people said that and then all this) and freeze peach. I realize that the joke gets less funny as it is explained, but prior to the replies I had mistakenly thought it self-evident.
I would not worry about onlookers giving the project a pass when they see very public statements of discontent. Responses such as this - with the brilliant “why does this keep happening to us” byline - should drive the majority repulsive effect just fine.
Well, I’m somehow not laughing that we’ve gotten to the point that people appear to take a perverse pleasure in degrading and embarrassing others, so you’ll maybe have to explain this joke a little more to me.
If you could point me to the confusing bit, I would happily elaborate. It was my impression from previous replies that people did not truly desire a deep dive in this direction, but if I was mistaken I shall gladly be of assistance.
Any perverse pleasure you may feel or seek I can’t really help you with.
It’s the degrading cruelty in general. The team dissolved, and you’re joining in a finger pointing campaign, and somehow laughing about it. What do you get out of it? It appears cruel from the outside.
By voicing my dissent and explaining the scope I do exactly those two things.
The means by which I laugh is pointing out the ridiculousness of representatives of a movement I continue to hold responsible for the current state of the community expressing bewilderment when behaviour meets consequence. Incredulous, I choose humour as a healthier alternative to anger and sadness.
Thank you for your interest in my perspective. I’ll happily elaborate further, but as stated previously I am assuming that this direction of the thread is a bit more in the interest of you & I than the broader community or just the thread participants.
I really agree with this, because we have two wildly differing stories which should at least have something surviving we can all look at. One side says micro management, the other says that this stuff barely made it onto their agenda. Meeting notes / minutes / agendas should be able to resolve this specific point pretty quickly. If they can’t then the SC needs perhaps at minimum a secretarial position to make sure these things are handled going forwards. @JulienMalka publishes notes from time to time. That’s cool, we should do more of that. It’s been very enlightening to see vote tallys and decision logs when they show up for major points of contention.
I’m very much still a bystander as I don’t meet the contribution floor to vote, but this is the type of stuff that would help me vote.
Having gone through the minutes, it seems like the nixpkgs team shows up twice:
GSoC kerfuffle. This seems mostly like a botch job where differing people had differing opinions over how GSoC should be run and what it meant for nixpkgs for a GSoC project to be admitted.
AI policy overlap: At no point in that arc do I see anyone saying that the SC overrules anything, projects would have their own policies.
OTOH there seems to have been multiple complaints about “comms” in general, an agreement to invite the nixpkgs team, but the meeting never materialised, the minutes don’t seem to record if the invite was extended or declined.
At most it looks like maybe the SC is ineffective, but I see nothing that justifies accusations of micro-management or overreach. So on the face of it we have a another open letter slinging mud, and the discussion of the mud hived off to the side. We 100% get the governance we deserve.
A recent example, in which I’m going to paraphrase and anonymize everyone except for myself, in an attempt to balance ‘community should know how the sausage gets made’ and ‘we should be able to communicate with each other with an expectation of privacy’. It won’t be very exciting; if you’re here for drama, you’re about to be disappointed. I want current and future SC members to understand what we mean when we say that the SC micromanages and (dare I hope) to be motivated to do better — and, barring that, I want the electorate to recognize the difference between good managers and micromanagers and favor the former in future elections.
SC member #1 sent a message in the shared SC/bootstrap team channel about this PR, ‘recommend we close’. My response was:
I concur that it should be closed, by someone who ordinarily has responsibility for that repo (the Nixpkgs core team?).
I don’t think it by itself represents an abuse so extraordinary that either of our respective bodies should intervene publicly yet.
(In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have qualified that with ‘publicly’. I was thinking that someone might try reaching out to Wolfgang in private, not that what happened would happen.)
SC member #1 agreed. Another moderator said to leave it in the hands of the core team and let things play out.
SC member #2 then said that they’d forward the suggestion to close on to the core team.
Shortly thereafter, in a private conversation I was already having with one of the core team members, she complained of receiving a message from SC member #2 ‘suggesting a dictated action and wording for us’. Said message opened with ‘we were notified by the bootstrap/moderation team that ideally we’d close…’, which is probably why she was complaining to me about it. (Given that the SC started the conversation with us, this is a misleading framing, but that’s somewhat of a separate complaint.)
End of story. Is this all a big deal? No, definitely not. You could, if feeling generous, chalk this one incident up to miscommunication or any number of benign mistakes — including my own response. But it demonstrates how the ‘he said/she said’ quoted at the top of this post is a false dichotomy. None of this has appeared in any meeting minutes — all of this happened a day or two after this meeting. Nevertheless, it’s textbook micromanagement.
Nobody involved — not the SC, not the bootstrap team, not the core team — believed this PR was going to get merged. There was never any risk to the project that it would be; it’s so obviously a stunt. It’s not a particularly mature response to the situation, but it doesn’t require the SC to drop down and engage with it, if they actually trusted the core team to do the obviously correct thing on their own judgment and timeline.
Managers don’t tell their teams what to do on line items like this under ordinary circumstances. It’s one thing if you’re training someone or if there is a crisis or if you’ve determined the team needs to change its course. But when things are generally stable, good managers let their teams make decisions that maybe the manager thinks are suboptimal. They don’t dictate to their teams how to do things as soon as they see the potential for an issue on the horizon. If your manager does this to you, you’re being micromanaged. If you do this to your team, you are a micromanager.
This is the one event where I’ve had visibility into both the SC side and the core team side of their interactions, and the plural of anecdote is not data, so you can draw your own conclusions about how representative this is of broader patterns and so on. But from my perspective, everything that Emily Alyssa (sorry, misremembered!) wrote about the core team’s experience with the SC is consistent with what I know about how those groups work.
@rhendric thank you for your response. This is really useful. I had imagined the SC members acting under the aegis of SC authority being limited to officially documented decisions, minuted meetings etc. Mostly because of the name I see this perception is probably quite askew. Thanks again!
I see this perception is probably quite askew. Thanks again!