We should urgently ban and denounce Determinate Systems

I think everyone agrees at this point that determinate systems is a very obvious embrace, extend, extinguish effort, to capture a market on their proprietary flakehub platform, and move control of the project onto determinate nix. Arguing this at length repeatedly will only prolong solving the problem. They can trivially prove this wrong by implementing strong licensing measures that will ensure they can’t capture the project to disprove this. If they don’t, let’s not waste time arguing further.

Surely I’m not the only person that thinks we should just stop providing a platform for these efforts to capture the project. If we keep enabling them, and don’t take a more collective stance of denouncing Determinate Systems, we will likely succumb to these efforts.

Several lifetimes of open source effort has gone into this project, let’s not let a bunch of venture capital backed opportunists take that away from us. Even all the other companies in this community must realize that Determinate Systems proves an existential threat to their existence.

It may be the case that governance is too ineffective to get to the point here and act on this. It may be the case that a bunch of trolls will emerge on this thread. But maybe, for once, we take the nescesarry action in advance. I think this is likely gonna be one of the last times we get that opportunity, before the probabilities just get so skewed that this ship is never gonna turn around.

Alternatively, we should perhaps start to consider whether a stronger license for Nix/Nixpkgs is appropriate. I’m sure a lot of people will bikeshed on licenses below, but regardless, there does exist licenses that could prevent Determinate Systems from doing a proprietary capture, and the foundation exists as a legal entity that could enforce these.

Now that’s out there. Do or don’t. Determinate Systems won’t wait for us to find consensus.

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I heavily suggest waiting for an SC response rather than debating further.

Any response supporting or opposing holds weight only if it comes from an SC member or a statment from the SC as a whole.

I am a nobody, so feel free to ignore the above, but keep in mind that someone could very likely leave nixos again due to endless debates and discussions.

And it is not my intent to gatekeep or block futher debates, just a suggestion.

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Looking at the overall reactions, OP is definitely resonating with quite a few people. This led us to keep this open in hope it’d better voice concern and lead to some productive discussions, like we had in the announcement thread.

Turned out it was not. This thread is not going to a place we’ll all find a solution. We closed it to prevent more burnout for everybody (mod team included).

This is a immediate counter measure, and won’t fix the underlying issue.

17 Likes