Where do our morals come from in the Nix community?

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There are two ways humans build foundations for their morals, for purposes like religious movements or good-person-being.

One is called vertical morality. It’s built on authority and fear, and often but not strictly associated with organized religion. There is some common understanding or set of rules which determines who is good and bad, so everyone can see where on the vertical scale they belong and act accordingly. If there’s noone above you, you’re allowed to feel good. Lucky you. If you determine that you’re above someone else on the scale, anywhere really, you’re allowed to kick down, because you’re enforcing the order that you already know to be good. It’s great if you like religious wars, or culture wars. That’s because in practice it’s really hard for everyone to use exactly the same scale. Once we have successfully fought all the necessary battles though, we will be united in freedom and harmony we envision for our community.

The other one is called horizontal morality. It is built on empathy and not causing harm. It concedes that in practice we do not all share a very elaborate set of common values from the start, beyond seeing each other as people, or enough blood to spill to build them, and accepts this with humility. We have not walked in each others shoes. We do not necessarily know better. Luckily we do not need to do any of that to try to relate to each other through empathy. This is an antidote for is two or more groups causing each other immediate harm, in a spiral of escalation or endless back and forth, in service of preventing various abstract more hypothetical harms. It’s good for uniting people in a multi-lateral world. If that multi-lateral world sounds an awful lot like ideological extremism to you, I’ve got bad news.

Anyways, you might be wondering what this has to do with open source, or with this community in particular.

Well, lets look at different community as a reference first. Richard Stallman, the founder of the FSF, used to sometimes dress up as a saint. This was objectively funny, exactly because FSF was built on an extreme ideological foundation, by which I mean a vertical one. When presented with a choice, they can sort each thing in the world by how much non-free software it contains, and each person by how much free and non-free software they produce and consume. In the 80s and 90s, hey were deathly afraid of getting infiltrated and their members getting bought out by Microsoft. They also benefited from someone at the top using emas to read his emails to be top tog and keep the band together.
Their ideological foundation made it possible for them to show us a world based on their ideals. It also made them easy to dislike or get into an argument with, because they acted like they knew something others did not. Convincing others of the particular thing they were arguing for was their core mission, and them arguing with each other about the details of that thing also made sense in that context. They convinced many who are now part of this community.

Personally, I was nontheless delighted to hear Zoë Kooyman, the Executive Director of the FSF, at NixCon, reject claims of the FSF holding moral authority, and recinding the general concept of what she called “ladders of morality”. The FSF still carries the same ideals, but they conceded that there are other ways to sort the world, and that both their members and outsiders freely choose how to sort theirs. I would argue that this shift towards a more horizontal view of morality is not simply a concession to reality. People’s minds are generally more open if you try less hard to impose your beliefs onto them, especially if your promise of salvation does not carry with it the condemnation of their pre-existing way of life that comes with a lower place on your particular ladder.

No let’s bring this back to our community, where many people care a lot about fighing a particuar brand of ideological extremism, and it’s influence on our community.

Some of them might ask:

How do we fight extremism inside this community within the tighter constraints on behavior imposed by horizontal morality?

Not by being soldiers on the battlefield of *checks notes* software package management, but by embodying the change we want to see in the world.

  • By moderating our community based on immediate harm, and not letting crusaders off the hook based on some greater harm they claim to be preventing through kicking towards where their own personal moral compass points down.
  • By not being overeager to judge or shun those who we suspect have impure minds and hearts, as to not provide the caricature-like enemy or create the division and breakdown of dialog, that extremist views thrive on.

In an increasingly polarizing world, let’s not be an increasingly polarized community. Let’s be a bastion against increasing polarization itself.

That’s all very abstract. How would I ever apply that in my life?

If you wanted to step of the ladder and give horizontal morality a try today, there are a great many ways to do it. Be nice to or try to understand someone on this forum. I’m sure some of use hanging around here for the last few days desperately need it. If that doesn’t sound structured enough to be fun for your, try reading our Community Values instead, *pow* point one, and *pow* point two look pretty horizontal to me.

[Early in the text above multi-lateralism and extremism were flipped as a rhetoric device, to subvert the readers expectations. I’m sorry for deceiving you like that.]

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Okay.

We prioritise project health over individual interests. People with higher visibility within the project or towards the public are subject to higher expectations for their conduct.

Our priority here is to work on Nix projects for the benefit of all their contributors and users.

We value building excellent software with a vibrant and diverse community.

With the context from the The dire state of the SC thread, it seems to me like there are a few people who go against those values.

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You surely mean the people that deem it necessary to share the content of private conversations that were held in confidence without the other party’s consent, right?

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I think our morals should be “don’t discuss anything off-topic that even remotely resembles a conflicting/polarising topic, and keep discussions in official spaces to technical discussions about the project.”

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In that horizontal model community leaders are neither above us nor below. They are on the same level. They are people. We should not idealize them and we should not demonize them, and we should not use them to score points on the internet.

A public fight that could be avoided by questions like “What do you mean by that?”, or “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”, or “Are you OK with me publishing this?” is not a good fight to have, as a community. It’s very eroding, and for no good reason.

People with higher visibility within the project or towards the public are subject to higher expectations for their conduct.

Is definitely a good thing, but it can in no way imply

People with higher visibility within the project or towards the public are subject to lower expectations for conduct towards them.

generally, someone that has to accept some lower expectations for conduct towards them, subject to further discussion within a term limit is called a parent.

All of the discussion on actual subject matter happens on top of this base layer of mutual respect. If we cannot manage that, there is an election is two weeks, and there will be another one in a year. This is not the same as if we were fighting with some bureaucratic entity that we have no control over. Making our voices heard is OK, but trying to assert control over elected officials outside the democratic process we built is definitely not. It undermines that process we built.

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Separating social stuff from technical stuff doesn’t really work and there is a great talk transcript that explains why: A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy

Here’s one excerpt from the talk, as an example:

There’s a great document called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction,” which is about the wizards of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis’s Xerox PARC experiment in building a MUD world. And one day the wizards of LambdaMOO announced, “We’ve gotten this system up and running, and all these interesting social effects are happening. Henceforth we wizards will only be involved in technological issues. We’re not going to get involved in any of that social stuff.”

And then, I think about 18 months later, the wizards come back, extremely cranky. And they say, “What we have learned from you whining users is that we can’t do what we said we would do. We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.”

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The thing you are straw-manning here is simply the nature of all societies everywhere in all places and at all times. Every organization of humans establishes a common understanding or set of rules.

Without a set a common values you cannot even define what harm is.

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the defense industry has been backdooring software and subverting trust in our own systems for decades. i won’t replay the history of NSA, NSO group, etc: just last year’s xz exploit attempted to subvert every software user, specifically leveraging how we package and distribute software. it’s not publicly attributed; ask an Anduril employee: they’ll say “state actor”.

i don’t know all of what Anduril does, except that it’s explicitly supporting state warfare: the industry its selling to and developing for would gladly buy backdoors or other influence from them, if they chose to market such things. Palmer Luckey would jump for that opportunity: tell me otherwise with a straight face – if you (the reader) are a voter, we can revisit the history alluded to above together. Ed25519 is a prime example of how sensitive the broad ecosystem is not just to demonstrable exploit, but to perceived loss of trust.

my specific view on this isn’t universal, but if you’re caught up in the moral angle of things see if it makes more sense to you when viewed as an issue of trust.

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the defense industry has been backdooring software and subverting trust in our own systems for decades. i won’t replay the history of NSA, NSO group, etc: just last year’s xz exploit attempted to subvert every software user, specifically leveraging how we package and distribute software. it’s not publicly attributed; ask an Anduril employee: they’ll say “state actor”.

My understanding is that, across the entire cybersecurity industry (including the MIC!), that’s considered the most likely scenario.

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