Answering your question is tricky to say the least. You are right that Jon appears quite level-headed and polite! He doesn’t call people names, he doesn’t outright troll people, and overall he seems very reasonable (and I’m still of the opinion that he is).
That said, our community as a whole is at the peak of years-long crisis. Historically, Nix community has been very welcoming of anyone tech-savvy and not outright hostile. We haven’t even had any moderation at all for a very long time, and we used to do things based on lengthy discussions and implicit authority that is based around people’s contributions. This might sound like a good thing, but it had backfired horribly on so many occasions. Flakes are in a half-baked limbo for eternity because people used their authority to push the feature without properly addressing community’s concerns. We are permanently short on people, because people with authority block any attempts to expand the teams. We are struggling with getting a lot of basic things done, because people with authority block any progress on that.
This is no exaggeration that this is a years-long crisis. There are people with authority in our community that are destroying the project and the community, and this authority is all implicit. A reasonable thing to do would be to ban those people from the project, as they are doing a lot of harm. But we can’t. We don’t have any formal structures in place to do that. Our moderation team is very limited in scope (as a result of people with authority limiting it!), and we don’t have anyone with actual explicit authority to ban people from the project.
As you can see, the situation is extremely dire. We desperately need to take decisive actions. The open letter was one of those actions. Jon’s input is, unfortunately, counterproductive in this case: the concerns he raises are valid, but he also misses the very important context of the situation being extremely bad. As such, he derails the sensitive conversation and wastes everyone’s time, when the clock is ticking like it never did.
To be clear: I’m not part of the moderation team, and I don’t speak for its behalf. This is my vision of a situation as someone who involved themselves with Nix Project for 3 years, without assuming some formal position. While I don’t want to see Jon gone from the community, I support the 6-week suspension: we really are in a terrible situation, and his input right now doesn’t help.
Regarding the Foundation: it is not a governing body. It just takes cares of administrative tasks, such as setting up events, NGOs, interacting with the sponsors, and so on. Moderation team isn’t a government body either: RFC 98 tried to establish it as such, and failed miserably. There are reasons to think that this failure (as long as all other failures at establishing a coherent governance model) are intentional sabotage from people who enjoy the implicit authority under the status quo.
The open letter calls this situation out, and wants to fix it. The open letter also depends on knowing a lot of internal context, so I’ve put out a text that aims to explain the situation concisely (shameless self-plug!).
I’ll add the section about RFC 98, Moderation team, and how it plays into this conflict, since it seems very apparent that people are confused about it, and are questioning moderation decisions in this case.