https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236
Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :
If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is: Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community
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I’d just like to remind the passing reader that creating an open source project does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to “make their own thing” if they don’t like it. Open source projects are the result of a massive collaborative effort and the resulting work is the product of a whole community laboring to make it happen. Signed: someone with a major mental illness.
does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to “make their own thing” if they don’t like it.
He not only wrote it but made it open source so if anyone doesn’t like what he’s doing they can take all of his work and make their own project.
The author of NixOS couldn’t have been more generous. If anyone doesn’t like it, they can take all his work that he did for free and make it their own project.
Threatening the creator is wrong.
I understand that and it is indeed a good thing to publicly license your work rather than keep that to yourself. Still, no matter how virtuous one’s actions are, that does not mean the people who come to deposit their time and work for a project should accept everything that person does simply because they started it.
People are entitled to argue about the project they participate in, and that is even more true for open source software, where the contributions of the community eventually become much greater than any single human can accomplish. I really do not understand this mentality of “this person created it, therefore if you don’t like any of their decision suck it up or go make your own fork”, it is very narrow and a horrible way to conduct anything, really anything, much less a collaborative project.
should accept everything that person does simply because they started it.
They don’t have to!!! He gave it to you for free to do with it what you want.
Giving you something for free doesn’t entitle you to threaten him.
I think you are missing the part where the community also gives back to the project. At some point the project isn’t really the creation of the original author anymore.
Which doesn’t matter because he’s already given everything to the community. If they want to take it in another direction, he’s already given it to them.
What I don’t get if you don’t like it why fight? It’s OSS just fork it and move on or choose another distro.
I think the easy answer to that is “because it is not as trivial as forking a small app that could run off of a git repo”, it’s a whole operating system involving a lot of infrastructure and a huge community around it. It might get forked, but people fight probably because they see value in what exists and would rather try and advocate for whatever direction they believe is best. Those who would disagree are not very different, just passive.
An even more trivial alternative is settling for “whatever the founder wants” and seeing the ability to fork as the final justification for this mentality. This is a lot less work, but also can amount to doing nothing, even if shitty decisions are being made. Even if that is your stance, you will have to fight for it. The alternative is everyone just sit idly and pretend not to have opinions. I’d much rather embrace the chaos that comes with collaboration and let it find proper processes to manifest.
I think the easy answer to that is “because it is not as trivial as forking a small app that could run off of a git repo”, it’s a whole operating system involving a lot of infrastructure and a huge community around it.
This It’s just an excuse. If the authors of the open letter are active developers and reflect what the majority of the community thinks then they already have the infrastructure (or big part of it, else how the fuck they work ?) and the community behing them. Man, it would not be the first time a distro to be forked.
I think people like you really don’t understand what OSS software is.
What you don’t understand is that OSS let you do what you want with the software I (an possibly others) created but not let you to dictate to me how I must run the project or what direction the project need to go.
We can discuss of course, and maybe sometimes I agree with you and sometimes not (and the contrary) but in the end I am the maintainer so I have the last word.So no, if I create an OSS project and have a vision for it, if you don’t agree I am fully entaitled to say “ok, just make your own, fork mine if you like” to you.
I guess it can be simple like that when you are the maintainer. It is definetly not as simple when there are many of them. Of course you can run it like that and many do, but the whole mentality is pretty limited.
My statement is not that you have to do whatever anyone asks in your project that you maintain. My statement is that a community that contributes towards a project has a say in it. You might want to ignore it, handle it BDFL-style, politely and cynically decline, whatever.
Not really about what is the absolute correct answer. Our values are clearly different. More like what I believe works best in the long term.
I guess it can be simple like that when you are the maintainer. It is definetly not as simple when there are many of them. Of course you can run it like that and many do, but the whole mentality is pretty limited.
Why limited ?. In the end I am pursuing my vision for the project.
Not really about what is the absolute correct answer. Our values are clearly different. More like what I believe works best in the long term.
I just acknowledge that at some point the vision of the author(s) and the vision of the community (or part of it) can differ and that at this point it is better for everyone to follow their vision.
If pursuing your own vision is the sole purpose intended, it would not be limited at all.