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’m not gonna read this person’s Evangelion analogy, but I did go to the trouble to hunt down what Jon Ringer actually did.
I don’t agree with him, and representation of particular minority groups, including gender minorities, are important when they are particularly under attack. It is important to actively resist the marginalization of groups under attack by elevating their voices.
That said, I’m not sure what Jon did was actually “actionable”. I’d say, stop listening to him and treating him as a leader? As someone with lots of close trans friends, I think this guy lowkey sucks, but I think this suspension is weird.
I’m not gonna read this person’s Evangelion analogy, but I did go to the trouble to hunt down what Jon Ringer actually did.
Here’s a link.
Thanks. From the same page I found this which has a tl;dr which is maybe useful for other readers.
The open letter is very vague at some points. It tries to outline some real issues that require years of context to fully grasp. Without having this necessary context - it is very hard to follow some of the points made, and evidence seems very poor.
This repository aims to list some key points that are easy to understand without all of the context. This is a compilation of damning evidence for Eelco’s leadership, essentially.
If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:
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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
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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
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Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority
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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
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Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community
OP, you should add that link to the body of your post. It seems to be the best source so far.
Thanks.Done.
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Thank you. Reading the blog was a complete train wreck that left me more confused then informed.
Looking at this from the outside as a non Nix user, I see two things:
- The community is melting down over something.
- If this is the state of the Nix community where will the support go when it fractures?
If I was asked to evaluate NixOS for something and saw this, I’d keep looking, because this spells disaster for ongoing maintenance.
Not the drama itself should influence your judgment, but how they will deal with it.
Whenever people work together on something, there will be some drama, but if they are dealing with it, then that should be fine.
Nix and NixOS are big enough, that even if it fails, there are enough other people that will continue it, maybe under a different name.
Even it that causes a hard fork, which I currently think is unlikely, there are may examples where that worked and resolved itself over time, without too much of burden on the users, meaning there are clear migration processes available: owncloud/nextcloud, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo, redis/valkey, …
I didn’t understand a thing about what the actual issues were.
Based on comments I can see that Jon Ringer objected to inserting gender minority person as a requirement for committee board.
So, why is he wrong? I totally agree that gender minorities deserve recognition, but making it a hard requirement for having a committee board sounds like nepotism.
This is a basic represention and inclusion issue. Unless you are actively seeking out voices of those minorities and addressing their concerns you will have a reinforcing loop where behaviour that puts people off engaging will continue and it will continue to limit people from those minorities being involved (and in the worst case causing active harm to some people who end getting involved). From what I understand the behaviour that has been demonstrated and from who those people leaving it is clear this is active issue within Nix. Having a diverse range of people and perspectives will actually make the outputs (software) and community generally better. It’s about recognising the problems in the formal and informal structures you are creating and working to address them.
Additionally, but just to clarify nepotism would be giving positions based on relationships with people in power and not ensuring that your board contains a more representative set of backgrounds and perspectives.
Suppose I have 1000 people from community and 10 out of them are gender minorities. I then have 5 projects, each with 10 members on board committee, and I want a representative of gender minority in each of them. And I choose hard workers based on merit, the best of the best.
In such case I will be choosing 9*5 = 45 people out of 1000, and specifically I add 1*5 = 5 people out of those 10.
So the board committees will have 45 members each with (worst case) 955/1000 = 95.5% percentile performance, and additionally 5 members of gender minorities, each with mediocre 5/10 = 50% performance.
The gender minorities will perform worse, because we specifically singled them out of the crowd. This is not how you improve diversity.
Hold up, let me just make up some numbers real quick to prove how wrong you are!
He is not wrong though.
Number aside, if you have a hard requirement that in a committee board there should be someone from a minority then you will end in a situation where the committee perform worse because the “forced” member has no merit to be in, or at least it is an very high probability.where the committee perform worse because the “forced” member
Ah, the common strawman. A committee where everyone thinks pretty much the same is somehow better than one where a few have a different opinion?
Such discussions took place decades ago when pretty much every manager was only male. And they often honestly thought they did the right thing. When there were more women forced to be managers the group as a whole got better insights into different opinions. Which helped to see that certain things could be done a different way.
That to me is history, plus rather logical.
Having a few people with different opinions is further usually good for a committee. Though some like every single person to think the same, more efficient or something. If most think the same it’s way easier to overlook something.
where the committee perform worse because the “forced” member
Ah, the common strawman. A committee where everyone thinks pretty much the same is somehow better than one where a few have a different opinion?
Sometime yes, sometime not.
It all depend on the context. The direction of a project ? Then maybe the fact that the committee has at least roughly the same vision is a good thing, it keep the project focused and progressing, as long as there is a way to offer suggestions.
A political group ? Then it is better to have more points of view, as long as you can decide something in the end.
There is not a single best solution.
Such discussions took place decades ago when pretty much every manager was only male. And they often honestly thought they did the right thing. When there were more women forced to be managers the group as a whole got better insights into different opinions. Which helped to see that certain things could be done a different way.
That to me is history, plus rather logical.
On the other hand I can point to examples where when a woman, to stay within your example, were put in charge the result were disastrous, so what ?
Maybe if we start to think that being in some groups does not inherently make you a better candidate to something than we will start to solve the problem.Having a few people with different opinions is further usually good for a committee.
As long as they know what they are talking about yes, else it is just stupid.
The point of all this discussion is that Jon Ringer objected to have an hard requirement for one person in the committee need to be from a minority, which honestly is not that stupid thing to say.Maybe if we start to think that being in some groups does not inherently make you a better candidate to something
The argument isn’t that they’re better, but that having a wider range of opinions and perspectives within the leadership group improves it more than a strictly merit-based approach would.
Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn’t make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination. In practice performance (‘merit’) is complex interaction between an individual’s skills and talent and the environment and support they get to thrive. If you have an environment that structurally and openly discriminates against a certain subclass of people and then chose on “merit” you are just further entrenching that discrimination.
This is a project that seemed to be having specific problems on gender that was causing harm and leading to losing talent. In a voluntary role particularly this is a death spiral for the project as a whole. Without goodwill and passion open source projects of any meaningful size just wouldn’t survive.
I’m glad you care enough about diversity and evidence to have worked out how to solve these problems without empowering and listening to those minorities. Please do share it.
Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn’t make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination.
So remove discrimination. Put in the CoC that any information about gender, race, religion and so on must not be disclosed since it is not relevant to the quality of the code/work you submit. Then you have merit only.
I really find stupid that someone really think that his contribution must be accepted just because he is from a minority, irregardless the quality.
You say remove discrimination and then use a discriminatory strawman. No one is suggesting a code contribution must be accepted based on a minority status. They are saying that to get a decent functioning community for everyone you need a diverse range of people in positions that set the behaviour of the community. You can’t get the CoC and enforcement of it right unless those affected are in positions that influence it. Your enforced anonymity doesn’t work because there are other ways of gendering and racialising people (e.g. based on who people talk). Additionally, what you are saying is that minoritised people have to hide who they are so they don’t get discriminated against rather than just deal with those doing the discrimination. They are called communities because that’s what’s they are: people want to be part of something and that involves sharing a part of themselves too. Open source projects live or die on their communities because they mostly don’t have the finances to just pay people to do the work. You need people to beleive in the project and not burn out etc.
You lose nothing by making sure people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity and enjoyment being part of it. If you aren’t in a minority and don’t care about those that are then just say so!
It is impossible to satisfy all minorities at once. The best outcome is to pick an adequate, sane person from the community with proper mindset and proper judgement, irrelevant if they’re from a minority or not.
It’s not about “satisfying the minorities”. It’s about ensuring a basic base level of respect and behaviour for people from all backgrounds. The roles you are talking about were specifically to deal with the fact there was an active problem around that minority in that community that needed dealing with. So bringing in that lived experience is absolutely important. Someone can be adequate, sane, have “proper” mindset and judgement and be from a minority that is currently being targeted with lived experience of the problem. Dealing with issues around diversity and inclusion make life easier and better for everyone: it’s well evidenced. I benefit daily from work that’s been done to make my area easier for people with disabilities despite not having one. Those only came about by people with disabilities challenging and getting in the room where decisions are made.
It’s really not that hard! If you don’t feel minoritised in your daily life and therefore don’t see the importance, fine, but all of us are only one incident or cultural shift to end up being the target so if you aren’t motivated by the plight of people you are happy to “other” than do so because one day you might be the other.
You say remove discrimination and then use a discriminatory strawman.
Why ? Because I basically say “keep these personal informations for yourself since they are not needed while developing” ?
No one is suggesting a code contribution must be accepted based on a minority status.
But they are saying that a board member should be elected based on the fact that he came from a minority, which is as wrong as asking that a code contribution should be accepted based on the minority status.
They are saying that to get a decent functioning community for everyone you need a diverse range of people in positions that set the behaviour of the community.
Agree on this. My point though is that the people in these positions need to be there for the merit and not for a status.
You can’t get the CoC and enforcement of it right unless those affected are in positions that influence it.
Nope. You can enforce a CoC if the ones delegated to enforce it are acknowledged as authoritative people and there is a clear path to do it. If you put a person in charge to enforce the code “just becasue [insert your favorite minority reason]” you end in the same place: the CoC will be selectively enforced only on a certain group of people.
Your enforced anonymity doesn’t work because there are other ways of gendering and racialising people (e.g. based on who people talk).
Assuming you track them outside the project, yes you are right.
Additionally, what you are saying is that minoritised people have to hide who they are so they don’t get discriminated against rather than just deal with those doing the discrimination.
That is what you are saying now, not me.
I said that I don’t care about what your identity is but only about the quality of your work, why did you assume that i mean that only the minorities should not disclose these informations ?Else explain to me why it is relevant that the pull request just created is done by someone from a minority group.
You lose nothing by making sure people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity and enjoyment being part of it.
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. I lose something if a board member of the project I contribute is elected only because he is from a minority group because he replace a more knowledgeable member and the average quality of the work decline.
If you aren’t in a minority and don’t care about those that are then just say so!
It is not that I don’t care, it is that in certain situation it not pertinent if you are from a minority or not. Software development, particularly OSS where the entry point is really low, is one of this situation: why I should care about the group you are part of when you submit a contribute ? How it is pertinent. Do you want to have a voice in the project ? Earn it by contributing and being better of the ones you think are bad and or toxic. But wanting to have a say in the project “just because” is toxic too.
There are two tensions here:
- Community building
- Code production
Community building can be done without any coding, coding can be done without any community. However, to build a large project you need them both.
In a large volunteer project like this, not everything can be worked on. You become selective. We are going to major on this thing, or specifically talk about that project to get community engagement and get the thing done. This drives the project, she helps it to stop chasing hairs. Someone has to decide what feature is going in this release to make it ready to be a release candidate.
That group of people, ultimately making and influencing those decisions, is the CoC.
Let’s take a for-instance: Sign up boxes.
For years, Linux sign up allows you to record random data into your profile, office, phone number, etc. These are text, and can be anything. Now, what if there’s a rising need to add a minicom number(minix, used to be used by the deaf to send messages to an organisation, before email). As a hearing person, this is going to be a low priority for me, so I work on something else. I’ve got spare capacity, so if the project leaders are calling for help on this thing, I can go and help.
This, ultimately, builds a better over-all product, but it’s not something I’d have noticed by myself, because I’m not part of the deaf community.
In our example with NixOS, asking for someone from the community to be a representative on it is not about code quality, but about the issue of visibility. Is there some need that that section of the community needs? Is there a way that the community can do y thing to make the os as a whole more accessible? I don’t know the answer, because I’m not a member of that community, just as I’m not a member of the deaf community.
In this case, the merit, the qualification, for being on the CoC is being a member of a section of the community. It brings valuable a viewpoint, and adds a voice at the table that can make a real difference. Most coders know that having a wish list of features at the start can make it infinitely easier to add them, than having to go back an rewrite to make them happen. Having a voice that might need that feature makes a difference
The debate for CoC is about merit, but merit isn’t just stubbornly focused on a single talent, it can also be about life experience.
I think you are right here. By cherry-picking gender minorities we sow a dissent and we underline their “otherness” from everyone else.
I am from an ethnic minority myself, and somehow people perceive us as maniacs and killers, try to burn our houses and fire us from work. Often it’s the same people who preach equality and diversity. Somehow in my case they don’t care about “empowerment” or “representation” at all. And somehow, the only place I feel comfortable is 4chan, where no one gives a damn who you are, and everyone’s racist and sexist. To everyone else. Equally.
That reads like someone with minor mental illness. Rambling. Evangelion. Rambling.
I clicked their resume and there’s no evidence they contributed a single line of code to the project. Yet they demand the person who wrote most of it step down? Yeah.
Write your own project and manage it how you want. Don’t threaten others. Do your own thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would also like to have made this a video of some kind to make it more personal (mostly so you can hear my voice and intonation/emotion in it), but it would take me too long to make it at my current production schedule timelines. I’ve already been spending a fucking month working on a mostly done Pikmin 3 speedrun video that has been constantly interrupted by this shit. As much as I’d like to do this, I don’t think it’s in the cards.
Ok please don’t hang me for this, I’m genuinely curious. Why does it seem like the only people who are upset about NixOS are 1. transgender, and 2. can’t actually pinpoint exact problems, or offer any solutions, but expect other people to magically change somehow?
Is there something I’m missing?
Why are identity politics even allowed to be discussed in an unrelated field (software development) in the first place? Seems it always just leads to people getting upset when you can just not talk about it as it’s really not related at all to my knowledge.
What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development? Software development is deeply entrenched in politics. It’s just that, just as in most topics that don’t have politics as their main thing, a lot of people would rather pretend it’s not.
Any community of people presupposes politics. If it doesn’t show, most likely it’s a very narrow or homogeneous group of people, which involves excluding/shunning others to defend this narrowness. So that has its own sort of problem too.
What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development?
The fact that the code quality is independent from your “identity” ?
I didn’t see where the author brought up gender in this article.
Why are identity politics even allowed to be discussed in an unrelated field (software development) in the first place? Seems it always just leads to people getting upset when you can just not talk about it as it’s really not related at all to my knowledge.
I can kinda agree here. In the open source community, identity politics should be especially irrelevant. The FOSS licences are explicitly designed in a way to not discriminate based on such factors like race, religion, gender, nationality, biological sex, political views, etc.
However, from what I can gleam from the blog, it seems somehow related to the COC, maintainer behavior and a lack of transparency rather than “identity politics”. In what way, idk because the blog doesn’t seem to specify any specific verifiable incident, at least from what I can tell. But I will say, that if it is a matter of the COC, that the COC is supposed to be a protection of the right for an individual to be able to express themselves in an environment that won’t prosecute them.
So, in this regard it’d make sense to if say someone was being miss gendered maliciously for example, it’d violate the COC. In this regard, the right to express oneself doesn’t give someone the right to harass others because they disagree with how someone else is expressing themselves.Edits : restructuring and clarification.
So basically it’s a matter of transparency (or lack there of)?
Sorry, it’s a lot to read and reading OCD doesn’t help.Yes, it’s a lot to read but I’m just the messenger and not capable to do a tl;dr.
- Posted because the blog author is a person that I’ve seen blog posts from before, and maybe it fits with the previous posts on Lemmy about NixOS. Here a video of what the person made with NixOS booting an old Super Mario 64 game https://cdn.xeiaso.net/file/christine-static/static/blog/boot2mario.mp4 which shows the magic of NixOS. Related blog post https://xeiaso.net/blog/super-bootable-64-2020-05-06/
deleted by creator
This post contains massive spoilers for Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion, and the four part revival Evangelion movies.
A Cruel Angel’s Thesis
In order to properly convey the level of emotions that I feel about this situation, I need you to understand the weight of The End of Evangelion.
I can’t get through this article without leaving quotes of it as comments.
What is the problem ? What particular decisions are we taking about beyond the apparent power struggle ?
