- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.
even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.
the fascists in the community proposed to finally moderate nixos properly, and this is their body of evidence of terrible leftist harrasment.
Kind of fascinating that last link leads with references to lobste.rs, and Srid, a terrible person who was banned from the site 3 months ago: https://lobste.rs/~srid
(Irenes is a mod and a good one too.)
oh wow, somehow I called that Standard is a fascist land-grab for control over the Flakes standard library (and it also just really fucking sucks to use)
they really are doing their damndest to reframe all of this as minor drama, aren’t they? it’s kind of amazing how limited the techfash project takeover toolbox is — cause it doesn’t take much variation in methodology to succeed, unfortunately. for better or worse, what’s going on in Nix is probably going to be worth writing about in the end.
I tipped Liam from el Reg about it, he could do a decent summary maybe
“popular Linux distro gets taken over by nazis” does have a ring to it as an article title
um
ok, popular with me specifically
It’s funny, by some metrics it is intensely popular: GitHub contributor count and daily commit volume would be two… but it definitely is a vanishingly small user base compared to Fedora or Ubuntu or, lol, Android, ofc.
That contributor count metric is also a fun one to consider when people complain about politics in OSS - this is the size of a small municipality, of course there’s going to be politics.
“Defending murder professionals isn’t defending actual murder guys. MODS!”
I really feel bad for poo-pooing my undergrad software ethics class. I could be a murder-machine builder right now if I hadn’t accidentally found certain spaces online and had the right friends.
I know approximately nothing about Nix (or computers really lol), but I do know that if your community crisis has reached the point that someone suggests using the orange site as a guiding star, you’re fucked?*
*edit for obligatory appending of ?