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
I guess you can, yeah.
My point is not that you can’t. You clearly can. And many do. The thing is, when you create your foundation that “you fill with whoever you see fit”, when you faithfully believe that the BDFL will “stop them doing stupid things”, or that you get to choose your board members arbitrarily and tell everyone it’s not a democracy like you are proud of running it as a dictatorship, that’s just a incredibly narrow and toxic culture you have set up. It’s not impossible. The ethic you are posing is actually quite widespread in the world I live in, anyone arguing for it will get many around to agree, it’s very assertive and rightful. Still, a shitty choice the way I see it. And from this bleak outset of things, I suppose forking is indeed the only option you have.
It was literally what you said, even if you didn’t mean it to be. And I don’t think that being a dictator for your project is necessarily “toxic”, I have projects that take contributions and I work on others that do not. Bikeshedding, and horrible politics, are both real things and sometimes for your own sanity, not engaging is the only option because community is not the reason I work on some tasks.
Some projects are just natural candles to moths who will talk to the projects like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to_github_and_i_have_lots_to_say/
Fuck that.
What I mean is that no one will stop you. When you ascertain your own right to do it, it doesn’t mean much that I don’t believe you are entitled to it. It’s pretty much common practice. That is more a semantic matter at this point, but yes I stand by that being messed up for a project the size of Nix.
Yeah, it is not necessarily toxic. It is at a lot more risk of being, though. Even a collectively managed project will mess up and upset the community, but then there is a sense of shared responsibility and more deliberation on what to do. With a BDFL, it’s just whatever. After your project reaches a certain size, that risk keeps increasing… exponentially.
Precisely. You see, if we take this into the context of a smaller project, specially one managed by a single person as you seem to be coming back to, that is a very different context. I don’t think an OSS maintainer should be laboring physically and emotionally to meet the demands of users. That is a well-known problem there. If this person doesn’t even want to have contact with the community and just ship code once an year, fine. They are just sharing things with the world at no cost. In this context, “suck it up and just fork it” is indeed the way to go.
When you take something as big as NixOS though, that can really be inverted. Now you have a very large number of people who are laboring physically and emotionally to sustain a very large project, and the original creator shifts to a very different place to. It’s another discussion entirely.