valid moral objections

That's the thing, whether or not they're valid depends on the person you're asking.

I personally think this is a load of bullshit and just another instance of slacktivists trying to guilt people into doing their bidding.

Hopefully the leader in question doesn't change a single thing due to this pressure. He would be a helpless child if he didn't have the strength to resist this kind of peer pressure from online drama.

They're kind of welcoming and accomodating with that. I've sent some drive-by PRs towards NixOS and it was always very easy and productive interactions.

But I guess it's more complicated at that scale. You can't just do whatever like in smaller projects. Someone needs to be in charge of money and finances, there will be dissent that doesn't just go away on its own. And mid- to longterm decisions need to be made. Architecture decisions and sometimes that's not easy and might be contrary to what the community needs and wants right now. It's just a lot of overhead, but larger projects work quite differently from smaller ones.

You have to look at the history of NixOS for it to make sense.

It started out small and there was a small group of people hacking away on a cool project in their free time. Of course they had shared interests and so would like to hang out together to discuss. That is how the community formed.

At first neither the community nor the distro were big, and so there wasn't much tensions. When something needed to be done/paid for, some member of the community just took it up and did it, doocracy-style.

Then as time went on and both the software world and Nixpkgs got more complex, the resource usage got outside the realm of "some dude just runs a build box in their basement" and "some other dude hosts a binary cache on their Uni's servers". There were commercial players willing to donate money and resources, but that needed some management, both financially and logistically. This is how the Foundation was formed, at first just by the project's founder and some trusted friends.

Simultaneously, as the community attracted more and more people, it started to feel less like a tight-knit group of friends and more like a town square: you know a couple folks well, kinda recognize most usernames, but can't say you're familiar with everyone. Some discussions got heated, and it became clear we would need moderation; that's how the moderation team formed.

Another aspect of community growing was that you could no longer just host a meetup at a local cafe and needed a dedicated space and such for everyone to fit it. This is how NixCon started, and since it costs money to rent a space, there were calls for sponsorship.

At some point, Anduril (a US MIC company with suspiciously fascist-like opinions and tech) started using Nix. Since they wanted to hire Nix engineers and in general wanted to do have sway in the Nix community, they sponsored a conference. People really didn't like that, there was a huge drama with open letters and maintainers leaving. The drama also uncovered some other rifts in the now quite massive community, e.g. contributors were unhappy with the direction Eelco (the project's founder) was taking Nix itself, and how many PRs into Nix, including crucial bugfixes, remained unreviewed for months.

This prompted a bunch of relatively trusted people in the community coming together and drafting up the constitution, which formed a new formal, elected governance body for the community, the Steering Committee, who had the final authority to manage all aspects of community governance (except finances). After the first SC election things calmed down a bit. Eelco semi-voluntarily left the Foundation and most other positions of power, the Nix maintainer team grew and that helped a bit with PR reviews, etc.

But it seems now Anduril has hired a member of the SC (after they were elected), once again prompting people to be rightfully upset about them trying to insert themselves in the community. There's also some mostly unrelated thing with SC trying to control the moderation team (the control which they do have according to constitution), to do some potentially shady things.

Hopefully this lets you see why NixOS needs a community, and community governance, in order for things to work at all. Someone has to host the binary cache, run the builders (which needs some entity to manage finances - the Foundation); review PRs (that needs discussions and those discussions need the moderation teem to keep them productive); and merge them (that needs committers, which requires deciding who's trustworthy enough to do that).

And yes, you can just make PRs or send patches without community participation. Most folks in the community are both super nice and technically knowledgeable, regardless of their political stances. But the community has to be there. I really hope that both theses things get resolved during the next SC election (which is in a month or so).

If it’s rejected and enough other people are interested in the change, it can be forked.

And actually both the Nix project (as in, the codebase) and the community had seen multiple notable "forks" over the years: GNU Guix started out as a Nix fork, there's also Tvix which is a Rust rewrite, Lix which is a code/community fork that happened after the first Anduril drama, etc. The latter two kind of rely on Nixpkgs and the associated build/cache infrastructure because maintaining that is expensive.

Lix

Lix is an independent variant of the Nix package manager, developed by a team of open-source volunteers, and maintained by and for a passionate community of users.

^Lix

I see, thanks for the overview.

If NixOS really does need a community in order for things to work at all, and it cannot be independent from it, then it looks like the moderation team asking for independence is a hard ask. It'll require restructuring it.

However, with this context it looks to me that what they are asking is not really independence for the moderation team, but independence from Anduril.. which are 2 completely different things. The message is misleading.

Well, yes, there are two separate contentious points.

The Anduril thing actually happened a month or so ago. I feel like this will be resolved at the next election, since tomberek's term is ending and I don't think he will be reelected, knowing how much most people in the community hate US MIC.

The moderation team independence is more complicated. It looks like the Steering Committee tried to remove a member from the moderation team, and also tried to push a new member onto it. I don't know the exact details there. If we just read the constitution, the SC has that power, but the moderation team was very unhappy with what they see as meddling in their affairs for political reasons, and decided to quit out of protest. I feel like the new member was a right-wing (in the context of the kinda leftist Nix community anyway) political appointment (since the stated reason was "to balance things out politically" and the mod team was mostly leftist), but don't know for sure and this is pure speculation. In any case, I think the moderation team is special and should not be under complete control of the SC (unlike purely technical teams). I don't know how that would look like, and indeed as you say a restructuring is needed. Maybe the SC should only be able to veto people joining the team, but the candidates have to be chosen by the mod team themselves, and in order to disband the mod team the SC must disband themselves too. Otherwise the moderators will have no good way to moderate any discussion involving SC.

First things first: a simple search for “anduril nixos” shows that NixOS and Anduril Industries (defense technology) have been entangled for years.

It's more like Anduril using Nix{OS} and trying to insert themselves into the community. There's been a lot of opposition to that, including an open letter and maintainers quitting; this was a big part of the reason for Steering Committee formation in the first place. The SC has since voted on some based things, like banning Anduril from job posting on community forums and sponsoring conferences. I was hoping they would just ban any mention of Anduril anywhere, but that's going too far for them unforutenately; and banning technical contributions wouldn't make sense.

An SC member joining Anduril (after being elected, not before, mind you) is really bad, but I bet they will lose their seat in a month's time when there's a new election. The community is mostly antifascist and thus anti-MIC. It's like one of the most leftist technical communities I've seen, perhaps more so than Rust.

It’s like one of the most leftist technical communities I’ve seen, perhaps more so than Rust

Rust is on the left? That's (cough) GNUs to me ;).

The most ridiculous thing in the conversations I read was someone arguing that the fact that Anduril has a member at SC (Steering Committee) weakens their position. The mental gymnastic is so insane to me because it completely naively expect people who have a conflict of interest to do the right thing. What if they don't ?

The argument there was that they would be excluded of any votes related to said company.

It reads as an "honor" system rather than any objective exclusionary mechanism. Steering committee members are expected, and to their credit, were considered to have done so, but it all seems like judgement calls.

It is fully possible that grey areas or instances where other SC members didn't personally care, were not met with recusal.

It would overall be better to not have those conflicts be likely or even possible.

The current political climate is really stupid making people unsure about what to do.

FTFY

Banned from community

Also, a fraction of packages, users and guides.

I think Guix is great, but as a NixOS enthusiast who genuinely wanted to try it out, I gave up in the face of the lack of docs for people who aren't working in lab or have a PhD in computing of some sort.

Also, how is shepherd better than systems? Genuinely curious.

Lastly, I agree Nix is not a very enjoyable language, but scheme doesn't look like a very beginner friendly option either. Could be wrong, I'm not a programmer.