this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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, ....

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Guix is a pretty good evolution of nix IMHO. I like both through