Linux

48057 readers

1047 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

122

Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS) (xeiaso.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

83 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

i'd like to see how you'd be measuring "performance" in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst "performance" you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren't equations you plug the "best people" into to achieve the optimal results, they're collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 "best people" to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.