Comment by ordinaryradical
1 year ago
Open source is probably one of the most accessible forums of direct democratic action. If you have the majority and leadership will not cede to your will, you fork the project and break away.
If you lack the majority, you have fewer options, most of which devolve to coups and forcing an ouster.
I don’t know how to read this letter in any other light.
I think it may also be symptomatic of the peculiarly leftist failure of assuming the inevitability and reasonableness of their positions as universal and that to disagree makes one a priori a bad actor.
Only one signer is in the top 200 contributors to Nixpkgs. That number is still the same even if you count signers in the top 500, too.
A group that _barely_ uses Nix wants to overthrow its creator. This is hilarious and I hope they don't win.
I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors
> Only one signer is in the top 200 contributors to Nixpkgs. That number is still the same even if you count signers in the top 500, too.
An 18000 commit user just left NixOS FYI
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/major-nixpkgs-contributor-leav...
Also of note, several of the people casually name-dropped in the letter, are not signatories. As well as several of the folks that I have seen publicly express that displeasure with even the most recent sponsorship policy.
This to me, says a lot. I been around Nix. There are some names on that list that hurt, that will be missed, but I honestly expected worse, given the self-important tone and demands the letter contains.
I posted this somewhere else, but I feel it's important to note here:
Forking Nix would take an immense amount of effort, and the maintainers are already overworked. There would absolutely be a community split, which means that there would be even more work required than before to just maintain both of the forks and keeping them in sync. The nix language itself has no spec right now, meaning the behavior is defined by the singular existing implementation. Forking Nix itself will very likely introduce incompatibilities that are impossible to remedy. A lot of the power of nix comes from nixpkgs (where the entirety of NixOS is maintained as well), its build system hydra and the binary cache, the servers, CDNs and agents for which are sponsored by external companies (we're talking 0€ cost for something that would normally cost 10s of thousands every year). Forking would lose all of that, it's pretty much impossible financially.
I don't see how forcing someone out means you lack the majority? I would say generally the opposite is true. The majority wants someone out and they are able to force them out.
>If you have the majority and leadership will not cede to your will, you fork the project and break away.
It's more likely that there is a majority BUT leadership does not cede and they hold the keys to the castle. It makes more sense to first try to remove the leadership. I would say this is in fact direct democratic action.
Some uses of "majority" can be disingenuous, because there is probably a large group of people that is indifferent to whether current leadership is forced out. They could be counted as not part of the majority that wants change. But they can just as well be counted for the other side.