Comment by incidentia

1 year ago

An attempted tldr of the letter if it is too long for your taste.

Some of the main points of the letter are:

- edolstra, who started Nix, acts like a BFDL, without oversight or responsibility, making unilaterally circumventing or disregarding decisions made by working groups, he chose not take part in.

- he has significant conflicts of interests between his actions as effective leader of the Nix project and his employer

- he is not transparent about his conflicts of interest, nor willing to recuse himself in such situations

- edolstra is not acting as an effective leader. Nixcpp is not well-maintained recent releases have been so buggy, that they are not used. Neither doing the necessary work to maintain Nixcpp and the Nix infra, but also not delegating (effectively or at all), not allowing teams to grow or giving them authority to act without his explicit review or arbitrary veto.

All these are significant concerns for there being a future for Nix as something besides a branch of Determinate Systems, dependent on the moods and business needs of a single company, unable to act independently or maintain a community

There are further ethical concerns you might not share, which are important to significant portions of the community, which they expect not to dodged, and at least to provides clear answers to

- Publicly endorsing a company that builds autonomous weapons systems and systems that are, in the opinion of many, built with the explicit purpose of aiding with human rights abuses

- That opposing fascism is a controversial statement

- Failing to achieve any effective moderation policy inside the project

They hope for reconciliation with the project and leadership, with edolstra stepping back from his BFDL position, allowing the institutions of the project to develop and act under their own authority with a mandate from the community

i would recommend you read the full letter and argue against the authors arguments instead of this post's

An additional comment: Forking is an option, but forking is not democratic event some seem to propose( one person one vote). Because even if the ones who fork are the clear majority, they have a much higher cost to bear, since domains, infrastructure, trademarks and mindshare stay with the original project