Comment by soraminazuki

> I'm sure that somewhere buried in a wall of text they state what this is all about

If they could've, they would've. Unfortunately, this has been bit of a problem in the Nix community for a while. No one mentioned in this letter is an "abusive" "right-wing" "concern troll" by any stretch of imagination. Actual behavior that kind would most likely result in an unanimous ban. But none of the evidence buried in this wall of text supports that assumption. Whether the authors realize it or not, this letter consists almost entirely of ad hominems and accusations of ulterior motives.

Just as an aside, I wrote "almost," because I do think the handling of the sponsorship was an issue here despite the letter framing this as not the central issue. Military sponsors aren't a great fit for a community of international volunteers, especially one trying to put AI on drones. I'm not comfortable with that either. But were the accused members of the Nix community abusing and concern trolling to push a right wing agenda? Definitely not.

The other issues though, are just disagreements. The letter is taking screenshots of random disagreements and claiming it as proof of, again, "abusive" "right-wing" "concern trolling" behavior. Some vocal members of the Nix community love to do this. All. The. Time.

They disagreed with me. They didn't do this or that. That means they must be against social justice. They're persecuting minorities. They're concern trolling. Oh, here's another person trying to stay away from all the drama. They're complicit too.

This is the stated mentality of these vocal members. This is also the reason I avoid posting in NixOS Discourse and Matrix off topic chat channels. It just feels like some are more interested playing Game of Thrones. It's not representative of the community, but I don't want to attract unnecessary attention from the vocal few. I think this is harmful because destroys healthy decision making on difficult issues by excluding people not looking to pick a fight. Fun fact, the same sort of drama also played out when #nixos IRC migrated to Matrix following the Freenode incident.

Actual concrete example. The Nixpkgs repository includes a file containing a list of maintainers. A PR was made against this file, and one member of the community asked the PR author if they can make the maintainer name the same as their GitHub username.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/120729#discussion_r621...

And this exploded. Way out of proportion. Some were pouncing on the member who made that comment. To me, the response seems far more abusive than the original comment ever was.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/120729#discussion_r621...

Accusations were flown, like "denying someone of a name." Like, seriously?

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/120729#discussion_r622...

I feel bad about bringing this back up, but it only seems fair to show the whole picture given the drama.