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Comment by steinuil

1 year ago

I coincidentally started lurking and responding to some support threads the NixOS discourse a few weeks ago, because I appreciate the project and I wanted to get more involved in it. In the past couple days I've seen this train wreck play out in real time, both on discourse and on github discussions.

From what I could gather, the main factor that led the community to this point is Anduril's involvement in the community. Anduril is a miltech company and a contractor of the USA DoD. It looks like they use Nix extensively to train ML models and deploy combat drones, and several of their employees have very close ties to the Nix community; Jon Ringer (an Anduril employee, who is mentioned several times in this document) has recently been a release manager for three versions of NixOS, and was nominated to become a release manager for the upcoming 24.05 release.

Anduril wanted to sponsor NixCon last year because of this deep involvement in the community. I was not there to see it, but from what I've seen lately, many members of the community were not happy about it. The sponsorship was eventually pulled, because the on-site video team for the conference (https://c3voc.de/) threatened to pull out on their own over this sponsorship.

From my understanding there has been no official decision taken over Anduril's sponsorship since last year's debacle. Many people in the community think that this is because Eelco Dolstra, the creator and de-facto BDFL of Nix, is currently employed by Determinate Systems, which is rumored to have a contract with Anduril.

Edit: I just want to make it clear that I don't agree with what is presented in this document. I just wanted to present an overview of what, from my perspective, happened up to this point.

10 comments

steinuil

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traverseda  1 year ago

As someone with decision making power in a small Canadian robotics firm that occasionally does military work (mostly environmental monitoring), this does make nixos a lot less attractive. The reproducible builds make it very attractive for reliable robotics, but if the nix community is that against me taking money from the military, well that's going to present a whole other set of challenges. Even for the 90% of our work that doesn't involve any potential military use.

  • sshine  1 year ago

    > if the nix community is that against me taking money from the military

    As far as I understand it, the objection would be if

      - you were simultaneously a key person in Nix, like a release manager
  - your company officially sponsored events that associated Nix with military
  - several of your employees were active contributors to core parts of Nix

    I think the last one might not even be a big issue, or at least it might not blow up.

    Surely, the usage of Nix in any domain is a free choice. You can't really police that anyways.

    • steinuil  1 year ago

      I think the main objection was Anduril sponsoring NixCon, because a lot of people see it as the Nix community advertising a miltech company in exchange for money the foundation doesn't necessarily need.

      1 reply →

  • asmor  1 year ago

    The main problem is

    * taking non-anonymous donations, making Nix seem like the extended arm of the military industrial complex

    * DetSys being the de-facto nix consultancy due to employing the BDFL, not moving work done / guarantees given (installer, flake stability) back into the foundation and taking money from the same military industrial complex

    FOSS is open to everyone and one can't stop people from using it; that doesn't mean the foundation (and it's de-facto corporate arm) need to openly become dependent on military contractors either.

  • matsemann  1 year ago

    > this does make nixos a lot less attractive

    Why should they care? You try to make yourself sound like some kind of important user they should cater to, which is absurd. They don't want you to use it for military stuff, so it's not a big gotcha that someone with "decision making power" (wow!) doesn't want to use it.

    Like, most FOSS projects just gets abuse and entitlement from their users, but actually little value from their users. You would be no different, and frankly sound entitled just from the get-go.

  • steinuil  1 year ago

    I personally hope some sort of reasonable policy will come from this whole situation and that the community will be stronger for it. I've seen some discussions over this on Discourse, but the community doesn't seem to be in any state to agree on something like this currently.

asmor  1 year ago

Eelco (alongside his co-founder) is Determinate Systems, and their active refusal to answer if they are involved in the military contract likely means they are.

rgoulter  1 year ago

> The sponsorship was eventually pulled, because the on-site video team for the conference (https://c3voc.de/) threatened to pull out on their own over this sponsorship.

This isn't accurate.

Per a summary at the time, https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixcon-2023-sponsorship-situat...

- c3voc resolved to not redistribute talks from Anduril (or with Anduril branding), but would otherwise cover the event.

- Anduril was withdrawn as a sponsor, since the venue had a policy against military funding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_clause), and time constraints didn't allow for clarity about whether the event could be held with Anduril as a sponsor.

FWIW, at the time of writing this post, Anduril is a sponsor of Nixcon 2024. https://2024-na.nixcon.org/