Comment by 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.

6 comments

traverseda

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.
- jonringer117 1 year ago
  
  Correct, there was an open letter [1].
  And to clarify above, there was no "contributors of this company" dynamic to the outrage.
  "jobs" are things which come and go, not a lot of people are will to burn their personal image for a [potentially] uncaring company. And I'm certainly not one of them either.
  [1]: https://nixos-users-against-mic-sponsorship.github.io/

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.