this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

  • @flizzo
    link
    102 months ago

    There’s a LWN piece that does a pretty good job with framing the specifics of this letter within some context. It gets some things wrong, such as stating that the arms manufacturer was rejected as a sponsor in both cases, but it has been corrected. The orange site is, of course, negging it with mod tools, showing that they’re fine with mods pulling out the C-4 when it’s their unelected mod team of choice.