I started working with NixOS and Nix more generally as a student/sysadmin at my uni. Just heard about some controversy at Nix? Something about wanting a “gender minority seat” on a budgetary committee and an alleged purge against anyone opposing that? Anyone care to clarify
Edit: found this post, might have some explaination https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1dtnsk5/what_on_earth_did_jonringer_even_do/
As someone who's been using NixOS for years and trying to follow this drama, I can tell you I still have no idea what's going on either.
At first it just seemed to be people upset about a sponsor, which was pretty easy to follow.
Somehow that devolved into the BDFL stepping down, the creation of a constitutional assembly, someone getting banned for arguing against affirmative action (I think?), moderation members basically deleting/unlisting every attempt to discuss it or clarify the issue, and now people stepping down after the banned person apologized the other day (after getting banned a second time)?
I still have no idea what is going on.
not to mention ragebaiters using this whole thing as an excuse to get people riled up around "woke-ism" ruining NixOS or something
But it is? The parent comment just explained how, but as usual people get more upset that people dare to label the issue than the issue itself
I'm not sure my summary (if you can really call what I posted as a "summary") really describes how NixOS is getting "ruined by woke-ism". I was mostly just pointing out that it's okay to not know WTF is going on because the majority of the Nix community doesn't really know either. I'm more annoyed with the piss-poor communication skills of the Nix moderation team. They basically keep saying "Everyone knows why they're banned" despite everyone still trying to figure it out.
It seems the triggering issue is, that the company in question is backed by Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, both of whom are prominent supporters of the Republican Presidential candidate.
While some Nix community members seem to subscribe to the view "Pecunia non olet", others apparently think that money from such a source would taint the project forever.
I understand the idea of wanting to avoid association with distasteful entities, but at the same time, there's not a single Unix project on earth that wasn't influenced by something like this
Thanks for the link. I've missed actual journalism where people reach out and do research in order to explain a situation.
We don't get journalism anymore. We get "coverage"
Right? I don't know how many shows I've heard the main person say some variation of "I don't know how any of this works...but here's my opinion on it." Might as well be a GPT trained on audience engagement.
Anyone that did not have strong opinions against a useless and completely unjustified war in Iraq should look in the fucking mirror.
Useless? But think about the Halliburton stock price!!?
Ha.
Nothing out of the ordinary there.
It all comes down to whether you see Nix as an apolitical tech project or a (progressive) social movement.
I don't think you can fully decouple the motivations of a project from the actual work being done. The social movement or whatever it is just has too much bearing on the future of a project in most cases. That being said, when it comes to my distro, I only really care about the tech as long as I'm not actually supporting something I morally object to. Best I can understand in this admittedly confusing debacle is that I'm not supporting anything by simply running NixOS.
What I'm writing now comes with the strong disclaimer that this is speculation on my part: If you accept the duality of an Open Source project as
then one can assume that people join for one of these aspects (some might for both, of course). Those who join solely for the "social movement" aspect won't have a strong tech background and will assume administrative or community roles (moderators, board members, outreach) that the actual developers don't want to do. And these are exactly the people who are apparently behind the so called "purge" in Nix.
It's the kind of people who forked "Glimpse" because the name "GIMP" is offensive.
Once again: solely my speculation.
Each open source project is going to be different and it needs to be decided by people that are actively participating in running the project.
At a certain point this needs to be spelled out so that people who are interested in using the software and contributing to the project know what they are getting into.
Some projects are created for the specific purpose of promoting a political agenda. (example: Tor Network) Other projects are created for the specific purpose of providing a technical goal. (example: Linux kernel) Others are a mixture.
One of the biggest problem facing projects that have lots of participants is that for many people their political agenda is essentially the highest priority for them in their lives.
And a lot of these people have the mentality that the ends justifies the means. Meaning if people need to expunged, abused, and projects dramatically lose functionality or participation to push a particular social agenda then that is 100% dandy because their political agenda is the singular priority that matters.
This is a problem because everybody wants to be nice, accepting, forgiving, and understanding. They want to give people the benefit of the doubt.
And this gives a opening for malicious/politically motivated actors to come in and disrupt projects for their personal social agendas. They leverage people's desire to be kind, accepting and understanding as way to cause problems for people they don't like.
It is very important for leadership to be willing to step in and stop people intentionally inflicting drama on projects. It is poisonous.
The downside is that people stepping in and willing to eliminate disruptive non-contributing factors of their "community" are going to see a significant amount of personal attacks and character assassinations in social media because of it.
It really is reprehensible behavior. People should not put political pressure on open source projects for a political or social agenda, unless it is aligned with that project's goal.
And a lot of these people have the mentality that the ends justifies the means. Meaning if people need to expunged, abused, and projects dramatically lose functionality or participation to push a particular social agenda then that is 100% dandy because their political agenda is the singular priority that matters.
Examples for FOSS projects please. Don't be vague either.
Edit: this was the CoC revision that I meant to refer to:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180213113526/https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html
They changed it in 2020 and fixed it's errors.
If you accept the duality of an Open Source project as
- a technological endeavour
- a social movement
then one can assume that people join for one of these aspects
You're leaving out numerous groups, including the very large group of people who want the technical things done their way, despite having no interest in contributing. For that group, Free Software is merely free software, and they feel entitled not only to the software, but to other people's labor (which I would call "support").
I've been part of the Free Software community for nearly 30 years now, and I have to tell you that the people who see Free Software as an ethical practice are far better contributors and far more pleasant to work with than the people who think ethics has no place in software.
this comment deserves a few hundred upvotes.
I'd also add "corporate HR wanting to earn their salary" to the list. (I firmly believe that the master/main thing in git branches is the brainchild of some HR dweeb at Microsoft!)
The worst part is that this category, unlike your second one, does not actually contribute to the project in any way, even "administrative or community roles"
Social movements that are unrelated to the technology themselves (i.e. outside of the realm of free software or privacy) are damaging to said technology.
You'd be very hard pressed to give an example of that here.
The idea of free software is one of progression and acceptance which is literally the opposite of thiel and crew.
I find it cringe when this topic comes up and we have literally seen projects get sabotaged, hijacked, or other wise killed by right wing nonsense but some how we have to "filter out the politics " when it comes to being neutral or "left".
Just look what happened with polyMC or whatever it was called. That shit simply DOES NOT happen with "left" leaning ideologies.
Just
I wouldn't be hard pressed to find an example of it. The topic of this whole thread is one. And, it does happen with left leaning ideologies. Stallman has rubbed a pile of people the wrong way when talking about things that have nothing to do with software and privacy and had people want to cancel him and his projects.
We don't have to filter out the politics. I simply ignore it, irrespective of what that politics is.
left leaning millionaire/billionaire backer is a paradox in itself. It does not matter to them how they earn that money, as long as they put a facade in their donations for progressive causes that turn out not so progressive after all
Head-in-the-sand philosophy?
Nope, I don't give two flips about a developer's politics. I care about his software. I'm never going to be able to set up a system where every piece of software was built by a developer whose positions align with mine. Anyone who tries that is positively nuts in the first place.
Software is like science. The politics is not relevant. Something objectively works, or it does not.
Open source software is INHERENTLY political.
Its not that you don't ignore politics, you just don't have a grasp on what that word means.
That's quite a striking take. At face value you're saying there is no room for ethics in science, but perhaps that's not what you mean. And where is the line between ethics and politics anyway.
These are complex topics when you start to think about them, but of course that's the beauty of the head-in-the-sand philosophy, you don't have to think.
The idea of free software is defined in the four essential freedoms: free to run, free to read, free to change and free to redistribute your changes. What does any of this have to do with "progression and acceptance"?
Wasn't there Node-IPC that nuked peoples drives if you had a Russian IP address?
Very well said
People have to realize, when you take any group - and it doesn't need to be a large one - you're going to have people that agree with you on some topics and disagree vehemently on others. If one wishes to choose software based upon whether or not they agree with the developers' political philosophy, they're not going to have anything.
But ... it is an OS/package manager/programming language
For some...
Perhaps; one might think that supporting a Fascist is a special case.
If you allow a special case, everyone will claim that their enemies are that special case.
In the case of Thiel, who is actively opposed to democracy and wants to see the world governed by megacorporations, the case is very publicly special and opposed to anything FOSS.
I believe that free democratic countries should preserve freedom of speech and advocacy, even if that advocacy aims to abolish democracy.
If the best case we can make for democracy relies on excluding those critical of it, that is not exactly high praise.
More importantly, I don't think that the question of what speech is permissible and impermissible is best legislated in the donation account of open source projects.
But this isn't legislation. This is an open source project. Open source is inherently political, and if people dislike the owners of a project being close with people like Thiel, then that's fully within their rights.
Thats some crazy hyperbole.
You think EVERY Linux project has well known ass hats who also subscribe to insane ideology funding them?
I'm willing to bet not even 10% of projects have a celebrity duche funding them.
Honestly its a take the money or don't deal here. My only concern would be what influence a funder would have on a project and I don't see Nix getting derailed scope wise by this.
But don't pretend this is par for the course.
Some hate Shopify and they sponsor a ton of projects.
others apparently think that money from such a source would taint the project forever.
It's not necessarily money on it's own. The inciting incidents in question were about sponsorships, which goes a step beyond just taking money.
'Pecunia non olet': money does not stink?
If they love selling piss so much they should just do that instead.
Yeah that's why I also have no issues with FSB sponsored software. Money is money, right?
Holy fuck what a way to obliterate any interest I had on that one. Whew.
Promoting Trump probably isn't the biggest issue with those guys.
Oof. Peter Thiel being involved at all is a huge red flag in itself - he's like a poster child for evil corporate CEO, and I don't mean in terms of right/left politics, I mean that the man would literally be a king if he could. He's a complete sociopath.
Committee governance destroying projects. Nothing new.
This might be partly off-topic, but the Nix community is weird, they have this unhealthy obsession with putting everything under the control of Nix. I wanted to install wargus, but for whatever brain damage reason the package pulls in the actual game files. As in the copyrighted assets from Blizzard which they still sell for money. I opened an issue for it, but the package maintainers remained stubborn.
There used to be this weird elitism going around based on what you run (i.e. Arch), and Nix was pretty much an end stop. Too many kids tried to get a hold a piece of it one way or another, and packaging is one low hanging fruit in that regards.
Regardless, the whole project and its fandom had always felt broken. Mind that, before writing this comment, I had to gulp down a number of other expressions due to aggressiveness, and this was the most mild one I could think of. The level of weirdo-ness of that particular area in the internet was very high.
It's not an unhealthy obsession with putting everything under control of nix. It's literally the main reason why I'd want to run the thing :) I just think that the tooling isn't there yet, and nixlang is not something I want to learn.
This particular issue seems ripe for a DMCA claim though.
Thanks for introducing me to Wargus!
Now if I can get it to work with my resolution that'll be great.
Everything under the control of Nix is another way of saying that your system can be configured in a single place. You cannot really have that without Nix controlling everything.
Perhaps you are referring to https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/?
I’ve been looking for something like this for weeks now. Thanks for the link!
I don't care about any controversy, drama, or whatever. I'm just here for interesting software that works. If they can do that with a gender minority seat, or without one, or with democratic leadership, or authoritarian leadership, then any of it is fine by me.
true but all the drama leaves a bad taste in the mouth. What goes through my mind reading an extended timeline of stuff like this is "what are their priorities? Is this really more important than the code?"
(I'm speaking too naively I guess)
I'm of a similar sentiment. Also, the tactics they are willing to use to get their own way is an issue. I'm sure they won't hesitate to do the same when it comes to the code and features.
Even though I agree with you that this is obviously not a very important thing to do, organizations are perfectly able to focus on several things at once. That's kinda one of the main reasons why humans form organizations.
Yeah same, it’s not because you support someone’s software that tou support the person (on the team) behind it.
That's exactly it. I don't agree with Anti-x philosophy. I'd use the distribution in a second. I disagree with 99% of what RMS says outside of privacy or free software. I respect him greatly and use emacs, not to mention many GNU utilities.
Let anyone commit changes to improve the code. If they improve the code accept them. If they don’t, where possible provide feedback back to why and perhaps how further improvements may increase chance of acceptance.
Use peer reviewed anonymity to maintain a focus on quality improvements not politics.
Same. If they make good software, I don't care if Stalin jr. himself makes it (a hyperbole)
Considering that Stalin raised a giant country ravaged by The War to the level of sending a man into the space in just a dozen years, this would be a damn good distribution.
If only not at the cost of gulag workers...
I don't think it was a gender minority seat, from what I heard it was for minority ethnicities?
I started using Nix and NixOS about a year ago. I have all my devices running NixOS - Everything in my homelab, even a few Raspberry Pis. I thought about leaving NixOS and using something else multiple times over the past few weeks with all the drama and realised that there's nothing out there that can replace NixOS for me.
So I've decided to stick with NixOS and see this through. If it comes out of this unharmed, all good. If it doesn't, I'm pretty sure a new community will form around a fork and I can just move to the fork.
Nix and NixOS (and all the awesome stuff that's build around them) are some really amazing projects. It's sad that the mods are hurting it over politics.
If the politics get bad enough, we might actually get a community fork like libreoffice and crablang. I think the way Nix manages packages really is something special and the idea will live on regardless
Please note that Crablang has gone nowhere, nobody really cares about it.
I started using nix about 3 months ago. I really don't need politics in my distro and I'm just waiting for all this dumb shit to blow over. I feel like I'm in the minority as I am a tech person, not a social movement person and it's the tech guys who don't abide by the social lines getting purged. I'd rather have them. Nobody is perfect, we are all morally grey and I don't need the Devs behind the code to be religiously pure. Can we just have the good tech and get out of the way of competent people? The answer is no apparently. It feels like sabotage.
So, the project will be even more fractured. I wouldn't touch that distro with a 10 foot pole.
doesn't matter. at the end of the day, there will be plenty of people interested in keeping the project alive.
Plus, there's no alternative out there that's anything like Nix, unless someone builds something from scratch.
Guix is pretty close, the same functional package management idea, Guile scheme instead of Nix lang, and a bunch of GNU infrastructure.
yes, I'm definitely planning to give it Guix a shot sometime
Just to play devil's advocate, do you know yet whether you'd run into the same issues/concerns with Guix administrators?
The more we bring politics into tech, the more we all struggle to get shit done and work collaboratively towards common goals. Tech will get polarized, we'll all be weaker for it, and more easily manipulated.
Let engineering decisions be just that.
As a GNU project, I wouldn't expect Guix to consider itself apolitical, but perhaps having that as a starting point would mean the topic is more settled and less a source of strife.
Well on Guix it is already happening, for example, look up the fight with Software Heritage due to problems with Software Heritage sharing code with HuggingFace for LLM training and some Guix users are against that since Guix uses software heritage to store source code of most of the packages. There was also a discussion about Software Heritage storing git history and thus, committer names, where some wanted to change their name online but Software Heritage doesn't provide a way to do that.
But it has not affected development in any way.
I'd say Guix is more likely to hit these discussions since people are a bit more polarized.
But that's not that important, right? Isn't the only connection between software heritage and guix that guix makes backups of all the source code they package on there? I.e. it only really affects a nice to have feature.
Yeah the discussion is about the stance of Guix with Software Heritage, Nix packages also get saved there I think.
I engaged with it a bit because the drama on r/NixOS was becoming annoying. Got called a bot by Jon and pals.
Won't engage again. If Nix kills itself there's alternatives.
I wanna checkout an alternative. Can you recommend one?
GNU Guix, easier to understand language, and also `nonguix` channel for non-free packages.
I was brifly considering moving from Guix to NixOS as my daily driver for a bit, just to try and learn something new. Also because Nix has way more packages than Guix, but I am seriously noping out after the drama.
You can still install nix with guix though
I use it under macos already, this is how I manage my ends at work. I just wanted to go all in for my personal daily driver, services and everything. It will be a no for me until they clear this shit up
Whatever Nix inevitably forks into.
For servers alpine Linux is a good alternative
Fedora Silverblue | The Fedora Project
I thought everyone knows this one.... bonus points for the corporate tie in, since 99% of them use redhat
Everyone knows it. It isn't an alternative to nix in any way.
whynot exactly? genuinely curious about which specific points you will make
Nix is build system that guarantees reproducibility.
Silverblue is just read-only Fedora.
Silverblue also guarantees reproducibility I think, via rpm-ostree. Doesn't it?
No. Silverblue is made by installing RPMs, then making the result into an immutable filesystem. The RPMs are built on the normal Fedora build servers. They are mostly not reproducible - if you recompile them yourself, you get something different.
Nix offers build time reproducibility. If you build a Nix package from source, it will be identical to the one you can download, and in theory even if you cross compile it. Also Nix doesn't even have to be immutable. You can build a regular distribution with it, if you want to. You can even use it to build things that are not distributions. Because it is a build system.
Silverblue offers no innovations in the area of build systems, that is why it is not an alternative to Nix.
You cannot configure a Silverblue system in a single place.
Gentoo
It'll drive more people to Guix hopefully
If Guix had a nonfree repo I'd use it. As it stands I would prefer to use only one package system on my PC, and I want one that has Steam.
There's a repo called 'nonguix', but I'd double-check to see if it has what you need
Neat! Last I heard there were no proprietary packages at all. However that was when the project was really new, so it doesn't surprise me that it has changed. I'll check it out, thanks!
I just started to use and figure out NixOS too and then seen all this. Migrated my 3 machines to BlendOS, but may check out Guix also.
it's wild watching commenters here just totally invent narratives based off one or two observations. social media abhors an information vaccuum
The whole situation at Nix feels similar to if an environmental group tried to purge people who support Israel (or Palestine) in the current war. Both the war and the environment are causes, but they are so different. Dividing people who are united in one cause due to disagreement over another makes change far more difficult. It's self-defeating. Activists may not like this, but in the real world you have to live with people you disagree with, be they family members, neighbors, or coworkers. Imagine if every family behaved like this, where you get disowned based on who you vote for? Or if a soup kitchen refuses service to people who don't believe in XYZ? Do you want to live in a world like that? I'd rather live in a world where everyone sees and treats each other as a human being. Refusing to interact with people who don't share your political ideology is immature and antisocial.
Many activists will tell you yes. They will want a world where those only on the "correct" side of the history and have the correct views of today (and not necessarily of tomorrow) should be erased from existence.
The problem with purity spirals in activism is that they lead to movements cannibalizing themselves to the point there's a tiny, now powerless group of people running things that may not even care about the movement's goals anymore, just that they are "good people" that forced the bad people out.
Obviously if someone comes in spouting bad takes, saying they hope certain groups burn and bring bad things to the movement and also try to make it about their ideology and hijack things, they need to go. But so should be people who are on witch hunts because they're just on the opposite side of the same coin.
The problem now is that the witch hunters are the ones calling the shots in most activist movements, and most people will not call them out on their shit because it's easy to just label someone bad and smear everyone in a group that disagrees with them. The ones who scream the loudest will be given a pacifier and the people they claim are bad will be booted instead. Often though, the witch hunters put themselves in a position of power just before they decide to start their cleansing of people they do not like.
It's self-defeating behavior.
the real question is why are politics getting involved in an OS
I don't know if you've been paying attention, but it's been infecting everything in recent years.
Parasites will attach themselves to anything even if they don't care about the topic. To them everything just acts as a vehicle for their actual goal. It's just that computer tech people are in general more of the pushover and feelgood temperament.
Environmental groups being also anti-war is completely expected and it would be hard-pressed to find a counter-example (Greenpeace was an anti-war group before being an environmental one), what a strange analogy lol.
The analogy relates to ideological purges. For example, I've donated money to the Ukrainian military through United24. Does that mean I should be expelled from an environmental group if I'm a sincere and helpful member of one, and if they should happen to find out about my donations? Of course I shouldn't be kicked out. It's better to leave that matter aside to come together and help the environment.
Not necessarily, some believe the world's biggest polluters should be destroyed (Philippines, China, USA). Others believe we should induce a nuclear winter to save the planet. Some believe a forceful reduction in the Earth's human population is necessary. It's insane, but it's the natural conclusion to militant environmentalism.
Okay, to those who are down voting my calls for not dehumanizing people, congratulations, you just convinced me to vote exclusively for Republicans this election just to spite your political puritanism. Great job.
Good one.
If downvotes make you a fascist, you had already sat down at the table, just forgot to take off your coat.
There is a difference in living in a world where people disagree and being in a space where people are harassing others.
If you don't like reserved seats for minorities, cool, I don't like it either and don't think it would solve any of the issues. But throwing slurs at people for being part of that minority isn't cool.
Refusing to interact with people who don't share your political ideology is immature and antisocial.
Yep, but it isn't activists who are doing this, it's the ones who don't like queer people and feel the need to mock someone as soon as this information comes up.
A project destroying itself
What normal person uses NixOS though
When you have to deploy Linux on 100 machines, NixOS suddenly looks fairly convenient
Isn’t that why we have Kubernetes?
Have you ever used Kubernetes? It's fucking horrendous.
Note: I've never used NIX, but I have dabbled in Kubernetes.
Having used both, k8s is a far more miserable process than Nix
Just triggered political fanaticism like everything nowadays, one side hates the other and viceversa, bo-ring
There's inclusion, then there's excluding people so only marginalized people are afforded any kind of voice. Lately some people think the latter counts as inclusion, but it does not. This is what I'm seeing and it is in a weird kind of forceful gaslighting manner than you normally only see in government and politics.
They're just shoving out everyone that disagrees with them. While that's certainly not freedom, I don't care if they are indeed only responsible for legals and finances, and NixOS itself doesn't change nor starts to push any ideology, be it right or left.
Tend to agree but it does seem like a bunch of the core developers (and contributors both code and ideas) have gone elsewhere. Forking isn't a terrible thing, it's what makes FOSS awesome, but dividing resources along ideological lines doesn't help anyone. I'm of the mindset this shouldn't even be a thing. But I'll admit I wasn't paying attention until it boiled over.
I'm in the same boat, I didn't care and now I just want politics and ideology to stand aside and focus on software.
Forking isn't a bad idea, but I heard that the recent changes only concern the committee that cares about finances and legals
excluding people so only marginalized people are afforded any kind of voice
Which just means the others are now the marginalised people...
Thank you for stating so succinctly what I've been struggling to describe
That's a pitty. Even if I'm not using NixOS anymore (due to Raspi issues) I really liked it.
Sad to see that its community got fractured.
You act like you’ve never seen a coup before
Hostile takeover after the BDFL stepped down.
Yep...
Basically the following:
People didn't agree with this, as the seats should be for people who helped the project the most
Moderation started a "purge" (their words) against everyone who did those things or who didn't agree with punishing those who did
There was also that stuff from a military sponsorship, but this is what happened recently and threw the shit in the fan.
I do not agree with reserved seats and saying that for a while criticizing them would be an offense, but if there are people attacking someone for being Irish/skinny/ginger/a cis man/etc, they should be banned. I mean, that's just rules of being around other people, right?
As far as I know, there hasn't been any actual harrassment of minorities going on in the Nix community. Can you provide evidence?
they block you for asking too? crazy what some people will do to maintain a narrative
are you just making shit up? I have followed as much as I can and not one person on nix zulip, matrix or discourse is claiming harrassment or mockery has occurred - srid linked his ridiculous blog in his bio and got banned for it, jr and some others were accused of sealioning in a debate around reserved seats for gender minorities and got banned for it, and lots of people got mad about nixcon anduril sponsorships. not one post or account I have seen backs up your claim that there was flagrant and unchecked harrassment.
Just ban everyone who wants to play politics, problem solved
Everywhere where the is power, there is politics.
Politics is any process of making decisions that affect people. The process of engineering itself in a group of people is political in nature.
I saw at least one good post earlier that explained it. Have you tried searching this sub or checking r/NixOS?
given the accusations of a purge, if the nixos sub is official, maybe they erased the evidence. Only found posts in this sub about the private defence sponsor money scandal and how they tried to hide it
r/UnofficialNixOS has the unlisted posts
This committee bullshit is the reason we have benevolent dictators for life. Good god. There shouldn't even be committee seats to reserve because committees and the people on them degrade everything the so much as glance at. I say purge the committees.
Some contributors in NixOS are so much aligned against the west that they wanted to cut all links to a western defence company from the project. It might even be an outright intelligence offensive against those companies, in roughly the same style as the xz attack was.
"Woke" is a red herring. It's actually geopolitics and the actors on that level don't give a fuck about woke issues beyond weaponizing them.
Nix is pretty interesting technology: I don't think anything else allows for configuring a reproducible system in a purely declarative way from a single place like that, in such a clean way. But the cost is that many packages need to be defined precisely for it to work, and that requires several contributors. Which Nix still has, I believe.
Been watching from a distance for a while as I plan to move to Nix eventually. From what I can tell it started when they accepted money from a military contractors with ties to far right American politicians, this understandably made the nix community pretty upset as it seems to be one of the gayest Linux communities out there. In response there was a committee formed to make decisions on who to accept funds from. People wanted to make sure that trans people were represented on the committee (if you're not following American politics, trans people area huge target for the far right here and could face huge institutional persecution even as far as a genocide depending on how elections this year go). The idea pushed to make ensure a trans voice exists on the committee is to reserve one seat to only be held by a trans person. Some people thought that single committee seat is literally fascism and threw a hissy fit and now here we are.
this isn't factual at all - zulip logs show discussions about 50% or more seats being potentially reserved for diversity picks, replete with some "who is more oppressed tho" discourse (re a hypothetical cis african man vs a disabled nb American or something)
I don't think genocide is the right term here considering transgender is not a race, religion, or ethnicity.
That's not to say trans people in the US aren't facing oppression of course.
What the kurwa is going on in 'Murica? A genocide?
It's election season
Social media reactions on top of social media reactions spanning several decades. It's like a very slow moving nuclear blast. Everybody is willingly spending their limited free time making themselves crazier and crazier.
Future generations in a century or so will look at this and wonder what the hell we were thinking.
Project 2025 openly calls for the removal of legal protections for gender identity and gender affirming medical care.
and there's conservative groups calling transgender people pedophiles and sex criminals. Spreading misinfo through social media stating that they should be locked up for indecency and going into public places around children. Local megachurches call them an existential threat that needs to be "dealt with" with urgency.
Basically hinting that they should be rounded up and "dealt" with.
Well that's far from a genocide, I was thinking of something along the lines of Katyn massacre (shooting of Polish intelligence under the commie dictatorship).
It still sucks tho, and I'm glad to have more options than two equally corrupt parties here in EU.
Genocides are rarely just an instant start from nothing. A build up of resentment and othering and a removal of legal protections and recognition often precede it.
People really forget that the Nazis didn’t start with killing the Jews. Hell, they didn’t even target Jewish people first - they targeted communists/socialists, then queer people/sexual health institutions, THEN the Jewish community.
It’s the same as hacking. You don’t go all in the second you get access - you start small and quiet and build up to a single moment, and by the time you notice, it’s way too late
That is not at all what genocide is, that build up is not genocide.
Genocide is a very specific term for a very specific form of mass murder.
That's part of the definitions, not the entire one as legally defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention
No it isn't even the wikipedia page says as much:
.. any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
Specifically:
For an act to be classified as genocide, it is essential to demonstrate that the perpetrators had a deliberate and specific aim (dolus specialis) to physically destroy the group based on its real or perceived nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. Intention to destroy the group's culture or intending to scatter the group does not suffice
For all their hatemonger the right-wing conservatives are doing they are not calling for an trans-cleansing, which would be required for it to be considered genocide.
Genocide is the erasure of a people. That can mean their lives, or just their identity and culture. For example Russia tried to genocide everyone in their empire by resettling the native population and replacing them with Russians (at least in considerable numbers), banning the native languages, etc.
And while the official definitions don't quite fit something happening to gender minorities, that's more because the awareness of the issue is very new. Project 2025 is certainly within the spirit of a genocide.
I see. I always considered genocide to be violence or other mainly physical harm (such as famine) against a certain group of people
Genocide is the erasure of a people. That can mean their lives, or just their identity and culture.
The problem with trying to expand the definition of "genocide" to fit this issue is that sterilization erases people physically/genetically, while rejection of gender identity "erases" their identity/culture. I hope you can consider that the people you're arguing against are not simply trying to "erase people," but that they disagree with you about what's important for people.
genocide
There is not even remotely a "trans genocide" going in America.
You can say there's heavy discrimination to the point of targeted murder because they are trans but that is not genocide.
Or is Ted Bundy a known "genocider" of women?
This has been the clearest reconstruction yet, so first of all thanks. Second of all I had some doubts I hoped you could shed some light on. First off, many mantainers left the project, but what side where they on? Then, what did Jon Ringer do that got him banned? From my understanding from the post on the NixOS site it seems the way he was interacting and arguing was, while perhaps in good faith, disruptive and discriminatory
EDIT: the more I dig the more the issue seems to go back to other events, I just lack the knowledge and investment in NixOS to understand I believe. This seems extremely nuanced, I can only hope someone can put the pieces together so we can all understand. I just today intended to try Nix only to find out about this, what a mess
You think republicans are going to actively put trans people to death?
persecution even as far as a genocide
Oh come on. The word "genocide" is a serious one.
Basically, Only thing missing is some other issues with the way the project was being ran (mostly Eelco being incompetent at being BDFL, or somewhat malicious, depending on who you ask), that bubbled up at the same time.
Mental illness mostly
What does software have to do with LGBTQ shit?
They want to make more software in rainbows now because they feel insecure??
because lots of developers are trans or gay that's why.
The Woke ideology tries a hostile takeover
I agree just look at Disney these days ugh. Total mess!
A relatively big chunk of the software dev community is made of authoritarian far left woke nutjobs, so I'm not surprised to see them throwing temper tantrums when they find some right wing people taking a seat at the table. They don't want "inclusion", they want domination.
authoritarian far left woke nutjobs,
I stopped taking your comment seriously right about there.
I couldn't care less.
ok.
Sadly that's the case. Let's hope it doesn't influence any of the actual code and stops at sponsorships
NixOS has gotten relatively popular in the past year and various people want to spread FUD.
It seems so complex that i have decided i do not care.
Yeah, that community or the shills is really bad- they dismissed that article mostly because of the author - they didn't even evaluate the content much - well, they are biased, obviously. It appears to be another distro that was polluted with leftist politics and is run by authoritarian devs/mods, whatever. I think it's a good idea to stay away but to each their own.
I read the article, never heard of the author before, and after reading it all, I understand people that dismissed it
Lunduke is a far far right conspiracy nutjob that constantly argues in bad faith while pretending that his work is free of any political bias. He was more famous in the past for his annually "Linux Sucks", that covered the ongoing problems (and improvements in that sector) with Desktop Linux. Over time he got more and more deranged. Last time I heard, he believes now strongly in Alien abductions and the all governing American deep state cabal.
I read this thread and some links and I still have no clue what is going on.