https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236
Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :
If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is: Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community
Holy shit the comments on this one are vile. If you don’t like the article, don’t read it and go on with your day.
The footer of the blog shows a Nix file structure, skimming their blog they wrote a bunch of articles and guides for Nix, checking their repo they have a bunch of Nix work, they’re not exactly a nobody (if you couldn’t judge from the people saying they’ll miss them on the Nix forum post)
This entire article is an extension of https://save-nix-together.org which is the actual thing that sparked the the gasoline covered Nix community, this will probably seem more coherent with that background.
Thanks for the background, as a very recent nix adopter this drama seems like a lot 😥
The biggest red flag here is that someone is trying to derive meaning from Eva, an anime whose religious/philosophical imagery and themes were used “just because they looked and sounded cool” (not a direct quote.) I mean I like it too, but it’s gibberish.
I’ll say this about OSS and the community around it: It’s painfully obvious at times that while the individuals working on these projects (often thanklessly) are brilliant people, they often lack the communication and project leadership skills necessary to make a project thrive. The last few posts I’ve seen on this particular issue have been extremely vague and for whatever reason just won’t come out and say what they mean. They’re verbose, go off on tangents, and beat around the bush. We must first have explained to us the plots of TV shows, movies, and other ancillary things in order to understand what likely boils down to “people with differing viewpoints cannot find common ground.” I see the linked blog post as nothing more than someone trying to work out relatively complex feelings about the time/effort they contributed to a project they no longer have faith in more than an “expose-eh.” Given that people in the comments of previous threads have boiled the issue with NixOS down to a sentence or two, I think this is an accurate view.
See: Soft skills.
I didn’t understand a thing about what the actual issues were.
Based on comments I can see that Jon Ringer objected to inserting gender minority person as a requirement for committee board.
So, why is he wrong? I totally agree that gender minorities deserve recognition, but making it a hard requirement for having a committee board sounds like nepotism.
This is a basic represention and inclusion issue. Unless you are actively seeking out voices of those minorities and addressing their concerns you will have a reinforcing loop where behaviour that puts people off engaging will continue and it will continue to limit people from those minorities being involved (and in the worst case causing active harm to some people who end getting involved). From what I understand the behaviour that has been demonstrated and from who those people leaving it is clear this is active issue within Nix. Having a diverse range of people and perspectives will actually make the outputs (software) and community generally better. It’s about recognising the problems in the formal and informal structures you are creating and working to address them.
Additionally, but just to clarify nepotism would be giving positions based on relationships with people in power and not ensuring that your board contains a more representative set of backgrounds and perspectives.
Suppose I have 1000 people from community and 10 out of them are gender minorities. I then have 5 projects, each with 10 members on board committee, and I want a representative of gender minority in each of them. And I choose hard workers based on merit, the best of the best.
In such case I will be choosing 9*5 = 45 people out of 1000, and specifically I add 1*5 = 5 people out of those 10.
So the board committees will have 45 members each with (worst case) 955/1000 = 95.5% percentile performance, and additionally 5 members of gender minorities, each with mediocre 5/10 = 50% performance.
The gender minorities will perform worse, because we specifically singled them out of the crowd. This is not how you improve diversity.
Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn’t make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination. In practice performance (‘merit’) is complex interaction between an individual’s skills and talent and the environment and support they get to thrive. If you have an environment that structurally and openly discriminates against a certain subclass of people and then chose on “merit” you are just further entrenching that discrimination.
This is a project that seemed to be having specific problems on gender that was causing harm and leading to losing talent. In a voluntary role particularly this is a death spiral for the project as a whole. Without goodwill and passion open source projects of any meaningful size just wouldn’t survive.
I’m glad you care enough about diversity and evidence to have worked out how to solve these problems without empowering and listening to those minorities. Please do share it.
Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn’t make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination.
So remove discrimination. Put in the CoC that any information about gender, race, religion and so on must not be disclosed since it is not relevant to the quality of the code/work you submit. Then you have merit only.
I really find stupid that someone really think that his contribution must be accepted just because he is from a minority, irregardless the quality.
You say remove discrimination and then use a discriminatory strawman. No one is suggesting a code contribution must be accepted based on a minority status. They are saying that to get a decent functioning community for everyone you need a diverse range of people in positions that set the behaviour of the community. You can’t get the CoC and enforcement of it right unless those affected are in positions that influence it. Your enforced anonymity doesn’t work because there are other ways of gendering and racialising people (e.g. based on who people talk). Additionally, what you are saying is that minoritised people have to hide who they are so they don’t get discriminated against rather than just deal with those doing the discrimination. They are called communities because that’s what’s they are: people want to be part of something and that involves sharing a part of themselves too. Open source projects live or die on their communities because they mostly don’t have the finances to just pay people to do the work. You need people to beleive in the project and not burn out etc.
You lose nothing by making sure people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity and enjoyment being part of it. If you aren’t in a minority and don’t care about those that are then just say so!
It is impossible to satisfy all minorities at once. The best outcome is to pick an adequate, sane person from the community with proper mindset and proper judgement, irrelevant if they’re from a minority or not.
It’s not about “satisfying the minorities”. It’s about ensuring a basic base level of respect and behaviour for people from all backgrounds. The roles you are talking about were specifically to deal with the fact there was an active problem around that minority in that community that needed dealing with. So bringing in that lived experience is absolutely important. Someone can be adequate, sane, have “proper” mindset and judgement and be from a minority that is currently being targeted with lived experience of the problem. Dealing with issues around diversity and inclusion make life easier and better for everyone: it’s well evidenced. I benefit daily from work that’s been done to make my area easier for people with disabilities despite not having one. Those only came about by people with disabilities challenging and getting in the room where decisions are made.
It’s really not that hard! If you don’t feel minoritised in your daily life and therefore don’t see the importance, fine, but all of us are only one incident or cultural shift to end up being the target so if you aren’t motivated by the plight of people you are happy to “other” than do so because one day you might be the other.
You say remove discrimination and then use a discriminatory strawman.
Why ? Because I basically say “keep these personal informations for yourself since they are not needed while developing” ?
No one is suggesting a code contribution must be accepted based on a minority status.
But they are saying that a board member should be elected based on the fact that he came from a minority, which is as wrong as asking that a code contribution should be accepted based on the minority status.
They are saying that to get a decent functioning community for everyone you need a diverse range of people in positions that set the behaviour of the community.
Agree on this. My point though is that the people in these positions need to be there for the merit and not for a status.
You can’t get the CoC and enforcement of it right unless those affected are in positions that influence it.
Nope. You can enforce a CoC if the ones delegated to enforce it are acknowledged as authoritative people and there is a clear path to do it. If you put a person in charge to enforce the code “just becasue [insert your favorite minority reason]” you end in the same place: the CoC will be selectively enforced only on a certain group of people.
Your enforced anonymity doesn’t work because there are other ways of gendering and racialising people (e.g. based on who people talk).
Assuming you track them outside the project, yes you are right.
Additionally, what you are saying is that minoritised people have to hide who they are so they don’t get discriminated against rather than just deal with those doing the discrimination.
That is what you are saying now, not me.
I said that I don’t care about what your identity is but only about the quality of your work, why did you assume that i mean that only the minorities should not disclose these informations ?Else explain to me why it is relevant that the pull request just created is done by someone from a minority group.
You lose nothing by making sure people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity and enjoyment being part of it.
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. I lose something if a board member of the project I contribute is elected only because he is from a minority group because he replace a more knowledgeable member and the average quality of the work decline.
If you aren’t in a minority and don’t care about those that are then just say so!
It is not that I don’t care, it is that in certain situation it not pertinent if you are from a minority or not. Software development, particularly OSS where the entry point is really low, is one of this situation: why I should care about the group you are part of when you submit a contribute ? How it is pertinent. Do you want to have a voice in the project ? Earn it by contributing and being better of the ones you think are bad and or toxic. But wanting to have a say in the project “just because” is toxic too.
I think you are right here. By cherry-picking gender minorities we sow a dissent and we underline their “otherness” from everyone else.
I am from an ethnic minority myself, and somehow people perceive us as maniacs and killers, try to burn our houses and fire us from work. Often it’s the same people who preach equality and diversity. Somehow in my case they don’t care about “empowerment” or “representation” at all. And somehow, the only place I feel comfortable is 4chan, where no one gives a damn who you are, and everyone’s racist and sexist. To everyone else. Equally.
Hold up, let me just make up some numbers real quick to prove how wrong you are!
He is not wrong though.
Number aside, if you have a hard requirement that in a committee board there should be someone from a minority then you will end in a situation where the committee perform worse because the “forced” member has no merit to be in, or at least it is an very high probability.
DEI requirements is not nepotism, but let’s take on the core issue I think you brought up: meritocracy. If you show me two people with the same level of skill and experience, I would say the one that came from the most disadvantaged environment is more qualified because they were able to get to the same level with less support.
But you brought in numbers, let me do the same. L Consider that the minority group you mentioned actually has greater barriers to participate, so those 10 people might actually perform better than 80% of the 1000 of the majority group. Assuming both groups have the same distribution of merit is a fallacy.
If the community itself is discriminating, there’s no way out than to fight or wait for an opportunity. We don’t see black empowerment in China or a pride parade in Iran.
What I saw in Nix community right now is someone proposed an affirmative action and Jon refused. I don’t see discrimination here.
We don’t see black empowerment in China or a pride parade in Iran.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.
people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.
the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.
My personal bias: I really don’t like NixOS, tried it for four months and found that the config file was an annoying way of handling general system and package management (especially since there was a completely parallel nix package manager with a cli interface which I find redundant at best)
Bro actin like he got some serious dirt on the project with his emails, but all he talks about is evangeleon, how moderation is hard, one blogpost from the big boss of the project that he eleges (idk how to spell that) wasn’t accepted well (no sauce tho), and how some maintainer(s?) left. This article is a waste of time, and adds nothing to the discussion
Looking at this from the outside as a non Nix user, I see two things:
- The community is melting down over something.
- If this is the state of the Nix community where will the support go when it fractures?
If I was asked to evaluate NixOS for something and saw this, I’d keep looking, because this spells disaster for ongoing maintenance.
Really interesting but I still dont get the title, you might rename it to “TL;DR about the NixOS drama” or something?
The post title is the title of the blog and I’ve added the (==Goodbye NixOS) part to show Fediverse readers it is about NixOS. After several people commented, I have, after a suggestion of a commenter, added the tl;dr (written by another person apparently involved in the NixOS drama) in the post body. After all this I prefer to leave the post title as is.
I love Evangelion. I don’t love this stupid bullshit.
Windows: Ad Ridden
macOS: Not Enough Freedom Apparently
Linux: Community Arguments
Every OS has issues.
Ok please don’t hang me for this, I’m genuinely curious. Why does it seem like the only people who are upset about NixOS are 1. transgender, and 2. can’t actually pinpoint exact problems, or offer any solutions, but expect other people to magically change somehow?
Is there something I’m missing?
Why are identity politics even allowed to be discussed in an unrelated field (software development) in the first place? Seems it always just leads to people getting upset when you can just not talk about it as it’s really not related at all to my knowledge.
What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development? Software development is deeply entrenched in politics. It’s just that, just as in most topics that don’t have politics as their main thing, a lot of people would rather pretend it’s not.
Any community of people presupposes politics. If it doesn’t show, most likely it’s a very narrow or homogeneous group of people, which involves excluding/shunning others to defend this narrowness. So that has its own sort of problem too.
What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development?
The fact that the code quality is independent from your “identity” ?
I didn’t see where the author brought up gender in this article.
deleted by creator
Evangelion? This person is sick, and needs to get some help.
What is the problem ? What particular decisions are we taking about beyond the apparent power struggle ?
This post contains massive spoilers for Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion, and the four part revival Evangelion movies.
A Cruel Angel’s Thesis
In order to properly convey the level of emotions that I feel about this situation, I need you to understand the weight of The End of Evangelion.
I can’t get through this article without leaving quotes of it as comments.
I would also like to have made this a video of some kind to make it more personal (mostly so you can hear my voice and intonation/emotion in it), but it would take me too long to make it at my current production schedule timelines. I’ve already been spending a fucking month working on a mostly done Pikmin 3 speedrun video that has been constantly interrupted by this shit. As much as I’d like to do this, I don’t think it’s in the cards.
