this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

(logo credit, with modifications by @[email protected])

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an open letter to the NixOS foundation (save-nix-together.org)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

a maintainer quit

one of those complicit dickheads that was highlighted in the open letter has, unfortunately, said words again

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Lotta people are leaving, holy shit

Update: Milestone got deleted, pulled out a Wayback machine copy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

ah, this must be why the lie being pushed now is that it’s really just two people causing all the problems. anything to stop the bleeding without instituting any changes at all!

I seem to have made the same mistake that @danderson mentioned in #307033. This PR rectifies the issue by leaving the Determinate Systems community.

This orphans a bunch of long tail packages, but hopefully someone who loves the idea of hunting migrants with Nix-powered surveillance can take over.

fucking brutal

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

clearly the problem is none of these long-term open source package maintainers understand that open source means Anduril can use NixOS for whatever they like! and clearly that means we have to give them an outsized amount of direct and indirect control over our committees and board, accept their money even when our entire community and several partner organizations tell us not to, let their trolls take over our discussion forums, and set up several shady commercial deals between them and a company that controls a bunch of Nix’s supposedly community-owned infrastructure (which we’ll also insist they have the right to use, even when their commercial usage of it far outstrips the value of their contributions to the community (which, in any case, wants Anduril to fuck off))

yeah, that’s the problem here

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

there’s nothing more non-political than destroying your own community because you want to get funding and a tiny amount of code from a right-wing defense contractor whose explicit mission is to use your and your contributors’ work to more efficiently kill people

It’s worth noting that the open letter received 232 signatures. However, 231 contributors have opted to keep contributing to nixpkgs, which makes me optimistic that things will work out.

christ almighty. there’s no number of signatures or amount of core maintainers quitting that’ll stop these fuckers from using bad math and statistics to make it look like a good thing. this is the mind-numbing banality of technofascism — you can always ass-pull some numbers to justify your ghastly fucking position no matter how many people tell you you’re a fucking ghoul.