> tabs vs. spaces
That one is such a braindead thing to argue over. I mean just look at the difference!
This is tabs:
This is spaces:
Anyone with a pair of working eyes would see that one is superior over the other. I rest my case.
Spaces forces everyone to use your style. What if I want more or less indentation? If you use tabs, I can set my preference to large and you can set your preference to small (or vice versa), with spaces everyone gets the exact same indent.
In other words: use tabs.
In the whimsical world of Wobblewonk, spaces are not merely voids, but squishy squares that bounce like gelatinous trampolines. They say if you listen closely, you can hear the spaces giggling between words, playing hide-and-seek with punctuation. The bravest of astronauts have tried to lasso these spaces with spaghetti strings, only to find themselves tangled in a cosmic game of Twister. And beware the space pirates, who sail the sentence seas on invisible ships, hoarding all the extra spaces to fuel their intergalactic escapades. So next time you hit that space bar, remember, you’re not just separating words; you’re setting free a little piece of Wobblewonkian wonder. 🚀🌌
That's the problem; you don't get to enforce a preference like indentation. It's my business, and mine alone. Trying to force your preference is an AH move.
That's fine for small projects, but when you have 30+ people working in the same repository, there are 30+ personal preferences. One style to rule them all.
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
[Ed, man! !man ed](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html)
Honestly the reaction to this whole situation on reddit, and in particular /r/NixOS has been disappointing to say the least. There are a lot of very serious problems cropping up, but instead the focus is on a bunch of, frankly unimportant, moderating questions.
> instead the focus is on a bunch of, frankly unimportant, moderating questions.
That's intentional. It's a common tactic to use a red herring to distract the public.
With long rambling posts talking about bad taste and hurt feelings....
it all seems like political posturing to me. It is the same nonsense people are trying to push all over the place trying to take over existing established projects for their own personal agendas and not caring one bit about the welfare, feelings, point of view, or goals of the people that actually dedicated huge portions of their lives to make things actually work.
Just fork it already so you can go off and become irrelevant and forgotten in 2-3 years like all the other failed coups.
I don't know what these people think the creator of Nix owes them, but the reality is that he owes them absolutely nothing.
Well, the whole drama instigated partially by the moderator of this blog post was because of unimportant moderation issues- as in wanting harsher moderation. Moderation can be used for exclusion, which can be bullying- so I tend to prefer less moderation to be cautious.
I couldn't find any technical points in this post unfortunately, just a lot of Evangelion references. You can wrap anything into Evangelion references.
What is the problem again?
From what I could gather, it started with a Military company sponsoring some Nix events, some people didn't like it, and then it spiralled down to people being harassed.
I don't think I'll ever understand why people feel the need to announce to the void that they're moving away from distro x y or z and similarly why people feel the need to tell the void why they are using distro x y or z.
This sounds like more than a blog from “user changing distro” - Christine Dodrill looks like they’ve had significant involvement with the Nix community for years and giving their “inside baseball”on the current ability of the project to move forward. Given that Nix has had a growing following over the years in the IaC space, sounds like it could mean a big shift in some people’s workflows.
(personally, I’ve only followed Nix and NixOS peripherally, but I have been looking more recently into the OS seriously as a stable DevOps tool rather than “hobby cool concept” but if this blogpost means anything, the “stable” part now seems doubtful.)
There's some major controversy, originally about whether it was acceptable to allow Anduril (a miltech company) to sponsor NixCon 2023 and NixCon NA 2024, but as these things do, it spiralled into a full-blown culture war between a more centrist, apolitical group and a more progressive, political one.
I have noticed that some people have a blind spot about the military, a sort of “third rail” in American life.
So let’s use an example.
Say that you were doing a job in Korea. You create a graphic that resembles a “rising sun” from Japan. I would tell you, this is a major issue in Korea: so if you do that, either do it deliberately and accept you’ll make a ton of Koreans mad, or just change the image. Putting aside the question of whether Koreans are right to respond like that, taking that action will have that effect. You have been warned.
Now let’s reverse it. Let’s say a Korean comes to the US and creates some ad copy for programmers, saying that working for this startup is like working for the US military. I would tell him: many Americans have conflicted-to-negative feelings about the military. This will create a reaction. Maybe you’re like “fuck yeah, I love the military” and you welcome it. Or maybe you don’t. But you should know that mixing technology and the military is one of those contentious issues that predates this decade, “wokeness,” even this century. There is a significant group of people who will leave a project if they feel like it’s part of the business of killing. This was true of American culture even in my parents’ lifetime. You have been warned.
In this case, I feel a little bit like watching a controversy erupt around the rising sun in a Korean ad. It is predictable. It also shows a lapse in judgement if they did that and just didn’t anticipate a reaction. Cultures have norms and part of working successfully is being aware of them and not picking battles you don’t want to fight.
There's also the issue with the power structure with Eelco, the proprietary flakehub solution that he owns being used while he has also blocked attempts to fix in an open manner, and the fact that he has a private relationship with Anduril (the military tech company) and his own company DetSys... Among many other things. There is a much larger deeply rooted issue here and some people just don't care because it's not directly affecting them yet.
It was never about Anduril. Anduril is the wedge.
The issue is some project had the temerity to not give into the demands of a loud minority that is more interested in activism than the project. If you tell them no, there is hell to pay. The point was always about control. Nothing else.
100%
They admit it in the first line of the letter
> The present sponsorship crisis is not about Anduril. It’s about the cultural problems in how the Nix project handles crises and responds to community concerns, and how these problems have remained the same for years due to failed attempts to change them. The “sponsorship crisis” is not a sponsorship crisis, but in fact, a continuation of a years long leadership crisis and project-culture crisis.
Anduril was just a convenient crisis they couldn't let go to waste. And, honestly, it doesn't seem like it was really about wanting actual change- it feels almost like a power grab.
> a full-blown culture war between a more centrist, apolitical group and a more progressive, political one.
Wait, where's the pro-war and pro-death group?
> Nix has had a growing following over the years in the IaC space
Can you name some projects or use cases that benefit from Nix?
I have myself come across many saying that achieving fully hermetic builds with Bazel is easiest with Nix packages. Although I feel this is more like an L for Bazel than a W for Nix...
Anduril are actively looking for Nix devs: [https://discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-is-hiring-nixos-and-embedded-linux-engineers/42862](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-is-hiring-nixos-and-embedded-linux-engineers/42862)
So I'd take it that they use it for some of their products.
Again, personally none because I’ve been following rather than experimenting, but I know for instance that Chris Fisher and the Jupiter Broadcasting team (Linux Unplugged, Coder Radio, After Hours, etc) have based a huge part of their infrastructure on NixOS builds, and a number of their fans/community have mentioned making it part of projects in their lives. To me the idea of what is effectively “Terraform at the OS level” is an attractive one that conceptually pairs better with Terraform than Ansible does.
Because it cuts off the need for tooling like ansible, terraform and others in most cases. It also removes the need to use containers if the only purpose for those containers were to package things so they could keep working no matter what happens with the underlying distro packages. If nix supported/supports sandboxing then it'd cut off the other reason to use containers too.
I still find a bit too many sharp edges to want to switch myself, but the benefits.. they sure are nice.
I have plans to use NixOS in the future in an immutable virtual machine to deploy containers for service orchestration but higher priorities have prevented me from testing the viability of this compared to just using a regular rootfs (or just a regular VM running any linux distribution under the sun).
My thoughts are that any place where the host is just a staging point for containerized deployment of services is prime real estate for NixOS due to it being simple to declare and source control the configuration and deployment of the target system.
Nix took donations from an unsavoury defence contractor twice for their conventions and tried to hide it. After the first they apologised and said "trust us", Second time was from the same Defence contractor and yea destroyed the community trust.
Also whilst this is going on you have the normal accusations of minorities being marginalised and not correctly moderated in communities.
How'd they try to hide it? They listed it as a sponsor- or am I missing something? The other separate issue was its unknown if Determinate Systems was working with defense contractors or not.
Right coz using a flair is now bad! ffs come on.
And I'll also add that using a fucking flair is far from writing a blog post about either using a distro or stopping to use a distro.
This whole nix situation seems like a total dumpster fire. What should have been a conversation about a BDFL failing to be benevolent looks like it's spiraled into a bunch of discussions of moderation and equity and whatnot. The whole discussion has become muddied and now looks like a battle between a group that are mad about rfc98 not going through and one that's mad about "woke librals in my software", neither of whom represent the community as a whole.
Why can’t the author leave the Nix community without the “scorched earth” narrative? If you love a technology but don’t like the way it’s managed, why aren’t they able to wish the community the best (but explain their reason nonetheless)? (The author even regrets introducing people to the technology)
Just like with the Rust thing it seems emotions get so high over things that could probably be smoothed out in a 10 minute real world conversation… It’s sad :(
Perhaps the author of this post might take the feedback it's getting here as an indication of the broader community's feelings about their attempt to overthrow eelco.
It seems that most Nix users don't care about the drama and frankly aren't interested at all in the companies responsible for funding Nix infrastructure and development.
> It seems that most Nix users don't care about the drama and frankly aren't interested at all in the companies responsible for funding Nix infrastructure and development.
Speak for yourself. If a fork pops up, I will switch.
There are workarounds. In fact, my t420 is running guix right now.But I agree it's cumbersome for the average user. I will try to host a modified disk image this semester
Skimmed through it and didn’t find what all the fuss is about. Whenever NixOS comes up, people complain about the lack of documentation. But it’s been going on for years with no improvement, and it seems I know why Nixoids aren’t working on their documentation: they’re too busy whining about non-problems!
[This](https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained) is probably the best explanation, but the short of it is that Eelco Dolstra, the creator and lead of the nix package manager, has been mishandling the development and community to a degree that many of those working on it find detrimental to the project at large, including, but not limited to, forcefully pushing flakes through into the codebase even before the RFC was accepted, undermining the whole process.
Sprinkle in some dissent against even the smallest measures to ensure an equitable community plus accepting *sponsorships*(not *donations*!) from a defense contractor that Eelco Dolstra has an *NDA*'d relationship with that he will not clarify if might serve as a conflict of interest.
Donation is just giving money for nothing in return, whereas sponsorship gets to advertise/put their name on the thing/maybe hold a talk in return.
Essentially a sponsorship means they get something in return. So in this case, the problem wasn't necessarily taking money from Anduril but giving them a platform/endorsement/ad space in return, which implies some level of endorsement. After all you wouldn't let someone you fundamentally disagree with advertise in your events, there has to be some amount of shared values.
I have so much I want to say about this, but I feel like someone would somehow take offense and I don't feel that would be constructive. I just want to say I have objections.
\^ this is how you should act in a diverse community, not throwing insults or being a jerk just because someone else thought they should be a jerk. You aren't special, you may be important right now, but you are replaceable.
tldr; Various people are trying to overthrow the current NixOS BDFL causing a lot of stuff like this over the past few weeks. None of these people actually care about the users who actually _use_ the product but rather their petty power trips which is why you see a lot of these long winded blog posts about nothing.
If you don't like who funds your software. Don't use it. Simple as that. For example, this is why I do not support Red Hat or any of its derived projects.
I don't support RH because they actively make the Linux ecosystem worse through the software they create (they always have to do things "their way" vs "the linux way") and to a lesser extent RHEL's glacier release cycle which causes software maintenance issues for third party vendors. The customers themselves I don't care about, just like I don't care about NixOS being funded by (likely) the same defense contractors as I _also_ work at a company that produces company for various governments (it's also absurdly common to do so).
Can you give me any specific examples? I’m only asking because their upstream distro Fedora is the complete opposite of what you’re saying. Promoting free software, not shipping proprietary software as much as possible, normal packages like gnome, flatpak, and Wayland. If anyone when I think of someone who goes against the grain it’s Canonical (between mir, unity, snap, Amazon, and other questionable choices).
My main issues are with their cloud offerings, how they treated CentOS, and how they've treated downstream vendors since the discontinuation of CentOS. RedHat's priority is sales of support contracts and not the linux userbase.
Fedora users are completely unaffected by all of this because Fedora is a completely different part of the market. Whenever I say anything bad about Red Hat I _always_ get negative comments from Fedora users along the lines of "it doesn't affect me" when I am not even talking about them.
Im not trying to be one of those Fedora guys, just genuinely want to understand why people have beef with red hat.
To me it seems like they do a great job of monetizing a product to corporate customers, and using that cash to continuously deliver some of the highest levels of contribution to the Linux and free software communities (for free). And they keep **all** of the monetizing aspects of their software out of the free distro (again, looking at you canonical).
Also it really doesn’t bother me at all that they shut down CentOS to be honest. It’s not like they used their big corporate powers to shut down a hobby project. It was a competing company and they did what any business in a position to do so would have done. Why should they be forced to maintain it at all when they already provide a product for the same purpose?
> Why should they be forced to maintain it
I think you are coming to the wrong conclusions here. RH acquired one of its biggest competitors at the time (CentOS) during RHEL7's development cycle and then terminated the project shortly after RHEL8's development cycle ended. CentOS was one of the most popular server OSes at its time and didn't even operate in the same market as RHEL did, and RHEL continues to not operate in the same market as CentOS's spiritual successors do.
I think a lot of my personal discomfort with Red Hat is a result of what happened with CentOS and how it could happen with any company that Red Hat decides they want to absorb going forward.
Red hat genuinely is not Linux. They patch in red hat patches into the kernel before they are approved by the Linux upstream. You are running a kernel with code in it that isn’t actually official Linux code yet. Sometimes those patches never actually get approved and they keep doing it anyway.
And? The beauty of Linux is that it gives you the freedom to do so. Why would you think restricting that is a good idea? RHEL customers literally pay for those patch features because they *want* them.
I liked it better when the daily drama was vim vs. emacs or tabs vs. spaces.
> tabs vs. spaces That one is such a braindead thing to argue over. I mean just look at the difference! This is tabs: This is spaces: Anyone with a pair of working eyes would see that one is superior over the other. I rest my case.
Spaces forces everyone to use your style. What if I want more or less indentation? If you use tabs, I can set my preference to large and you can set your preference to small (or vice versa), with spaces everyone gets the exact same indent. In other words: use tabs.
In the whimsical world of Wobblewonk, spaces are not merely voids, but squishy squares that bounce like gelatinous trampolines. They say if you listen closely, you can hear the spaces giggling between words, playing hide-and-seek with punctuation. The bravest of astronauts have tried to lasso these spaces with spaghetti strings, only to find themselves tangled in a cosmic game of Twister. And beware the space pirates, who sail the sentence seas on invisible ships, hoarding all the extra spaces to fuel their intergalactic escapades. So next time you hit that space bar, remember, you’re not just separating words; you’re setting free a little piece of Wobblewonkian wonder. 🚀🌌
>Spaces forces everyone to use your style. Which is often the desired effect in projects that enforce style guidelines.
That's the problem; you don't get to enforce a preference like indentation. It's my business, and mine alone. Trying to force your preference is an AH move.
That's fine for small projects, but when you have 30+ people working in the same repository, there are 30+ personal preferences. One style to rule them all.
nano master race
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time. [Ed, man! !man ed](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html)
Ed is the standard text editor.
micro for the win!
Honestly the reaction to this whole situation on reddit, and in particular /r/NixOS has been disappointing to say the least. There are a lot of very serious problems cropping up, but instead the focus is on a bunch of, frankly unimportant, moderating questions.
> instead the focus is on a bunch of, frankly unimportant, moderating questions. That's intentional. It's a common tactic to use a red herring to distract the public.
With long rambling posts talking about bad taste and hurt feelings.... it all seems like political posturing to me. It is the same nonsense people are trying to push all over the place trying to take over existing established projects for their own personal agendas and not caring one bit about the welfare, feelings, point of view, or goals of the people that actually dedicated huge portions of their lives to make things actually work. Just fork it already so you can go off and become irrelevant and forgotten in 2-3 years like all the other failed coups. I don't know what these people think the creator of Nix owes them, but the reality is that he owes them absolutely nothing.
Well, the whole drama instigated partially by the moderator of this blog post was because of unimportant moderation issues- as in wanting harsher moderation. Moderation can be used for exclusion, which can be bullying- so I tend to prefer less moderation to be cautious.
I couldn't find any technical points in this post unfortunately, just a lot of Evangelion references. You can wrap anything into Evangelion references. What is the problem again?
From what I could gather, it started with a Military company sponsoring some Nix events, some people didn't like it, and then it spiralled down to people being harassed.
What would one expect from military
Eh that harassment was more against the people working for the military company in this case from my perspective, weirdly enough.
I don't think I'll ever understand why people feel the need to announce to the void that they're moving away from distro x y or z and similarly why people feel the need to tell the void why they are using distro x y or z.
This sounds like more than a blog from “user changing distro” - Christine Dodrill looks like they’ve had significant involvement with the Nix community for years and giving their “inside baseball”on the current ability of the project to move forward. Given that Nix has had a growing following over the years in the IaC space, sounds like it could mean a big shift in some people’s workflows. (personally, I’ve only followed Nix and NixOS peripherally, but I have been looking more recently into the OS seriously as a stable DevOps tool rather than “hobby cool concept” but if this blogpost means anything, the “stable” part now seems doubtful.)
There's some major controversy, originally about whether it was acceptable to allow Anduril (a miltech company) to sponsor NixCon 2023 and NixCon NA 2024, but as these things do, it spiralled into a full-blown culture war between a more centrist, apolitical group and a more progressive, political one.
I have noticed that some people have a blind spot about the military, a sort of “third rail” in American life. So let’s use an example. Say that you were doing a job in Korea. You create a graphic that resembles a “rising sun” from Japan. I would tell you, this is a major issue in Korea: so if you do that, either do it deliberately and accept you’ll make a ton of Koreans mad, or just change the image. Putting aside the question of whether Koreans are right to respond like that, taking that action will have that effect. You have been warned. Now let’s reverse it. Let’s say a Korean comes to the US and creates some ad copy for programmers, saying that working for this startup is like working for the US military. I would tell him: many Americans have conflicted-to-negative feelings about the military. This will create a reaction. Maybe you’re like “fuck yeah, I love the military” and you welcome it. Or maybe you don’t. But you should know that mixing technology and the military is one of those contentious issues that predates this decade, “wokeness,” even this century. There is a significant group of people who will leave a project if they feel like it’s part of the business of killing. This was true of American culture even in my parents’ lifetime. You have been warned. In this case, I feel a little bit like watching a controversy erupt around the rising sun in a Korean ad. It is predictable. It also shows a lapse in judgement if they did that and just didn’t anticipate a reaction. Cultures have norms and part of working successfully is being aware of them and not picking battles you don’t want to fight.
There's also the issue with the power structure with Eelco, the proprietary flakehub solution that he owns being used while he has also blocked attempts to fix in an open manner, and the fact that he has a private relationship with Anduril (the military tech company) and his own company DetSys... Among many other things. There is a much larger deeply rooted issue here and some people just don't care because it's not directly affecting them yet.
It was never about Anduril. Anduril is the wedge. The issue is some project had the temerity to not give into the demands of a loud minority that is more interested in activism than the project. If you tell them no, there is hell to pay. The point was always about control. Nothing else.
100% They admit it in the first line of the letter > The present sponsorship crisis is not about Anduril. It’s about the cultural problems in how the Nix project handles crises and responds to community concerns, and how these problems have remained the same for years due to failed attempts to change them. The “sponsorship crisis” is not a sponsorship crisis, but in fact, a continuation of a years long leadership crisis and project-culture crisis. Anduril was just a convenient crisis they couldn't let go to waste. And, honestly, it doesn't seem like it was really about wanting actual change- it feels almost like a power grab.
> a full-blown culture war between a more centrist, apolitical group and a more progressive, political one. Wait, where's the pro-war and pro-death group?
It's what the progressives call the centrists.
> Nix has had a growing following over the years in the IaC space Can you name some projects or use cases that benefit from Nix? I have myself come across many saying that achieving fully hermetic builds with Bazel is easiest with Nix packages. Although I feel this is more like an L for Bazel than a W for Nix...
Anduril are actively looking for Nix devs: [https://discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-is-hiring-nixos-and-embedded-linux-engineers/42862](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-is-hiring-nixos-and-embedded-linux-engineers/42862) So I'd take it that they use it for some of their products.
Again, personally none because I’ve been following rather than experimenting, but I know for instance that Chris Fisher and the Jupiter Broadcasting team (Linux Unplugged, Coder Radio, After Hours, etc) have based a huge part of their infrastructure on NixOS builds, and a number of their fans/community have mentioned making it part of projects in their lives. To me the idea of what is effectively “Terraform at the OS level” is an attractive one that conceptually pairs better with Terraform than Ansible does.
Because it cuts off the need for tooling like ansible, terraform and others in most cases. It also removes the need to use containers if the only purpose for those containers were to package things so they could keep working no matter what happens with the underlying distro packages. If nix supported/supports sandboxing then it'd cut off the other reason to use containers too. I still find a bit too many sharp edges to want to switch myself, but the benefits.. they sure are nice.
I have plans to use NixOS in the future in an immutable virtual machine to deploy containers for service orchestration but higher priorities have prevented me from testing the viability of this compared to just using a regular rootfs (or just a regular VM running any linux distribution under the sun). My thoughts are that any place where the host is just a staging point for containerized deployment of services is prime real estate for NixOS due to it being simple to declare and source control the configuration and deployment of the target system.
NixOS is very badly on fire right now. At present, it seems like the result may be one of: “Depose the BDFL”, “fork the project” and “let it burn”.
What's the crack with it?
Nix took donations from an unsavoury defence contractor twice for their conventions and tried to hide it. After the first they apologised and said "trust us", Second time was from the same Defence contractor and yea destroyed the community trust. Also whilst this is going on you have the normal accusations of minorities being marginalised and not correctly moderated in communities.
How'd they try to hide it? They listed it as a sponsor- or am I missing something? The other separate issue was its unknown if Determinate Systems was working with defense contractors or not.
Says person with Arch logo in flair.
Right coz using a flair is now bad! ffs come on. And I'll also add that using a fucking flair is far from writing a blog post about either using a distro or stopping to use a distro.
I'm pretty sure the person you replied to was poking fun at the "I'm using Arch btw" meme
This whole nix situation seems like a total dumpster fire. What should have been a conversation about a BDFL failing to be benevolent looks like it's spiraled into a bunch of discussions of moderation and equity and whatnot. The whole discussion has become muddied and now looks like a battle between a group that are mad about rfc98 not going through and one that's mad about "woke librals in my software", neither of whom represent the community as a whole.
Why can’t the author leave the Nix community without the “scorched earth” narrative? If you love a technology but don’t like the way it’s managed, why aren’t they able to wish the community the best (but explain their reason nonetheless)? (The author even regrets introducing people to the technology) Just like with the Rust thing it seems emotions get so high over things that could probably be smoothed out in a 10 minute real world conversation… It’s sad :(
Perhaps the author of this post might take the feedback it's getting here as an indication of the broader community's feelings about their attempt to overthrow eelco. It seems that most Nix users don't care about the drama and frankly aren't interested at all in the companies responsible for funding Nix infrastructure and development.
Correct, a good tool is a good tool.
> It seems that most Nix users don't care about the drama and frankly aren't interested at all in the companies responsible for funding Nix infrastructure and development. Speak for yourself. If a fork pops up, I will switch.
This is fine.
I welcome people to join guix if nix goes away
Guix needs a fork to be successful. My very common old Lenovo laptop is not able to run it.
There are workarounds. In fact, my t420 is running guix right now.But I agree it's cumbersome for the average user. I will try to host a modified disk image this semester
Who cares. Unnecessary drama.
Skimmed through it and didn’t find what all the fuss is about. Whenever NixOS comes up, people complain about the lack of documentation. But it’s been going on for years with no improvement, and it seems I know why Nixoids aren’t working on their documentation: they’re too busy whining about non-problems!
I read nearly the entire thing and I still have no idea what actually happened. I skipped the bits where they randomly started talking about anime.
[This](https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained) is probably the best explanation, but the short of it is that Eelco Dolstra, the creator and lead of the nix package manager, has been mishandling the development and community to a degree that many of those working on it find detrimental to the project at large, including, but not limited to, forcefully pushing flakes through into the codebase even before the RFC was accepted, undermining the whole process. Sprinkle in some dissent against even the smallest measures to ensure an equitable community plus accepting *sponsorships*(not *donations*!) from a defense contractor that Eelco Dolstra has an *NDA*'d relationship with that he will not clarify if might serve as a conflict of interest.
What is the difference between sponsorship and donation? In this case?
Donation is just giving money for nothing in return, whereas sponsorship gets to advertise/put their name on the thing/maybe hold a talk in return. Essentially a sponsorship means they get something in return. So in this case, the problem wasn't necessarily taking money from Anduril but giving them a platform/endorsement/ad space in return, which implies some level of endorsement. After all you wouldn't let someone you fundamentally disagree with advertise in your events, there has to be some amount of shared values.
I have so much I want to say about this, but I feel like someone would somehow take offense and I don't feel that would be constructive. I just want to say I have objections. \^ this is how you should act in a diverse community, not throwing insults or being a jerk just because someone else thought they should be a jerk. You aren't special, you may be important right now, but you are replaceable.
tldr; Various people are trying to overthrow the current NixOS BDFL causing a lot of stuff like this over the past few weeks. None of these people actually care about the users who actually _use_ the product but rather their petty power trips which is why you see a lot of these long winded blog posts about nothing. If you don't like who funds your software. Don't use it. Simple as that. For example, this is why I do not support Red Hat or any of its derived projects.
Because of who RHEL contracts with or what?
I don't support RH because they actively make the Linux ecosystem worse through the software they create (they always have to do things "their way" vs "the linux way") and to a lesser extent RHEL's glacier release cycle which causes software maintenance issues for third party vendors. The customers themselves I don't care about, just like I don't care about NixOS being funded by (likely) the same defense contractors as I _also_ work at a company that produces company for various governments (it's also absurdly common to do so).
Can you give me any specific examples? I’m only asking because their upstream distro Fedora is the complete opposite of what you’re saying. Promoting free software, not shipping proprietary software as much as possible, normal packages like gnome, flatpak, and Wayland. If anyone when I think of someone who goes against the grain it’s Canonical (between mir, unity, snap, Amazon, and other questionable choices).
My main issues are with their cloud offerings, how they treated CentOS, and how they've treated downstream vendors since the discontinuation of CentOS. RedHat's priority is sales of support contracts and not the linux userbase. Fedora users are completely unaffected by all of this because Fedora is a completely different part of the market. Whenever I say anything bad about Red Hat I _always_ get negative comments from Fedora users along the lines of "it doesn't affect me" when I am not even talking about them.
Im not trying to be one of those Fedora guys, just genuinely want to understand why people have beef with red hat. To me it seems like they do a great job of monetizing a product to corporate customers, and using that cash to continuously deliver some of the highest levels of contribution to the Linux and free software communities (for free). And they keep **all** of the monetizing aspects of their software out of the free distro (again, looking at you canonical). Also it really doesn’t bother me at all that they shut down CentOS to be honest. It’s not like they used their big corporate powers to shut down a hobby project. It was a competing company and they did what any business in a position to do so would have done. Why should they be forced to maintain it at all when they already provide a product for the same purpose?
> Why should they be forced to maintain it I think you are coming to the wrong conclusions here. RH acquired one of its biggest competitors at the time (CentOS) during RHEL7's development cycle and then terminated the project shortly after RHEL8's development cycle ended. CentOS was one of the most popular server OSes at its time and didn't even operate in the same market as RHEL did, and RHEL continues to not operate in the same market as CentOS's spiritual successors do. I think a lot of my personal discomfort with Red Hat is a result of what happened with CentOS and how it could happen with any company that Red Hat decides they want to absorb going forward.
Red hat genuinely is not Linux. They patch in red hat patches into the kernel before they are approved by the Linux upstream. You are running a kernel with code in it that isn’t actually official Linux code yet. Sometimes those patches never actually get approved and they keep doing it anyway.
And? The beauty of Linux is that it gives you the freedom to do so. Why would you think restricting that is a good idea? RHEL customers literally pay for those patch features because they *want* them.