Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
The NixOS Foundation board announced on April 30 that Eelco Dolstra is stepping down from the board following the recent calls for his resignation.
Eelco is the principal author of Nix and undoubtedly a central figure in the ecosystem that grew around it. We confirm that Eelco showed no intention to be perceived as or act like the BDFL [Benevolent Dictator for Life] of the Nix ecosystem, or the Nix code base. To commit to that in a timely manner, he has decided to formally step down from the board.
The board also announced its intent to set up new, explicit governance for the project, answerable to the community:
We will appoint a constitutional assembly within the next 14 days. Its task will be to set up a new governance structure, run by the community, that is capable of serving the community's needs. Once established, we will delegate our power to institutions within that new structure. This entire process will take place in a public space, such that it's traceable for anyone concerned. We are committed to listening to everyone who may help with solving the problems the community is facing.
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Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 9:05 UTC (Thu) by milesrout (guest, #126894) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 9:28 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 11:20 UTC (Thu) by milesrout (guest, #126894) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 12:14 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]
Two out of three of those statements are non-sequiturs; you do not need to have met someone or recognise their name for them to have opinions about you based on comments you have posted in the past. I am confident, for example, that none of the US presidents in my lifetime have met me, or would recognise my name, and yet I have opinions about them based on what they've previously said.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 17:37 UTC (Mon) by jhe (subscriber, #164815) [Link]
Yes, you are right now, but i wish someone else threw this stone.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 9:49 UTC (Thu) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 10:24 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 14:08 UTC (Thu) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 20:15 UTC (Thu) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 21:41 UTC (Thu) by stephenjudd (guest, #3227) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 20:25 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 2, 2024 22:25 UTC (Thu) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]
It's understandable that developers do not want their software being used for oppression or killing, but nothing radical is going on here. It's not like they're blocking the contributions of people who work in the defense sector or refusing to fix bugs just because the bug fixes would also benefit them.
To give an example that I'm sure many people here would agree with, I am not upset that Raytheon uses the Linux kernel (although I might wish Raytheon did not exist), but I would be very upset if they proudly sponsored Linux and had a powerful voice influencing the direction the project goes in. I would be even more upset if Linus Torvalds worked for Raytheon or a company with ties to it.
There are situations where people with good motives but terrible praxis take over projects. There are situations where people, tired of a toxic culture, swing too far in the opposite direction and end up unwittingly promoting new forms of discrimination. What is happening here is not one of those situations, and is not even close to it.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 3, 2024 16:16 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]
The majority of problems that NixOS was facing had to do with Eelco's interference with moderation and the overriding of community consensus. His alleged ties with the military-industrial complex are relevant but are far from the only issue at hand.My impression from the articles is that the people calling for his ouster saw the issues as parts of a whole: that he was interfering with moderation and overriding community consensus in order to further the interests of Anduril at the expense of- or at least to the displeasure of- the rest of the community. I agree with you, though, that the existence of the disagreement was more important than the exact cause. A project can either run through a formal system, or it can have a BDFL, but it can't do both at once. This disagreement showed there was a lack of clarity about which system NixOS was going to follow, and that question had to be answered one way or the other.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 3, 2024 17:48 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]
As someone who often glibly repeats that claim, let me clarify what I really mean. I do not literally intend to claim that *every* technical problem can be usefully analyzed through the lens of politics. "Bubblesort is a bad sorting algorithm" is not a political statement.
What I really mean is this: Remember the "fun algorithms and data structures" stuff we all enjoyed playing with when we were learning to program? Well, in the professional world, most of us aren't working on that stuff full-time anymore, or even a majority of our time. Most of the actual day-to-day code that we're writing is one of the following:
* Glue code (code that moves data from one format into another, or applies a simple mechanical transformation).
* High-level library/middleware logic (code that decides which algorithms or data structures to apply to some data, with at least some understanding of what that data represents).
* High-level application logic (code that directly implements an application that the user can interact with).
I would say that almost all application logic is political (if you think hard enough), library logic is more often political than people give it credit for, and glue code is seldom political in its own right. Libraries (and frameworks, distros, and various other kinds of middleware) often maintain the fiction of not "knowing" what they're being used for, but the reality is that e.g. a GIS database is being used to store the location data of real humans (among other uses), not the location data of hobbits in Lord of the Rings. You cannot work on a GIS database and claim that act to be totally apolitical - human location data is an inherently political topic. So it goes for a surprisingly large set of other categories of library.
So if you're going to say that your work is 100% apolitical, you're claiming one of two things:
1. You work almost exclusively on pure algorithms and data structures, and/or glue code, and so you have no idea what the data actually represents.
2. You work on a library or other middleware, but the function your library performs is so basic and fundamental that it has no political implications whatsoever.
Also, you don't use the GPL or any other license with an overtly political preamble or the like. Yes, I know, not everybody agrees with the GPL's preamble, but it is a political statement, and it's right there in your COPYING.txt! Regardless of whether it has any legal effect (in some jurisdictions, it might inform the court's interpretation of the "spirit" of the license), some people will read it and draw inferences from it, whether you want them to or not. That is why the FSF put it there in the first place.
The SQLite developers have a somewhat credible claim to being apolitical. Maybe one or two other libraries. You can make a case for programming languages, but I'm not sure I believe it (e.g. Python is in practice a machine learning language, C++ a language for developing video games which are mostly proprietary, C# is Microsoft, Swift is Apple, JavaScript is drowning the web in nonsense, etc.). But if you don't fall into one of those categories, then you probably spend a nontrivial part of your time working on something that is, in some sense, political, and since that describes the vast majority of software developers, it is easier to just summarize it as "software is inherently political" rather than trying to explain all of this every time.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 4, 2024 17:01 UTC (Sat) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]
Choosing to release software is political. You're immediately interacting with other people, and so you've already made a political decision. Choosing the license is more obviously a political decision, but so is choosing a build system, a bug tracking system, a communication mechanism (email? Discord? IRC?)
So even if you're working on a data structure library that is only used by other programmers, your life is full of political decisions that you may not even realize you're making. And if you're making them without realizing then there's only one response ... Get woke!
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 4, 2024 18:34 UTC (Sat) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]
- As you said, software is inherently political because software development is inherently political because software is developed by humans and those humans are political entities and exist in a poltical context
- Software is inherently political by generalization of Conways Law. We already treat it as a truism that software will inherently develop in a way that reproduces and thus reinforces the circumstances under which it was made. It would be strange to argue that this somehow only applies to office politics and not something as fundamental as the worldviews of the people making it or the political context under which it was made.
These both offer good counterarguments to the disclaimer above that that projects like SQLite might be apolitical. Both their software development practices are highly political (making your code of conduct the 10 commandments is definitely a choice) as are the imbued ideas and assumptions, with the single-node-single-process model originating from it's creation for use in guided missile destroyers vs the single-server-many-user batch processing heavy model formed by big business (including of course also the military) logistics.
Another aspect is that in common discussion, there's sometimes a misunderstanding between something being political and something being partisan. Indeed, there are many people who have the luxury of being able to be detached enough from politics think these two things are the same thing. What is partisan depends highly on when and where you are and indeed many highly political things are not generally partisan. Again the US military offers a good example there, with it's size and international role being uncontroversial enough domestically to be politically irrelevant.
There's also a final and I think most correct argument, which is: So what? Why does it matter whether that thing is political or not?
Litigating what is and isn't political only matters if it being political or not changes how we approach the situation. But claims of something being political generally goes one of two ways: Either you espouse a need to "ban politics", by which you mean banning anything of controversy, which would effectively prevent any change away from the current situation that benefits you. Or you're trying to bring awareness to the inherent choices we make when developing software, which you are probably doing because you are trying to bring awareness to the fact that these choices are malleable, deserve introspection and believe they can and should be changed, as I do. In either case, the argument does not benefit much from trying to pin down what is and isn't political.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 20:15 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]
I think the issue is mostly about external politics rather than partisan politics specifically. How do you even define partisan politics for a group where not everyone is part of the same political system? What people who complain about politics seem to be unhappy about is issues they see as outside the scope of their project intruding. They like to see their project as a refuge from the outside world and get annoyed when that outside world intrudes. The question of whether NixOS should be tightly aligned with Anduril seems like a good example. It isn't explicitly partisan, but it's definitely an example of the non-software world intruding into a mostly technical project.
I think this makes complaints about "politics" more understandable. It is annoying when concerns external to whatever you're working on interfere; it makes everything that much more complicated. That said, I agree that criticism of topics as "political" is often used to shut down uncomfortable discussions.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 20:44 UTC (Mon) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]
I also have to say I'm struggling to sympathize with the plight of someone being reminded that minorities exist while coding. I'm reminded of them pretty regularly and I don't find that particularly distressing myself. Even for people who's right to exist is highly politicized. But you may differ of course.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 21:58 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]
I hope I didn't sound dismissive of people who are mistreated because of who they are. I agree that the way the project treats its members is a core governance issue and is absolutely not a matter of external politics intruding. It's a great example of people using "let's not talk about politics" as a way of shutting down discussions they want to avoid. I thought about using it as an example but foolishly decided it would just stir up trouble.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 9:25 UTC (Mon) by milesrout (guest, #126894) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 20:27 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 5, 2024 6:02 UTC (Sun) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]
That said, it would be a very unusual job indeed where you are writing glue code to alter data from one format to another, and yet have no clue what the data (or classes of data) are or what they will used for.
There's really only one class of customer I can think of that demands that much compartmentalization.. and at that point, you probably have a fair idea that you're not generating data used for hugs & kittens, based on the customer alone.
While we're painting with very anecdotal broad strokes.. you have a very Googly view of the world... I'm torn as to whether that's more distorted than an Amazonian view, based on my experience. The googly tends be more welcoming on the surface, but lacking the cynicism of the Amazonian, they tend more toward the true believer type, and, thus, paint the world in far fewer colours and shapes.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 17:23 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]
Yes, it is a spectrum. No, this does not materially change my argument. My point is that hardly anyone is all the way over on the "I have no idea what my data actually means" end of said spectrum.
> There's really only one class of customer I can think of that demands that much compartmentalization.. and at that point, you probably have a fair idea that you're not generating data used for hugs & kittens, based on the customer alone.
I already conceded that SQLite is at this end of the spectrum, so frankly I have no idea what you're talking about.
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 6, 2024 20:26 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]
Eelco Dolstra steps down from NixOS Foundation board
Posted May 9, 2024 16:04 UTC (Thu) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]
* Aux https://aux.computer - package maintainers who left Nix looking to set up a package repo. No code yet, but the organiser is Jake Hamilton, whose extensive work in Nix gives it credibility.
* Lix https://lix.systems - the nix evaluator, attempting to untangle the web of weird dependencies in cppNix (which has hampered dev work) and move it from C++ to Rust. This work was in progress for a couple of months before Lix announced.
Aux is also very enthusiastic about working with Lix. https://forum.aux.computer/t/the-future-of-nixcpp-lix/483