| 27 Apr 2024 |
 Claes | I am really confused by all allegations towards Determinate Systems, and that their actions are somehow illegitimate or conspicuous. There are hundreds of examples of companies seeing opportunity in an open source ecosystem, trying to sell services or a product around it while also sharing it under a free license. This is a good thing! It grows the use and mindshare, it stimulates innovation and so forth. | 11:01:38 |
 infinisil | Totally fine selling products around Nix, a lot of companies do that and I have no issues with it | 11:09:20 |
 eaon | Same. That is not at all what I'm getting at. | 11:10:18 |
| infinisil | DetSys seems to be trying to sell Nix itself, not just products on top of it.. | 11:10:47 |
| infinisil | Especially the third-party Flakes stability promise when you use _their_ Nix installer, directly going against the efforts of the Nix team trying to stabilise Flakes | 11:12:11 |
| infinisil | E.g. see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/10603#discussion_r1581048278 | 11:13:02 |
| Claes | In reply to @infinisil:matrix.org
DetSys seems to be trying to sell Nix itself, not just products on top of it.. But is not that the same as what for example Red Hat does? They sell a stability promise, they create their own patches towards the kernel, they upstream them but also maintain them in their own distribution
What they sell is their distribution. Cannot DetSys be seen as selling a kind of distribution of NixOS? A relation similar to what Ubuntu has towards Debian? | 11:21:02 |
| infinisil | This is different because Flakes is an experimental feature, which explicitly allows making breaking changes to it (has to happen with a notice period though, due to so many people using it). This is in direct conflict with keeping it stable | 11:24:41 |
| infinisil | Imo, DetSys should acknowledge this fact and actively support the Nix team with stabilisation. They can take all the glory once they actually help stabilise something, but not before that | 11:29:29 |
 @joepie91:pixie.town | In reply to @arianvp:matrix.org
But it used to be for the past decade or so. People often didn't even know that the Foundation existed. It only changed recently. Wanted to add that as context I would like to note that for half of that "past decade" we've already had serious moderation problems which I have repeatedly tried to address and which seems to have run aground on "no board mandate" every time. just because you didn't see issues for the "past decade" didn't mean they weren't there | 12:45:31 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | so let's please not pretend that this situation started in the last few months or year or whatever | 12:46:02 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | the lack of clarity on where the responsibilities and authority lie, has been a problem for a much longer time | 12:46:58 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | * the lack of clarity on where the responsibilities and authority lie, has been a problem for a much longer time, they have merely become more pressing around the topic of sponsorship | 12:47:34 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | I am not even opposed to a board which keeps its distance from day-to-day community management, but then that does need to actually be clearly specified, with the necessary mandate provided given to the teams responsible for carrying out those operations, because the foundation does legally have control over matters - and that simply never happened | 12:49:07 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | you cannot both say "the community should run itself" and then still on paper be the owner while nobody actually knows who is supposed to have authority over what | 12:50:12 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | * you cannot both say "the community should run itself" and then still on paper be the owner while nobody actually knows who is supposed to have authority over what. that is setting up the community governance for failure | 12:50:45 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | (not to mention how a certain board member barging in and overruling already-made decisions, like has already been brought up frequently as a complaint, communicates exactly the inverse intention) | 12:51:55 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | in short, the fundamental problem here is neither the community governance, nor the anarchic nature of it, nor the lack of "top-down" governance, nor a lack of structure; it's that the structures that the community built to do the governing, never got the proper recognition and authority from "up top" that they needed to actually do their job | 12:54:54 |
|  @emilytrau:matrix.org joined the room. | 12:58:29 |
 Arian | I think we're saying the same thing? It seems the community has a different interpretation and expectation over what authority the foundation holds than it has in practise.
If we want it go do active governance it needs to be run way more ... Professionally than it currently has | 13:03:56 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | I do not think we are; I am not saying we need active governance from the foundation | 13:04:31 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | I am saying that the lack of clarity about the foundation's position, and particularly that of eelco, has been the significant factor in our governance issues | 13:04:58 |
| Arian | So. What is the problem? That they say they dont do active governance but then get in the way the moment there are governance issues? | 13:05:21 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | it has created an environment of uncertainty where nobody running a team can tell whether a decision they make within the team is going to be overruled out of nowhere | 13:05:32 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | because there is no explicit policy of non-interference from the foundation, and one of the board members has a tendency to do exactly that | 13:06:00 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | you cannot do effective community governance under those circumstances | 13:06:15 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | this can be solved in one of two ways; either the foundation starts structurally and professionally involving them in governance; or they explicitly refrain from doing so, and make this a formal policy that is actually followed by the board members, with no duplicate hats | 13:06:59 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | but not this weird "maybe a board member will come in to veto things, maybe they won't" inbetween situation that we've had thus far | 13:07:26 |
 @theophane:hufschmitt.net | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
but not this weird "maybe a board member will come in to veto things, maybe they won't" inbetween situation that we've had thus far I certainly can't say I know everything, but I can't remember ever seeing that (I've seen board members engaged in all kind of discussion ofc, but not using some magic board wand to veto anything). Do you have some example? | 13:09:22 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | if we're going to do community governance then the teams appointed to be responsible for certain areas need to actually have unambiguous authority over making decisions within those areas | 13:09:23 |
