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:

all types of passion projects and contributions are welcome, including and especially those that aren't programming or engineering in nature
this is an explicitly noncommercial, share-alike space
don't force yourself to do work you don't enjoy, or demand it of others

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an open letter to the NixOS foundation (save-nix-together.org)

submitted 5 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 5 months ago (7 children)

Eelco posted another non-apology and stepped down from the NixOS Foundation board. here’s the Aux take on it which I think has a bit more value than the original post alone did.

in essence: this is a good step, but it’s important to remember that Eelco and friends have made concessions like this in the past, and it hasn’t mattered to their (informal but very real) entrenched positions of power. specifically, Eelco hasn’t stepped down from the Nix evaluator team or promised he’d change any of his behavior there (and the evaluator is key to Nix, and to commercializing the project against the community’s wishes), and there’s no clarity on how the Nix governance changes will impact bad actors (which specifically includes Anduril). there’s still a very good place for Aux and any other Nix fork to exist as long as Eelco and company haven’t committed to taking actions that will remedy the most crucially broken parts of the Nix community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There's some bitter irony to the fact that I've been getting nonstop notices about commits to the infamous "lazy trees" branch, the thing that is supposed to make flakes usable with monorepos (but in practice has yet to do so). Watching those notifications the last couple of days has told me all I needed to know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

oops all eelco and he really ain’t doing much in these commits, is he? between that and the recent commits to the Nix evaluator it’s pretty obvious he’s keeping near-exclusive control over what gets into the evaluator and how it’s developed

it’s very likely that Eelco and Determinate Systems have employed an old strikebreaking technique: they’ve agreed to concessions that don’t inconvenience them and weren’t really what was demanded. Eelco has lost a board position he didn’t want, but maintains a position that’ll ensure he and his friends can commercialize improvements to Nix by controlling what goes into the evaluator, ensuring that only Determinate Systems can implement an improved version of Nix with a working version of flakes.

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