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Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS)
(xeiaso.net)
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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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That reads like someone with minor mental illness. Rambling. Evangelion. Rambling.
I clicked their resume and there's no evidence they contributed a single line of code to the project. Yet they demand the person who wrote most of it step down? Yeah.
Write your own project and manage it how you want. Don't threaten others. Do your own thing.
I'd just like to remind the passing reader that creating an open source project does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to "make their own thing" if they don't like it. Open source projects are the result of a massive collaborative effort and the resulting work is the product of a whole community laboring to make it happen. Signed: someone with a major mental illness.
Hopefully this is satire.
If I create an open source project I can run it however I want. I do not have to create a board to manage it, there are plenty that have a single developer doing all the work, like VLC, and like Sqlite they may or may not even accept PRs. It doesn't stop it being open source.
If I do create a foundation, I can fill it with whoever I see fit. If there is a board, then generally they have the last say but there are plenty of projects, like Python used to be, where there might be a board but the founder remains the benevolent dictator for life and will stop them doing stupid things that distracts from the core project. Look at Linux, the project is mostly self maintained but Linus will gatekeep anything that doesn't meet his definition of success.
If my rules for my project is that all board members have to be a furry, then that's my right, and maybe the board of furries will vote to overturn that. Or maybe they won't. But you can't tell me how to run my project, this isn't a democracy.
I guess you can, yeah.
My point is not that you can't. You clearly can. And many do. The thing is, when you create your foundation that "you fill with whoever you see fit", when you faithfully believe that the BDFL will "stop them doing stupid things", or that you get to choose your board members arbitrarily and tell everyone it's not a democracy like you are proud of running it as a dictatorship, that's just a incredibly narrow and toxic culture you have set up. It's not impossible. The ethic you are posing is actually quite widespread in the world I live in, anyone arguing for it will get many around to agree, it's very assertive and rightful. Still, a shitty choice the way I see it. And from this bleak outset of things, I suppose forking is indeed the only option you have.
It was literally what you said, even if you didn't mean it to be. And I don't think that being a dictator for your project is necessarily "toxic", I have projects that take contributions and I work on others that do not. Bikeshedding, and horrible politics, are both real things and sometimes for your own sanity, not engaging is the only option because community is not the reason I work on some tasks.
Some projects are just natural candles to moths who will talk to the projects like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to_github_and_i_have_lots_to_say/
Fuck that.
What I mean is that no one will stop you. When you ascertain your own right to do it, it doesn't mean much that I don't believe you are entitled to it. It's pretty much common practice. That is more a semantic matter at this point, but yes I stand by that being messed up for a project the size of Nix.
Yeah, it is not necessarily toxic. It is at a lot more risk of being, though. Even a collectively managed project will mess up and upset the community, but then there is a sense of shared responsibility and more deliberation on what to do. With a BDFL, it's just whatever. After your project reaches a certain size, that risk keeps increasing... exponentially.
Precisely. You see, if we take this into the context of a smaller project, specially one managed by a single person as you seem to be coming back to, that is a very different context. I don't think an OSS maintainer should be laboring physically and emotionally to meet the demands of users. That is a well-known problem there. If this person doesn't even want to have contact with the community and just ship code once an year, fine. They are just sharing things with the world at no cost. In this context, "suck it up and just fork it" is indeed the way to go.
When you take something as big as NixOS though, that can really be inverted. Now you have a very large number of people who are laboring physically and emotionally to sustain a very large project, and the original creator shifts to a very different place to. It's another discussion entirely.