my conflicting urges to rant about the defense contractors sponsoring RustConf, the Palantir employee who secretly controls most of the Rust package ecosystem via a transitive dependency (with arbitrary code execution on development machines!) and got a speaker kicked out of RustConf for threatening that position with a replacement for that dependency, or the fact that all the tech I like instantly gets taken over by shitheads as soon as it gets popular (and Nix is looking like it might be next)
so far the results from various steering committees haven’t been fantastic, to the point where I’ve seen marginalized folks ranting about the outcome on mastodon, which isn’t a great sign. with that said, I’ve also seen a ton of marginalized folks quite happily get into Nix recently, and that’s fantastic — as long as they don’t hit a brick wall in the form of exclusionary social systems set up around contributing to the Nix ecosystem.
overall these are essentially just general concerns around a few signals I’ve seen and the point Nix is at where it’s rapidly transitioning from a project with an academic focus to one with a more general focus. I’ve already seen many attempts by commercial interests to irrevocably claim parts of the ecosystem, especially in flakes (there have been many attempts to restandardize flakes onto a complex, commercially-controlled standard library, which could result in a similar situation to what we’ve seen with rust)
Nix itself is still fantastic tech I use everywhere; that’s why I care if folks are excluded from contributing. unfortunately, the commercialization of open source ecosystems and exclusion seem to go hand-in-hand — it’s one of the tactics that corporations use to maintain control over open source projects, while making forks very hard or impossible for anyone without corporate levels of wealth and available labor.
that’s the uwu smol bean defense contractors
(see: most of Rust)
my conflicting urges to rant about the defense contractors sponsoring RustConf, the Palantir employee who secretly controls most of the Rust package ecosystem via a transitive dependency (with arbitrary code execution on development machines!) and got a speaker kicked out of RustConf for threatening that position with a replacement for that dependency, or the fact that all the tech I like instantly gets taken over by shitheads as soon as it gets popular (and Nix is looking like it might be next)
More details on the rust thing? I can’t find it by searching keywords you mentioned but I must know.
Here is the pile of receipts, posted by the speaker who was cancelled via backdoor.
@self @dgerard Am curious if you have specific concerns about Nix or if it’s more a general concern based on past experience.
so far the results from various steering committees haven’t been fantastic, to the point where I’ve seen marginalized folks ranting about the outcome on mastodon, which isn’t a great sign. with that said, I’ve also seen a ton of marginalized folks quite happily get into Nix recently, and that’s fantastic — as long as they don’t hit a brick wall in the form of exclusionary social systems set up around contributing to the Nix ecosystem.
overall these are essentially just general concerns around a few signals I’ve seen and the point Nix is at where it’s rapidly transitioning from a project with an academic focus to one with a more general focus. I’ve already seen many attempts by commercial interests to irrevocably claim parts of the ecosystem, especially in flakes (there have been many attempts to restandardize flakes onto a complex, commercially-controlled standard library, which could result in a similar situation to what we’ve seen with rust)
Nix itself is still fantastic tech I use everywhere; that’s why I care if folks are excluded from contributing. unfortunately, the commercialization of open source ecosystems and exclusion seem to go hand-in-hand — it’s one of the tactics that corporations use to maintain control over open source projects, while making forks very hard or impossible for anyone without corporate levels of wealth and available labor.