https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236
Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :
If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is: Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community
What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development? Software development is deeply entrenched in politics. It’s just that, just as in most topics that don’t have politics as their main thing, a lot of people would rather pretend it’s not.
Any community of people presupposes politics. If it doesn’t show, most likely it’s a very narrow or homogeneous group of people, which involves excluding/shunning others to defend this narrowness. So that has its own sort of problem too.
What makes you think (“identity”) politics are unrelated to software development?
The fact that the code quality is independent from your “identity” ?
yes because how a factory produces goods is independent from its workers well being, right?
code is made by people, pushing away good contributors will lead to worse code, stressing contributors will lead to worse code, splitting contributor communities will lead to worse code
if you really only care about code quality why are you bothered by identity talk? leave it to those affected and go back looking at code
“Why identity politics bro?”
Says the first guy to bring up identity politics in the thread.
The article didn’t say shit about gender you weirdo. You have hallucinated this.
Jon Ringer’s actual actions did include pushback against representation for trans people. I’ll take your word for it that this article didn’t mention those exchanges; I’m not readin’ all that.
Shit, sorry, you’re a different guy I think? Apologies for that the top comment was deleted.
Still going to restate that removing trans people from the community wouldn’t be identity politics, it’d be hatred
Why are identity politics even allowed to be discussed in an unrelated field (software development) in the first place? Seems it always just leads to people getting upset when you can just not talk about it as it’s really not related at all to my knowledge.
I can kinda agree here. In the open source community, identity politics should be especially irrelevant. The FOSS licences are explicitly designed in a way to not discriminate based on such factors like race, religion, gender, nationality, biological sex, political views, etc.
However, from what I can gleam from the blog, it seems somehow related to the COC, maintainer behavior and a lack of transparency rather than “identity politics”. In what way, idk because the blog doesn’t seem to specify any specific verifiable incident, at least from what I can tell. But I will say, that if it is a matter of the COC, that the COC is supposed to be a protection of the right for an individual to be able to express themselves in an environment that won’t prosecute them.
So, in this regard it’d make sense to if say someone was being miss gendered maliciously for example, it’d violate the COC. In this regard, the right to express oneself doesn’t give someone the right to harass others because they disagree with how someone else is expressing themselves.
Edits : restructuring and clarification.
