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Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS) (xeiaso.net)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by lemmyreader@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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
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[-] eupraxia 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that's the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it's only to a project's benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors' needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.

[-] baru@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply.

If the majority of contributions come from one person, then yeah, maybe that person should dictate everything. Else you'd miss out on all of those contributions, no?

I use Home Assistant. If reported a few bugs. Every single time I get a really friendly response. Often things are fixed quickly. Things are discussed, different opinions seem to be appreciated and considered. This doesn't mean that they'll do whatever someone suggests.

What I find funny about the one contributor who does the majority of the work situation is that it can also be seen in a different way.

Home Assistant as a project has grown like crazy. I'm unable to say exactly why that it, I must see it a great accomplishment.

At one point Home Assistant was just one person doing the majority of the work. Nowadays it is far from that. Pointing towards just one person doing most of the work ignores how it maybe could be. Meaning, maybe with "magic" the project would be crazily bigger. With a crazy amount of contributors. With maybe people paid for by companies to contribute.

That's what I find lacking in the logic as said by some comments (not by you). It's a comparison of the current status, not of different outcomes. And those outcomes could be worse, or better.

this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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