We have heard from multiple people in multiple unrelated contexts that they are hoping for a hard fork of the entire community over the continued inaction on the toxic culture in the Nix project.

Oh yes, please. My experiences on the nix community forums and matrix have been soured by the actions of high-level contributors. They are simply unable to view things from another perspective and harshly defend their perceived territory. I accept that they make mistakes as we are all human, but they are aware of their positions of power and happily take advantage of it.

My major problem has been the documentation of the project and how top contributors are unable to accept how bad it is. Discussions about improvements and attempts at improving it at regularly shut down or impeded. Coming back to the “harsh defense of perceived territory”, it distinctly feels like existing teams are supposed to be the only ones making changes to the things they own. Contributions from “outsiders” never exit nix review hell and are nitpicked to death.

A hard fork doesn’t guarantee existing problems won’t be copy-pasted into a new community (humans be humans), but at least if a new one started there’d be an attempt at resolving existing problems.

(no, I’m not xz’ist - this is a real person with a real opinion)

Edit: I realise I don’t have the same issues as described in this open letter which seems to be focused on Eelco. There have been no interactions with the dude, so I can’t judge, but interactions with some high-level nix members haven’t been pleasant.

Anti Commercial-AI license