I just saw the news of the soft fork announcement over on the IceShrimp instance and thought I should share here
Background Context for Anyone Out of the Loop
(newest to oldest news - top to bottom):
- NixOS Fork Announced by Jake Hamilton -
- Reddit post - 15 contributors left Nixpkgs maintenance
- Programming.dev post - Jon Ringer’s suspension
As mentioned (by u/steventrouble in the previous post here):
I’m still not entirely sure what’s happening. I get the one guy who works for Anduril was suspended a few days ago for being toxic, but did the community side with him or not? The subreddit sure seems to be siding with him, but something tells me that may not something to be proud of.
Was this split about trying to get away from Anduril or because they didn’t care for the moderation that suspended the guy from Anduril?
Seems like political tensions stemming from developments with situations Israel/Gaza/Iran and Ukraine have piqued the discontentment over accepting donations from organizations that profit from contracts with the US DoD.
The lead developer/organizer of the NixOS project seems to be pro authoritarian in their political values and this has also lead to an uneasiness amongst a number of contributors although things seem to be civil overall.
It seems that the “toxic” behavior from Hamilton was derailing technical discussions over concerns about the funding from military contractors.
I may have got some of this wrong, but it seems that everyone involved is trying not to draw attention to the broader political aspect of the schism in the community. So people out of the loop are having trouble figuring out what is going on.