NixOS Foundation board: Giving power to the community
NixOS Foundation board: Giving power to the community
The community is more important than the product. — Pieter Hintjens Dear contributors to the Nix ecosystem, dear users, We recognize that the Nix community keeps growing and changing, and its governance has not been adapting accordingly. While the foundation board was never intended to lead the ...
Eelco has agreed to step down from the NixOS foundation board. Over the next two weeks, a constitutional assembly will be appointed to draft a constitution to democratically govern Nix/NixOS.
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I do not like distributed, community-driven leadership. The more leadership is shared, the more arguments there are, and the less gets done.
I would rather have a strong dictatorship focused on technical merit, to be deposed in the future for another dictator, again, based on technical merit.
You are free to set up such a project, instituting yourself as the initial dictator, accepting merit challenges of some specified form, and see whether someone bothers to go for your jugular. Call it KingOfTheHillOS.
...in all seriousness the general issue with merit-based approaches is that you need a way to decide on what "merit" means, and to have an actual project and not a one person show you need a community that shares that definition, and you can't dispose of the dictator if they have the power to dictate what merit is, so you are left with either a) an unchanging definition which is just as bad as unpatchable software or b) some form of stakeholder democracy.
I would rather have a strong dictatorship focused on technical merit, to be deposed in the future for another dictator, again, based on technical merit.
Normally when I see people say something like this, what they actually mean is "based on technical merit (and also has the right opinions that agree with mine)". The concern is that democracy will produce outcomes they find disagreeable.
Personally I'd rather have a choice of who to follow based on whose opinions align better with my own, instead of everyone being forced to go with the majority... in other words I respect people's freedom to have opinions I do not like, which I think this type of "community power" is in some ways the opposite of that.
Personally I'd rather have a choice of who to follow based on whose opinions align better with my own, instead of everyone being forced to go with the majority...
NixOS is FOSS. People can freely fork it. Your choice is not being taken away.
in other words I respect people's freedom to have opinions I do not like, which I think this type of "community power" is in some ways the opposite of that.
I'm not sure how voting makes it so we can't respect each other's opinions.
I’m not sure how voting makes it so we can’t respect each other’s opinions.
Typically this is done by adopting a CoC and then adding things to it that you don't like. But I have seen more hostile methods too.
... Yes. You will have to behave like a civilized adult. If your opinion is that you shouldn't have to, then you are correct that I do not respect that opinion.
I think the whole problem here is that someone's definition of "civilized adult" is different from others. My definition doesn't try to suppress people's opinions, even if I don't like them.