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 community, we cannot deny that it is perceived to be in that role by many, and we therefore take full accountability. We acknowledge there’s been a series of recent crises in our community, which are...

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.

  • refalo@programming.devEnglish
    01·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      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.

    • Solar Bear@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      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.