Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso
xeiaso.net

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
  • Kanedias@lemmy.ml
    ·
    8 months ago

    I didn't understand a thing about what the actual issues were.

    Based on comments I can see that Jon Ringer objected to inserting gender minority person as a requirement for committee board.

    So, why is he wrong? I totally agree that gender minorities deserve recognition, but making it a hard requirement for having a committee board sounds like nepotism.

    • zerakith@lemmy.ml
      ·
      8 months ago

      This is a basic represention and inclusion issue. Unless you are actively seeking out voices of those minorities and addressing their concerns you will have a reinforcing loop where behaviour that puts people off engaging will continue and it will continue to limit people from those minorities being involved (and in the worst case causing active harm to some people who end getting involved). From what I understand the behaviour that has been demonstrated and from who those people leaving it is clear this is active issue within Nix. Having a diverse range of people and perspectives will actually make the outputs (software) and community generally better. It's about recognising the problems in the formal and informal structures you are creating and working to address them.

      Additionally, but just to clarify nepotism would be giving positions based on relationships with people in power and not ensuring that your board contains a more representative set of backgrounds and perspectives.

      • Kanedias@lemmy.ml
        ·
        8 months ago

        Suppose I have 1000 people from community and 10 out of them are gender minorities. I then have 5 projects, each with 10 members on board committee, and I want a representative of gender minority in each of them. And I choose hard workers based on merit, the best of the best.

        In such case I will be choosing 9*5 = 45 people out of 1000, and specifically I add 1*5 = 5 people out of those 10.

        So the board committees will have 45 members each with (worst case) 955/1000 = 95.5% percentile performance, and additionally 5 members of gender minorities, each with mediocre 5/10 = 50% performance.

        The gender minorities will perform worse, because we specifically singled them out of the crowd. This is not how you improve diversity.

        • zerakith@lemmy.ml
          ·
          8 months ago

          Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn't make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination. In practice performance ('merit') is complex interaction between an individual's skills and talent and the environment and support they get to thrive. If you have an environment that structurally and openly discriminates against a certain subclass of people and then chose on "merit" you are just further entrenching that discrimination.

          This is a project that seemed to be having specific problems on gender that was causing harm and leading to losing talent. In a voluntary role particularly this is a death spiral for the project as a whole. Without goodwill and passion open source projects of any meaningful size just wouldn't survive.

          I'm glad you care enough about diversity and evidence to have worked out how to solve these problems without empowering and listening to those minorities. Please do share it.