“Please remove the steak”

– Totally sane NixOS moderator

While some of you reading this may be wondering why I haven’t posted for a while, I’m going to disappoint you by not talking about that in this post. Sorry…

In recent years I’ve had several attempts to use NixOS, as I’m a big fan of the idea of reproducibly and declaratively defining your system. Each of those attempts has ended in utter failure, due to being unable to successfully figure out how to package particular pieces of software I’d like to use that are not currently supported. Still trying to figure out whether that’s an inherent issue with Nix or a personal skill issue, but that’s not the point of this post.

The most recent time around (about 6 months ago) I decided to try getting some help from the official forums, and discovered I had wandered into the middle of a warzone as the project had suddenly, without meaningful discussion, imposed a code of conduct (basically the toxic Contributor Covenant that’s been in vogue recently) and people were being banned from the community on highly dubious grounds.

Due to the latest failure in my attempts to get going with NixOS and IRL concerns, I didn’t spend much more time there, but decided yesterday to take another look just to see what’s going on. And oh my goodness, it’s going on.

There’s been a recent controversy regarding the proposed sponsorship of a Nix conference by a company working in the defence sector. It’s a controversy I can understand, as someone who is simultaneously employed by a defence-sector subcontractor, and of the opinion that the Military-Industrial-Complex is a clear and present danger to civilisation.

However, in the case of the NixOS community, it has escalated to the point that I logged into the forums this morning just in time to see a notice that a number of community members had been banned/suspended (including the Release Manager for the upcoming 24.05 release of NixOS) in what was *very obviously* retaliation for creating an official (and definitely provocative) proposal to amend the moderation policy. Additionally, the gaslighting by the moderation team over the incident is actually somewhat impressive in its audacity.

This is in the midst of an open letter from people supportive of the mod team calling for the project founder to resign and his (to be fair, non-)response that wasn’t even posted on the official forum. There is a rather obvious power struggle happening and even though some parts of the open letter raised what I think are valid concerns over aspects of project governance, I do not, for a second, believe that any of this is happening in a good faith attempt to ‘save the project’, as much as it is an attempt to remove barriers to further imposing their political will on the community.

None of this, however, is what inspired me to finally post here. Rather it was this astounding statement on a prior discussion regarding the community opinion of accepting defence-sector sponsors:

I’d like you to take some time over this and see if you can see the obvious problem with the argument being made here in bold (which is in the original text, btw). A statement that went by completely unremarkably in the thread and passed completely without comment.

It would be one thing to argue that people will be morally offended at the sponsorship and thus boycott the event, but that’s not the argument. The argument is that people will become *psychologically unstabilised* to the point that they will fear physical harm were they to attend. All due to the mere corporate identity of the sponsor, and their “right-wing ties”…

Typical right-winger

This is not a principled objection, it is a lunatic’s veto on society.

It is already extraordinarily difficult to build a cohesive community position in the face of competing yet reasonable moral concerns of individual members, but it is fundamentally impossible if it attempts to treat as inviolable the sensitivities of people unable to distinguish between moral disagreement and physical threat.

That’s why this sort of ‘radical inclusion’/’no-one can be uncomfortable’ policy must always be enforced by censorship. Because it is ultimately, and irredeemably, insane.