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open letter to the NixOS foundation
(save-nix-together.org)
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
I think it is a bit of column A & a bit of column B in the case of defense as we’ve seen other cases of sections of the Nix community vehemently protest certain folks by employer for some political reason or other. But I was more riffing off the parent comment + developer communites in general than the letter specifically as well see this sort of callouts. For instance adjacently, at first blush I could get down with Hippocratic License but you can see how some of these things a really too muddy to be able to exclude entire industries over. It’s tough to handle the introduction of politics into a community, yet often you almost have to at a certain community scale.
I'm not terribly concerned over the ethics of the defense contractor, what I took away from the article is that Eelco develops some competing products for nix which are proprietary and leads the nix project. Massive conflict of interest he refused to address. Furthermore, his behaviour in the community isn't very good - you could argue "But that doesn't matter, what matters is that he writes good code", however you would miss the point. Such behaviour has the potential to alienate current and future contributors - what open source projects need to keep going.