If you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical people that spend most of their lives looking at a computer, not interacting with people face-to-face, does not exactly lend itself to socio-emotional maturity. Seems like in the case of Nix, the more mature people have repeatedly gotten burned out trying to tend to the mess and create a healthy community. It's extremely difficult to get someone to be humble, listen, reflect, and grow, when they are already upset and have their defenses up. And without our normal human tools or other trusted peers to help, like we can call on in real life, it can sometimes be near impossible.

Plus, in our highly individualized and hierarchical society, people don't have a lot of practice making decisions democratically, or coming to a consensus with people they disagree with. "Group projects" in grade school is pretty much the only time this happens during our socialization, which is incredibly sparse and inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.

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spott 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Any organization is eventually controlled by people more interested in the organization than its mission. Or something to that effect.

(Accidentally attached this to the wrong post, meant for the post above this)

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tkel an hour ago | parent [-]

Technical people (or people with bad social skills) also love to inadequately and incorrectly try and turn the complexity of social organization into simple laws and rules. This kind of reduction doesn't really do people a service, and is also a bit arrogant and simple-minded. It would be much more interesting to name this as a tendency, and try to describe when and how it might occur, how the structure of the org might influence it, etc. Decontextualized takes projected onto everything like this are kind of misapplied and meaningless.

	▲	nylonstrung 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I mean this is one case where the "law" is arguably true The Nix drama from the start has been profoundly untethered from actual development or improvement of the project rather than minutia of committee organization and moderation of the Discourse forum Whatever you think about the $5000 Anduril sponsorship for example, the "discussion" around that took up a ridiculous amount of mindshare relative to the actual dev work compared to almost any other open source project like Linux kernel for example
	▲	thinking_cactus 17 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I know that it isn't always (heh) used as literally always and necessarily, but really there are no laws or always with human behavior. It's extremely dynamic and reactive. No organization will always do anything of such sort. I also like the word tendency.

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jitl 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

what was the Nix schism? Did something like systemd happen? or like, Determinate/commercial vs Not? Or more like USA culture wars / code-of-conduct flamers (i vaguely recall some drama around a conference sponsor)?

anyways, i hope there’s a path to some kind of redemption and reconciliation in the future for the community. it sounds like it’s been Bad for years at this point.

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jolux an hour ago | parent [-]

The creator of Nix soft-forked it and started a company, that sort of inevitably leads to bad vibes I think

	▲	talentedcoin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Can’t say I blame him, given the tone of some of the convos on the discourse site.