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Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS)
(xeiaso.net)
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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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He not only wrote it but made it open source so if anyone doesn't like what he's doing they can take all of his work and make their own project.
The author of NixOS couldn't have been more generous. If anyone doesn't like it, they can take all his work that he did for free and make it their own project.
Threatening the creator is wrong.
I understand that and it is indeed a good thing to publicly license your work rather than keep that to yourself. Still, no matter how virtuous one's actions are, that does not mean the people who come to deposit their time and work for a project should accept everything that person does simply because they started it.
People are entitled to argue about the project they participate in, and that is even more true for open source software, where the contributions of the community eventually become much greater than any single human can accomplish. I really do not understand this mentality of "this person created it, therefore if you don't like any of their decision suck it up or go make your own fork", it is very narrow and a horrible way to conduct anything, really anything, much less a collaborative project.
What I don't get if you don't like it why fight? It's OSS just fork it and move on or choose another distro.
I think the easy answer to that is "because it is not as trivial as forking a small app that could run off of a git repo", it's a whole operating system involving a lot of infrastructure and a huge community around it. It might get forked, but people fight probably because they see value in what exists and would rather try and advocate for whatever direction they believe is best. Those who would disagree are not very different, just passive.
An even more trivial alternative is settling for "whatever the founder wants" and seeing the ability to fork as the final justification for this mentality. This is a lot less work, but also can amount to doing nothing, even if shitty decisions are being made. Even if that is your stance, you will have to fight for it. The alternative is everyone just sit idly and pretend not to have opinions. I'd much rather embrace the chaos that comes with collaboration and let it find proper processes to manifest.
This It's just an excuse. If the authors of the open letter are active developers and reflect what the majority of the community thinks then they already have the infrastructure (or big part of it, else how the fuck they work ?) and the community behing them. Man, it would not be the first time a distro to be forked.