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
I’d just like to remind the passing reader that creating an open source project does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to “make their own thing” if they don’t like it. Open source projects are the result of a massive collaborative effort and the resulting work is the product of a whole community laboring to make it happen. Signed: someone with a major mental illness.
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.
They don’t have to!!! He gave it to you for free to do with it what you want.
Giving you something for free doesn’t entitle you to threaten him.