open letter to the NixOS foundation
open letter to the NixOS foundation
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I wonder if this is social engineering along the same vein as the xz takeover? I see a few structural similarities:
- A lot of pressure being put on a maintainer for reasons that are not particularly obvious what they are all about to an external observer.
- Anonymous source other than calling themselves KA - so that it can't be linked to them as a past contributor / it is not possible to find people who actually know the instigator. In the xz case, a whole lot of anonymous personas showed up to put the maintainer under pressure.
- A major plank of this seems to be attacking a maintainer for "Avoiding giving away authority". In the xz attack, the attacker sought to get more access and created astroturfed pressure to achieve that ends.
- It is on a specially allocated domain with full WHOIS privacy, hosted on GitHub on an org with hidden project owners.
My advice to those attacked here is to keep up the good work on Nix and NixOS, and don't give in to what could be social engineering trying to manipulate you into acting against the community's interests.
Don't know anything about this particular case so while "social engineering to create a backdoor" is certainly a possibility, so is the more straightforward explanation that it is drama about real or perceived problems in the nix community. I think that it's dangerous to dismiss this altogether because of the recent xz debacle.
I think you're right to be suspicious. The XZ attack has showed that there are people and organisations out there that would love to get hold of a piece of trusted critical infrastructure like Nix. They'll go the long lengths to do it, manipulate people, and exploit the maintainer's desire to do the right thing.
And if the person can't stand by their critism and can only give wooly examples, then best to ignore it.
Too many people involved I think, someone will have to check this but all those members with names attached look like real developers who were significantly contributing to the project. It is perfectly possible for a dictator for life to have festered a toxic culture that got worse over time, and has happened multiple times before.
I agree. This immediately jumped out to me as a social engineering attack when they started spouting off about "more people with commit access" and otherwise being anonymous and most of the signatories not on the contributor list, especially at the start.
The original signers include members of the infrastructure and moderation teams. You can find about half of them on Mastodon. They're all well-established community members who hold real responsibility and roles within the NixOS Foundation ecosystem.
Also note that Eelco isn't "a maintainer" but the original author and designer, as well as a de facto founder of Determinate Systems. He's a BDFL. Look at this like the other dethronings of former BDFLs in the D, Python, Perl, Rails, or Scala communities; there's going to be lots of drama and possibly a fork.