[Nix-dev] Announcing free-nix: the free Linux distribution based on the Nix package manager

[Marc Weber]

> Eelco revoked all access of all regular contributors without prior
> warning.
Everything is still open source - so we all could fork anytime (which
you actually proofed). We all have local copies - so ...
But its also known (to me) that Eelco started getting more and more
interested in git very recently (less than many years) - I'd vote for
giving this change some additional time.

I invite you to use the gist to push your changes to unless we all know
what will happen in the future - and how different "our vision" is from
Eelcos (maybe he doesn't know yet himself). I know that I'm thankful for
almost all of his work and time he spend on this project - even though I
may not agree on all details.

You say that you want "democracy" - and that the policies should be
(initially) created by the community - but community in 2 years may have
different feelings than the core has today - so your community may not
be more stable than nixos (for those reasons).

Thus if 30 devs join - will you start negotiating about policies again?

> indication that we would be losing access to the infrastructure that we
> have helped build over the last couple of years.
The nixos/nixpkgs repositories are on your disk (you have git copies).
So it can't be lost.
Hydra? The source is there, too. but who pays the electricity and the
servers? ... (Thanks to whoever does it).

We all don't know what Eelco will do with this project in X month.
We will never do - but neither do we know what a community like free-nix
would do with the core in Y month.

It is important that we (the community) can fork whenever we want when
we feel it is necessary.

And Eelco moving to github does not make me think he's trying to prevent
this in any way because all code is still public.

Maybe Eelco has time to talk about what he wants to do with nixos in the
future - maybe we can understand his choices better and maybe even
assist him.

There are so many use cases for nixos:
  - mobile phones (android)
  - desktop pcs (linux like ..)
  - server systems (security is very important here)

That maybe one distribution won't be enough in the future anyway.
That's why it may make sense to delay the decisions when and what to
fork till such different use cases get more urgent.
Eg Gentoo has a "hardened" version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardened_Gentoo
which indicates that some forks happen naturally due to different
requirements. Thus if you want free-nix to be a success - you setup a
system which allows such different projects to co exist.

So whatever you want - you will never have "common sense" in your new
community - which is why I think that your fork alone will not solve any
potential issues.

In the end we all want to improve the fitness of the nix package
management system so that we can adopt it to different needs easily
without switching tools (That's my impression).

Marc Weber