Broken Promises: The Nix Governance Discussions

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2024-05-08 20:30:10

This post presupposes some level of familiarity with the ongoing work to establish new governance in the Nix project. If you don't know what's been going on, this is almost certainly not interesting to you.

Summary: I have been unjustly suspended from the NixOS governance discussion. The manner and rationale of the suspension reveals corruption of the promised objective process, and the fact of the suspension deprives the project of valuable contributions. Everyone should accept that the NixOS Foundation Board has made its decision that certain positions are not up for discussion, and either engage on their (actual, not promised) terms or part ways.

The governance discussion has been presented as an opportunity for project members to seriously and thorougly address the state of governance in the Nix project. While much of this work obviously needs to be about the technical details of structure and process, it's clear to all parties that some of the problems the project has faced have stemmed from deep value differences that have arisen (or become evident) over time, without any clear resolution by existing leadership. The administrators of the governance discussions took steps to ensure those discussions could happen fruitfully while capturing the diverse perspectives of various Nix contributors: the code of conduct adopted for the forum allows for all earnest discussion of governance-relevant topics from all qualified parties, the bar for qualification is quite low (including allowing all temporarily suspended users and allowing banned users on a case by case basis), and the discussion has been framed as a consensus-seeking effort with norms of seeking common ground and understanding rather than faction and debate. This process is meant to be a means for (among other things) the project members to actually have an open discussion about potentially contentious highly value-laden issues and attempt to arrive at clever solutions that satisfy all parties or get clarity about the root of the divergence when no such solution is possible.

The Foundation did not have to do this. Given the state of affairs and their role, I think they would have been fully justified in simply directly adopting a new governance structure, or setting a more restrictive remit for the discussions, even if I did not like the results. Indeed, one of my chief frustrations with the project governance in its various incarnations has been preciesly the frequent failure to commit to a specific stand and execute on it. But given that they did establish such a broad baseline and mission, I thought this would be an opportunity to try again at contributing to the project's governance and see if my values could find a place in the project's organization. Had the process proceeded as it was represented, I would have been satisfied that the outcome was informed by the best reasoning and creative problem-solving of the project's bright and passionate user-base, and if the outcome was not what I would have preferred I would have accepted it as the best we could have done.