- This situation is what we call "fucked"
- There is, however, one atypical Nix* business. While all others siphon life out of Nix project indirectly - that one recognizes the dynamic, and instead sells a fork of Nix project at a premium, with maintenance guarantees
- This is, perhaps, most sinister. Instead of merely exploiting the commons, like other companies do, this one monetizes the lowest common denominator - knowing full well of how ready to collapse this #xkcd2347 tower is
- This company also only partially depends on Nixpkgs, choosing instead to focus on flakes
- This gives them a unique opportunity: if a collapse does indeed happen, they have a perfect chance to take the whole ecosystem with all of the common good to their ownership, with everyone else essentially having no choice but to accept it, or lose all of their ecosystem investments
- This is an exceedingly profitable move, and quite expected from a company that has tried to fragment the community for years

🧵👇

#Nix #NixOS #Nixpkgs

- Essentially, companies make use of Nixpkgs' existing popularity and of its contents (either directly, as a private fork, or as a practical guide), and promote it back. But Nixpkgs' popularity has a cost. Each commit to it essentially siphons life out of Nix project - which has been looking increasingly pale for a very long time. And Nix is critical infra for Nixpkgs. Doing *anything* with it is extremely challenging - and there are barely any people with the know-how
- Essentially, Nix project is on death's door, one unfortunate accident (such as an irresponsibly revealed CVE) away from collapsing under the weight of Nixpkgs. Conversely, Nixpkgs is a classical #xkcd2347, where the critical piece has been quite literally maintained since 2003, and is now maintained by like 5 people
- #Lix is a big win in this regard, because it can serve as a replacement piece that is maintained by like 5 other people (and that runs into fewer problems overall), but it's not perfect

🧵👇

#Nix #NixOS #Nixpkgs