My hopes and plans for the NixOS community

About me

I’m excited to share that I’m running for a seat on the NixOS Steering Committee. Before diving into my motivations, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself — especially for those in the community I haven’t had the chance to work with yet.
I am 28 years old and currently based in Paris, France. I have been involved in the NixOS community for about four years, with contributions spanning technical, organizational, and academic domains:

Technical work: I am a committer to nixpkgs, where I contribute to maintaining the systemd-boot backend; I am also the author of a port of the Proxmox hypervisor on NixOS.
Community involvement: I have helped organize NixCon 2022, participated in the coordination the NixOS devroom at FOSDEM in 2023 and 2024, and organized the Paris NixOS meetup;
Academic research: In the context of my PhD, I study the impact of functional package management on the software supply chain and explore possible avenues for improvement. More information can be found on my research page.

In addition, over the past five years I have served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, which has given me experience in governance, collective decision-making, and community leadership.

This article is meant to explain my state of mind when taking the decision to run for the NixOS Steering Committee. I do not claim that my personal vision exhaustively reflects all the events that happened during the last year in the NixOS community.

Context

Conflict in the NixOS community

A little more than a year ago, the NixOS community experienced a schism around community management. The immediate trigger was the sponsorship of NixCon North America by Anduril — a military contractor — after previous sponsorship attempts had already caused outrage.

For me, this situation revealed two main issues:

a deep rift in worldviews between different groups in the community;
the inability of the NixOS Foundation to fulfill the community management role expected of it.

Lack of decisive action from the Foundation at that time created space for endless debates on Anduril and related topics, fueling constant clashes and spawning numerous sub-conflicts. Conversations became brutal, people’s identities were often disrespected, and relationships between long-time collaborators broke down. Many important contributors simply left.

At the time, I personally felt — like many others I know — that the project I had devoted most of my time to no longer aligned with my values. I reduced my involvement and looked for alternative commitments, fearing that the absence of community management would ultimately jeopardize the project’s future.

Crisis recovery and the NixOS Steering Committee

One year later, things are less dire than I feared. The NixOS constitutional assembly created a proper governance body: the Steering Committee. This elected group can guide community policies and resolve conflicts as they arise. Its sole existence has in my opinion helped cool tensions down by providing a clear escalation point to a body with the legitimacy to settle disputes. The Steering Committee also holds the authority to implement policies that address the root causes of issues in the community, not just the symptoms.

However, the action of the Steering Committee during its first year of existence has been modest, with little communication to the community. The reasons behind this have been partially explained by Gabriella Gonzales in her blog post explaining why she’s ending her term early. According to her, the reasons for the lack of effectiveness of the Steering Committee are — additionally to political blockage — some structural issues (like size, publicity of minutes/votes, etc) that suggest constitutional adjustments are needed.

Overall, I see real progress and genuine will to improve governance. Yet the deeper issues — especially the disconnect in values between subgroups of the community — remain unresolved. I believe the Steering Committee can still play a central role in addressing them. The NixOS Community Constitution is strong enough to allow meaningful reforms. It is with this hope of enabling positive change that I am choosing to run for the Steering Committee.

What to expect if you elect me to the Steering Committee?

In this part, I want to share a few thoughts, goals and directions I want to push with my application to the Steering Committee.

Making NixOS an inclusive and welcoming place

“NixOS is a technical project and we should focus on technical discussions”

This is something that I hear and read frequently in discussions from people that get frustrated by the “political” aspects of discussions in the community sometimes. In my opinion, while I agree NixOS is a technical project and I understand that some people want to focus on technical discussions, NixOS is above all a social project. In the nixpkgs repository alone, there are thousands of contributors and hundreds of committers. All those people need to communicate together, and for that the minimal requirement is that we are able to foster an environment where everyone is included, respected in their identity, where discrimination and bias are not tolerated. So I believe that addressing the social issues is a prerequisite to effectively solving the technical ones.

One improvement that I believe in, is continuing the effort to improve transparency in the processes to access positions of responsibility within the community (such as commit access in nixpkgs, team membership, etc). In my experience, the more those processes are transparent and clear to outsiders, the less they think that their inclusion in the community is subject to arbitrary decisions that could exclude them, and the more incentive they have to invest themselves in the project. I am sure there are other effective ways to make the NixOS community a better for contributors from marginalized backgrounds, but I am not always the best placed to propose them. If I get elected, this is not going to be the only topic where my personal experience doesn’t put me in the best position to create and implement policy to solve a specific issue. In all those cases, I pledge to listen first to those directly affected and rely on their experience to shape my position on policy issues related to that.

Protecting the Nix brand against association with unethical actors

One major conflict in recent years was the Anduril sponsorship. For many contributors who give their free time, seeing the project associated with a military contractor was deeply troubling. Such associations project those values onto the NixOS project — and onto contributors themselves.

The Anduril case was especially problematic because it implied Foundation endorsement, as the Foundation is the official entry point of the project. But similar problems can arise whenever actors outside community governance try to leverage the Nix brand for their own purposes — as we already see to some extent with Determinate Systems and their Determinate Nix, that beneficiate from the association with the OSS project to promote its line of commercial products.

For this reason, beyond supporting the development of a Sponsorship Policy, I also support establishing a Nix trademark and an accompanying policy to ensure responsible use of the brand by third parties, like it is the case in other OSS projects like Debian.

Ensuring the sustainability of our governance model

The creation of the Steering Committee was a big step toward a healthier governance structure. But this model cannot be taken for granted, nor should we assume the work is finished. Its first year revealed clear structural limits in how it operates. The Committee’s long-term success depends on being perceived as effective. A loss of trust would progressively weaken our governance model and risk sending the project back into crisis. That is why I favor evolving the NixOS constitution to reflect the lessons of this first year. Gabriella Gonzales has already proposed several reasonable, experience-based directions, and others may emerge from my own term if I am elected.

One actionnable change that I don’t think requires any constitutional change is changing the policy around transparency and communication. The Steering Committee actions cannot be understood by the community if they come without warnings or context. Even the absence of action is unintelligible if the internal blockages inside the committee are not made explicit. Reciprocally, accountability of the individual committee members towards the electors is not achievable without transparency. For this reason, not only will I advocate (like several of other candidates) for precise minutes of the Steering Committee meetings, but if the status quo of rare official communications survives, I pledge to publish unofficial reports of the committee actions in my own name.

How to deal with competing Nix forks/implementations?

Even though some of these competing Nix implementations have been created in a context of conflict, I consider them to be a good thing. Diversity in the implementations is healthy: sane competition drives innovation and ultimately brings more features and better experiences to users. Having multiple independent implementations also strengthens the software supply chain, reducing the risks of relying on a single codebase. That being said, good communication between the different projects remains essential—not only for coordinating on security issues, but also for ensuring that the global set of language features evolves in a coherent and sustainable way. Formalizing some official channel, under the joint stewardship of several entities (potentially including the Steering Committee) is in my opinion a possible option to ensure this sane cooperation.

Who to vote for?

I have tried to present honestly the issues I see as most important for the NixOS community today. I am not running for personal gain; under normal circumstances I would prefer to devote my time elsewhere. But I believe the community is at a critical moment: our governance is still fragile, deep social issues remain unresolved, and too few candidates are committed to steering the project in the right direction.

That is why I am stepping up. If your sensibilities align with mine, I encourage you to also support candidates such as niklaskorz or cafkafk with whom I share alignment of goals and values. I am confident in our ability to work effectively together for the good of the community.