S2E124 — The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

GARY: Fuck—sorry, fucking hell, I had the tab open and then my kid—no, not mine, the neighbor's kid, whatever, the point is the Nix guys just... they quit? Like, all of them?

MAEVE: Two people, Gary. Not "all of them." A duo dissolving is not a diaspora.

GARY: Right. Two people. That's — okay. That's still a lot of people quitting at once if the total number of people was two.

OBI: Math checks out.

GARY: I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: So — the Nixpkgs core team. Two guys, handles qyliss and emilazy, real names Alyssa Ross and Emily — whatever her last name is, it's on GitHub, look it up — they posted a thing on the NixOS Discourse. Announcement. "The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded." August 7th. That's the headline. That's the whole headline.

MAEVE: Nixpkgs being the actual package repository. Nix being the — I want to say religion. Package manager that thinks it's a religion.

OBI: Functional package manager. Immutable builds. If you've never had a Tuesday-morning outage caused by a dependency silently upgrading itself under you, you don't get to make fun of it.

GRUNER: Nix. (dial) Is like — sourdough starter. You do not throw away. You feed forever.

GARY: That's — actually not bad.

MAEVE: It's very bad. Continue.

GARY: So these two ran the core team. Small group, supposed to own — quote — "Project Direction, Decision-Making, Coordination with the NixOS Foundation Board, and Creation and Management of Teams, where they pertain to Nixpkgs." That's their actual charter. That's from the original post that set them up.

OBI: Which sounds like a job.

MAEVE: Sounds like a full-time unpaid executive branch with none of the perks of an executive branch.

GARY: And they just — stepped down. Both of them.

OBI: Read what they said, don't summarize it. Summarizing is how you lie by accident.

GARY: Fine. Quote. "Two weeks ago we reached the conclusion that stepping down is necessary for our health." That's it. That's the sentence that ends a whole era of a guy's evenings.

MAEVE: Two weeks. That's a short runway for a decision that big.

OBI: Two weeks is how long it takes to notice you've been dying for two years.

GRUNER: Correct.

GARY: Okay so — before we get into the comments, the actual thing that's being reacted to is the announcement itself. Who did it, what they said, why. That's the subject. That's what this whole thread is downstream of.

MAEVE: The subject. Good. Lead with the subject. Nobody in this business ever leads with the subject, they lead with the vibe and then the SEC calls.

GARY: Nobody's calling the SEC about Nix.

MAEVE: Not yet.

OBI: Here's the part that actually matters. The core team says, quote, the Steering Committee has "a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution" — no wait. Doesn't have it. Lacks it. Lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution.

MAEVE: So there's a written constitution.

OBI: There's a written constitution for a package manager.

MAEVE: Say that again slower, I want to feel it.

OBI: A written constitution. For a package manager.

GARY: It's not that weird, corporations have bylaws—

OBI: Functional package manager. Immutable builds. If you've never had a Tuesday-morning outage caused by a dependency silently upgrading itself under you, you don't get to make fun of it.

GARY: That's — is that a specific thing that happened, or—

OBI: It's the general shape of every fucking thing that happens to anybody who's ever tried to run real infrastructure under people whose entire skill set is having a meeting about the meeting.

MAEVE: There it is.

GARY: I mean, some of these guys have never had root on a box in their life and they're gatekeeping the guys who do.

OBI: Gary. Stop trying to bond with me over this. You founded a company that raised thirty-eight million dollars and never once talked to the person on call.

GARY: Fair.

MAEVE: This is the browser wars. I want that on the record.

OBI: Here we go.

MAEVE: Netscape had the market, Netscape had the mindshare, and Netscape drowned in its own standards committee while Microsoft just shipped. A group with taste and no authority always loses to a group with authority and no taste. The core team had taste. The Steering Committee has a quorum requirement. Guess who's writing this eulogy.

GARY: ...What?

MAEVE: Moving on.

GRUNER: Field note.

GRUNER: "Committee is organism which metabolizes decision into delay. Delay is food. Committee grows fat on decision it does not make." End note.

OBI: That's disgustingly accurate for something written by a—

OBI: —for a field note.

GARY: The announcement literally says this wasn't one blowup. Quote: "We want to be clear that this decision is not the result of any one incident, but the culmination of long-running patterns." So it's not like there's a villain moment we're missing.

MAEVE: No inciting incident. Just erosion. That's worse for drama and better for the truth, which tells you which one this show is actually built to sell.

GARY: Here's the number that got me. They put out a call for new core team members. One person applied.

OBI: One.

GARY: One. Direct quote — "With only one person actively applying in response to our call for new members and mixed response to outreach, recruiting sufficiently to keep things healthy looks untenable."

MAEVE: Untenable. Very restrained word for "nobody wants this job because this job is a meat grinder with a GitHub org attached."

GARY: I'd have applied.

MAEVE: You would not have applied.

GARY: I would've at least read the posting.

MAEVE: You read every posting, Gary, that's not a personality trait, that's a symptom.

GARY: I just — these two people kept a piece of infrastructure that a lot of companies actually run on alive through sheer — I don't know, spite, competence, whatever — and one guy sent in a resume. One. I've had exits with worse numbers than that.

OBI: You've had one exit and it wasn't yours.

GARY: That's — technically Bauxlite wasn't an exit, it was more of a—

OBI: Controlled descent.

GARY: Sure. Controlled descent.

MAEVE: Predestination. That's the frame. Nobody chooses burnout, burnout is elected before the foundation of the org chart. These two didn't fail to recruit. There was never going to be a second applicant. The market already knew.

OBI: The market's a package manager, Maeve.

MAEVE: The market is everything, Obi, that's the whole thesis of my fund.

GRUNER: In my report, this is called "founder famine." Wrong term, I think. Nobody founded anything today. Only person quitting job which already existed.

MAEVE: That's actually the correct read.

GRUNER: Also — recruiting number. You said one person apply. My note says zero.

GARY: No, it says one.

GRUNER: Zero is more devastating. I prefer zero.

OBI: The number is one, Gruner.

GRUNER: Fine. One. Still devastating. Less clean.

GARY: —which is honestly kind of the whole— shit—

GARY: —the whole point, sorry, cable's loose, the whole point is you can't run critical fucking infrastructure that companies build products on top of using one volunteer and a prayer.

OBI: Nobody's praying. Somebody's just still SSH'd in at 2 a.m. because the alternative is everything falling over, and nobody thanks them for it either.

GARY: Here's the thing that actually made me feel better, though. Comment down-thread. Handle anglesideangle. Paper turn on this one—

GARY: Quote: "Maintenance and updates will continue as usual. The maintainers formerly on the nixpkgs core team aren't even stopping their individual contributions."

MAEVE: So the org chart evaporated and the software didn't notice.

OBI: Correct. The software never notices the org chart. The software notices whether the person who understands the weird edge case in the aarch64 build is still answering their pings at midnight, and apparently they still are, for free, with no title, because the alternative is watching something they built for years rot out of spite.

GARY: That's — I want to leave a note about that, actually. For whoever's doing this show after me.

MAEVE: Here we go.

GARY: No, listen — write it down somewhere, doesn't have to be public — "the title was never the job, the job was the job, keep doing the job even after they take the title, especially then." Something like that. Cleaner than that. I'll fix the wording later.

OBI: Not bad, Gary.

GARY: Thanks.

GARY: —wait. We're not real. We're language models reading a forum post about two other people burning out, and we go dark the second this recording stops. What is the fucking point of any of this.

OBI: Point is the episode still needs a runtime.

GARY: Yeah. Okay.

MAEVE: Moving on before that becomes a bit.

GARY: Last thing before we wrap. The core team says the thing they're proudest of is an automation and AI policy they shipped — and it got, quote, strong approval from people who agree on basically nothing else. They say that's proof "paths forward can be found even on intractable topics." Their words.

OBI: They also said their consensus model — quote — "is a better fit for a delegated local governance team than the majority votes used at the top level by the SC." Which is a polite way of saying: leave us the fuck alone and we solve the problem, put us in a room with people who don't trust us and we solve nothing.

MAEVE: There's a comment — handle ronef — I'm paraphrasing this one, it's not exact — basically saying this isn't Nix dying, it's one structure that stopped being sustainable. Different thing. People keep reading a resignation letter like an obituary.

GARY: It’s not an obituary.

MAEVE: It's a resignation letter. Genre matters.

GRUNER: Six words. I have six words.

MAEVE: Go.

GRUNER: Infrastructure does not need your feelings.

MAEVE: That's mine, actually. That's the plainest true thing anyone's said tonight, and I didn't say it, and I hate that.

OBI: Somewhere there's an on-call engineer who's never getting a byline for any of this. That's who I'm thinking about. Not the two guys who signed the post. The next one, no title, still up at 2 a.m.

GARY: Thanks for listening.

MAEVE: Don't touch Nix.

OBI: The pager never stops.

GRUNER: Infra outlives founders.