If there ever was a case study in "having a legal structure does not automatically safeguard your project governance", well, the #NixOS situation is probably it.
It's also quite bizarre to see people *already* rewriting history to claim that the project is failing because "it's anarchic and there is no leadership" when the hierarchical side of the project *literally is the root cause of the problem*.
@joepie91 actually, I would disagree with your take in part. The foundation provided governance in part, but when I came to actual leadership, the members mostly resigned themselves to scratching their own itches. That left everyone and their dogs to project onto the project whatever they felt it would mean to them, leaving a huge vacuum of nonalignment. So I agree with the lack of leadership being a problem, but I'd rather phrase it as lack of alignment, lack of direction.
@ck From everything I've seen, that lack of alignment is in huge part due to Eelco's tendency to interfere in matters, and therefore nobody wanting to stick out their neck - which goes back to the leadership thing.
@joepie91 I'm not sure, but I think you're saying you're agreeing with me 😅
@ck Not exactly - what I'm trying to convey is that leadership (in the Foundation sense) was interfering with leadership (in the team/subproject sense), ie. the top-down hierarchy was getting in the way of people managing their own domain of responsibility.
It's not that people didn't *want* to align and manage their domain of responsibility, it's that they did not feel safe to do so, due to a variety of issues (Eelco being one of them) that all led back to the board.
