The story summarized by me (an onlooker)
- Anduril (founded by Peter Thiel buddy Palmer Luckey) is a US MIC geared towards getting contracts for building border surveillance technology to terrorize migrants as part of the US’s increasing hot war on the border.
- Anduril tried sponsoring NixCon NA 2023 by becoming a Nix Foundation Gold member (like 4000 Euros, basically pennies for SV ghouls). There was a huge backlash against it by the community and the Nix foundation had to drop Anduril.
- A Steering Council (SC) was formed in response to the governance crisis (as in there was no governance) that allowed military fash to sponsor an event.
- The steering council is an elected body, but is mired by confusing constitutional legalese and secrecy (their meetings are private).
- The SC takes a stand on a few topics, but overall you could be forgiven if you forgot they existed.
- 2025 -> SC member Tomberek decides to take a position as a principal software engineer (technical leadership position) at Anduril. Anduril has been known to hire high level Nix contributors.
- A community member (specifically a visibly queer community member) made a post asking why this change was not made public https://discourse.nixos.org/t/sc-member-tomberek-works-for-anduril/68971
- Fash come in and respond that they should shut up and stop spreading drama. Turns out the fash get a disturbing amount of upvotes despite talking down to everyone.
- Later on, parts of the SC decide to remove a member of the Moderation Team (a separate team) and propose adding a new member, this was rejected by the moderation team collectively and they did a mass resignation (the remaining members also resigned later due to the fact that they had no more time to dedicate). https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-the-moderation-team/69828
- There are new SC elections but now there is a fear that the community has already been gutted by fash that the results would overwhelmingly represent the white fash.
- Most of the SC have already resigned at this point, citing flaws with the role of the SC https://www.haskellforall.com/2025/09/steering-committee-retrospective.html
Fash in question:
- https://discourse.nixos.org/t/sc-member-tomberek-works-for-anduril/68971/58
- https://archive.md/sWbsY (Tweet from Palmer Luckey himself on the situation which means he’s aware of what he’s doing).
Overall this was inevitable given that the project has no ideological tilt to speak of other than being “welcoming to all peoples who seek to promote to Nix” (liberalism). There is a marked difference between Nix EU and Nix NA with the latter being radically more fash and reactionary.
It was also inevitable considering that Nix is super nazi bar and most disputes are handled by talking down to the person who spoke up and choosing the option of least resistance (projects led by untrustworthy transphobes such as PolyMC are allowed in nixpkgs).
What can you do?
If you’re a member of the Nix community, you can spread awareness against the creeping tide of fascism infiltrating Nix. I also recommend signal boosting unofficial spaces such a Lix (a fork of the Nix language).
You can also 
if you’re an eligible member for the SC elections this year and endorse people who are not libs.
As for me?
I’m still going to contribute to nixpkgs because it recently got a core technical team, so the SC doesn’t have any unbalanced influence on it.
I’m also going to switch to Lix and get away from the other rabbit hole that is the Determinate Systems Nix vs. Upstream Nix conflict.
I’m gonna (yes I know cri)
red star os doesn’t have this problem
Unironically yes because red star os actually has a consistent political platform.
The NixOS community has zero morals or principles. It will keep having these crises of confidence till it eventually just becomes a reactionary corporate owned space and the Nix space is decentralized and fractured.
Honestly less social anxiety for me to actually give a shit about the community.
Linux (and Open Source in general) is really weird politically. It absolutely attracts extremists of all types. It’s always been strange to me, to see a space where the politics are primarily anarchist/libertarian as you’d expect, but on one end you’ve got actually sort of decent and just misguided ancom types, and on the other end the absolute worst right-libertarian chuds, and somehow both groups are willing to contribute to the same open source software projects. Very strange. And then you toss in the MLs, the fascists, and the bizarre world of governments and Official State Distros, and you’ve got a bona fide political mess.
If you want stability and explicit anti-fascism, AntiX is great. Personally, I’ve chosen a distro that doesn’t do politics and Just Works the way I want it to. I care less about Tech Politics than about my computer just freaking working. But, yeah. Get software made by explicit anti-fascists. Don’t find yourself in a Nazi bar every time you use your computer.
Its a CS wide thing as well, full of racists bumping arms with minorities and they have to get along because the code is god.
Hexbear being the only well managed online community I’ve been in is sad because we aren’t even perfect at all.
Nix and derivations isn’t going anyway for me, but caring about the community has gone out the window.
While I use Nix, I don’t really keep up with the community, though even I’ve started to notice fash creeping in. The guy who started the “Ekala project[1]” has absolutely lost it based on his blog posts. In this case, the user was banned from the forums (and possibly more?) but still, it didn’t leave a good taste in my mouth. (At least one other Ekala contributor also works for Anduril.) I spent some time reading his posts in amazement because they were just such garbage.
He’s a libertarian type chud who also works for Anduril:
On a cheerful note, before we begin, I’m pleased to share that I’ve recently joined Anduril Industries; likely to the chagrin of my political adversaries. This new role offers a technical platform and workload to reengage with interesting new problems, which, I’m sure, will inform my future efforts on Ekala. If I may add, contesting State corruption doesn’t diminish my pride in contributing, however modestly, to the defense of its people, and as I hope to show by the end of this piece, it might actually be the duty of every Citizen. After all, there can be no platform to reform Corrupt Laws or States if there’s no State left to amend.[2]
Case #2: Chud opinions on gender and “I hate my wife” posting
After pondering most of my life at the roots of modern societal woes, I can now pinpoint no issue more pivotal than this one. It underpins so much decay: from widespread debauchery and moral apathy to fiendish sexual deviancy and the largest-scale global child-trafficking networks in history. Consider, for example, the modern “battle of the sexes”; that perplexing tension between men and women fueling endless cultural wars, from #MeToo backlash to incel movements and declining birth rates. Nobody can seem to agree what lay at the root cause of all this chaos, but I’m now forced to conclude that this isn’t organic; it’s engineered by the corrupt state apparatus for profit and dominion. If you don’t believe it, I challenge you to make it to the end of this document while retaining that skepticism.
By pitting genders against each other through biased and (as shown) illegal laws that largely demonize men, reward manipulation, and extract wealth from broken families, the system ensures perpetual conflict. No sane, informed modern man would risk marriage or fatherhood in this horrific meat grinder, contributing to plummeting birth rates as families crumble and society weakens, all while the racketeers count their billions and power consolidates further and further away from the people.[3]
Denying the existence of fascism in the first few paragraphs discussing the Anduril/NixCon fallout:
During the second Anduril sponsorship controversy in early 2024, it became clear to us that a certain subsection of the community is heavily leaning into what might be termed the myth of marginalization as a strategic device to gain special powers over others.
Simultaneously, this group, still upset about the failure of RFC 98, is using the myth of fascism combined with an abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance (originally formulated by Karl Popper with a very different intent) to portray their opponents as bad-faith actors, or even as outright evil. They themselves, of course, do everything they can to appear justified in exercising power with absolutely no accountability, and with a clear sense of their own privileged entitlement to do so.[4][5]
I’d rather just stay away as far as possible, regardless of the technical merits of Nix. The code is open source so there’s no reason it couldn’t be forked. Now Guix has my eye as something that would actually be worth using (and perhaps contributing).
https://nrd.sh/blog/code-of-rebellion/
I find it hilarious that he calls his behavior “rebellion”. Fascism really is a faux revolution. ↩︎
https://github.com/nrdxp/rfc-evidence/blob/master/rfc_evidences_experiences.md ↩︎
GOOD post. It also feels like these fascist losers are really trying to keep their mask on. It inevitably slips though.
Now Guix has my eye as something that would actually be worth using (and perhaps contributing).
I’ve never had an allegiance to one particular project or community. I think derivations are a valuable abstraction and I totally recommend contributing to Guix as it’s gotten a lot more accessible (they’ve started using Codeberg as their sourceforge instead of mailing lists) and they don’t rely on any problematic infra (Nix cache uses S3 and Nixpkgs relies on GitHub Actions).
I want to poke the fash as much as possible so that Nix is forced to deal with this which is why I’m sharing this with y’all
I’m totally on board with that
“Letting my ex-wife who I hate leave me violates my constitutional rights and also making me pay child support is literally slavery” is a hell of a take
Dudes should just not fuck around if they don’t want to find out
guixis better anyway.*and much less susceptible to this kind of bullshit.
It is really fucking annoying to deal with this for years and have people who were supposed to prevent this only stoke the flames and North American Nix being a fash honeypot where you get an easy position at an MIC is infuriating.
why would the moderation team resign in protest? doesn’t that open up the opportunity for new members who will just give the SC what they want???
That would only inspire even less confidence in the SC but yeah even I’m hesitant to even comment directly on this issue within the forum because none of the original moderators are there.
It very much feels like a nazi bar where the only people left are liberals and fash and it only skews the internal perception of the community itself that these people have always been a majority.
I’m glad the fash are eating shit though and they have to deal with people speaking up.
Yeah I use Lix and for the time being nixpkgs. I don’t see any benefit from walking away from a technology that has obvious value to fascists because I want that value to benefit me and my comrades. I don’t have any reason to think that Guix would be immune to being adopted by the MIC either if it got big enough to be useful. I have dipped my toes into auxolotl, but it seems like a pretty sleepy project atm. Same issue there though, like any useful technology is going to eventually be adopted by our ops. Ceding it to them seems foolish, but its also annoying to deal with so pick your poison ig.
