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Nix Community Values

Introduction

Communities form when different people unite around a common purpose. Shared values guide decision making, and community goals supersede individual interests and agendas.

--- The Open Source Way

Our common purpose is to develop, propagate, and promote the adoption of the purely functional software deployment model. Our values help us achieve this purpose by guiding decisionmaking across the community, keeping us moving in a common direction.

This document captures our core values so that they can be shared and referenced by everyone in the community.

What is a value?

Values are not a Code of Conduct, they do not define governance structures, and they do not provide specific policies. Instead, values inform the decisions we make about these things.

A good test for whether something is a value is:

If a statement can be invoked by anyone in an organization, and cause a decision to be re-evaluated or changed, without regard to anyone’s rank or title, then you have a bona fide [i.e. genuine] value. If it doesn’t work that way, then it’s not a value.

To apply in many situations, values must be high-level, abstract concepts. Therefore, in the text below, each value is presented as a heading followed by an elaboration of its meaning. This is meant as a starting point for interpretation, not a comprehensive definition. The heading and the elaboration have equal importance.

The Values

Respect and civility

We treat each other with respect and civility. No matter one's individual identity, circumstances, level of contribution to the project, or status, everyone has the right to respect, and everyone has the duty to treat others with respect. We prioritise project health over individual interests.

People with higher visibility within the project or towards the public are subject to higher expectations for their conduct.

People come first

We are here, first and foremost, as individuals working together. Our priority here is to work on Nix projects for the benefit of all their contributors and users. We value building excellent software with a vibrant and diverse community.

Individuals gain trust and status by doing the work. Organisations gain prestige by funding the work of individuals and providing resources to support the project.

Free software and choice over lock-in

Nix projects are and will always remain free software.

We value working together with the broader free software community.

Free software is our priority, but we also support our users' needs to use non-free software, when practical.

Distribute decisionmaking widely

We are a synthesis of varied but overlapping communities. We rely on distributed approaches: asynchronous communication, clear ownership, deep-dive taskforces, and local decisionmaking.

We focus our attention on working together on our shared goals and working separately in a non-interfering way when our goals are independent.

We build trust primarily by working together on Nix projects.

Automation over process and toil¹

We are a global community, and disseminating information and maintaining processes can be difficult. We are also a large project with a lot of hard and repetitive work. Therefore, we value automation over toil, while recognizing that not all toil can be automated. Automation reduces toil, but people are still accountable. Adding new toil needs a very strong justification.

We build automation and processes that make the best use of our contributors' limited time and energy.

Stable evolution over stagnation or chaos

Openness to new ideas and evolution is part of what made Nix great. We continue to foster that evolution while encouraging development of re-usable building blocks and well-defined, stable interfaces.

We value experimenting with designs and concepts, and folding successful experiments back into continuous improvement for stable components.

The larger the impact an action has, the more care and discussion is warranted before taking the action.

Our leaders have a duty to find, support, and promote new contributors — and eventually step aside for new leaders.

Footnotes

Toil is work that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, interrupt-driven, devoid of enduring value, and scaling linearly with growth. ↩

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