Re: conflicts in the gnu project now affect guile

["Todor Kondić" <tk.code@protonmail.com>]

Dear Andy,

As a subscriber to the guile-user list only, I got wind of this discussion indirectly. If you already want a thorough discussion about future from the community members, perhaps including its less technical members (users) would not be such a bad idea (ie guile-user list, too). Consider it an investment.

Let me start by stating that this kind of ego shitstorm (RMS scandal, joint statement, and now Mark; oh and pardon my words ... I do write this email away from work in ten minutes that I have left until the lunch break is over, so it's kind of okay) I have not seen for ages. It was disconcerting to watch the tidal wave expanding trough the entire GNU universe, even our little galaxy.

In the discussion so far people start with platitudes about past work and then pour the worst kind of stuff over the recipient, so I'll skip that.

Now to the topic. The thing that concerns my skin the most.

Believe it, or not, after long time as an avid supporter of GNU Social movement (because this is what GNU means to me) and its core values, I am finally in a position to introduce GNU based software, including Guix and Guile into the research environment where I currently work. I have a Guix-based distro in the works which will encompass the set of tools we as a group develop and I will ship it to our collaborators and already have students using the development versions of it. There are various data processing scripts written in Guile and I can imagine the corpus growing. Isn't this amazing?

So, lets stop here and think for a moment. A month ago, free software movement was on the surface of it in a never better position. There are companies producing laptops, even phones based on fully free firmware ... i mean, i ordered a phone that will run FSF certified GNU Linux distro. This was inconceivable even just five years ago (at least to me). There are serious alternatives to proprietary communication apps, even for voip, etc.

And then, that medium article happens.

You know, there is a big IT department within our institution and telling them I will base some serious work on technologies such as GNU  Guile and Guix did raise a few eyebrows (those not raised are probably the cause of their proprietors not being informed enough).

I think the IT folk shall sooner, or later start laughing in my face. Also, I am starting to question my initial somewhat-risky decision to go the Scheme route.

So my message to maintainers: get your shit together, focus on the core values that brought all of us into this boat, understand we're all imperfect beings and lets keep working on cool stuff. Know that you have users and we're trying to expand your good work. Don't make that harder.

Couple of notes:

1) Are there any ladies on these lists? I am *dying* to hear from them
2) Related to (1) ... a brief look at the maintainers who signed the Joined Statement gives an impression that it leans heavily to the politically Western hemisphere; just a comment, maybe food for thought
3) The RMS scandal was brought to my attention by a female coder colleague who previously knew nothing of RMS's, or FSF's or GNU's work in the "Open Source Community"; another nibble for thought


Now gotta go, sorry for the long email, but I hope that knowing someone in the world tries to put your tools to practical use in
a production environment make you all understand how magic you
produce is more important than what sets us all apart.