On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 05:12:17PM -0800, Jason Self wrote:
> Taking this and considering Guix's build process: The method of
> building seems to involve downloading Chromium, then runnning
> ungoogled-chromium over it, and then building. I'm not sure if any
> other packages have their freedom problems fixed in this way but this,
> just like build flags, should not be sufficient. Freedom problems
> should not be hidden/removed after the fact by asking the user to run a
> clean-up program after downloading the source, even if that has been
> automated by the package manager. What is sent to the end user to
> compile should itself be 100% free software and FSDG compliant from the
> beginning. If not it still amounts to distributing non-free software to
> the user when they want to, for example, do guix build -S chromium.

To clarify this general point about Guix for anyone who is reading
along, as a matter of policy the end user does not receive non-free
source code from Guix.

The tools provided by Guix to access source code only return source code
that is freely licensed. If the sources have to be modified to ensure
this, the unodified source code is not provided to the user. Guix is
specifically designed to do it this way.