Re: Meta Guix: why guix is awesome!

[Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at>]

Hi Joshua

Am Mittwoch, den 28.04.2021, 13:20 -0400 schrieb Joshua Branson:
> Hello guix developers!
> 
> Guix is brilliantly fantastic!  I thought I would write down some of
> the
> things that make guix such a great community and a powerful free
> software tool.  I intend this email to encourage guix developers and
> perhaps encourage other free software projects to copy guix's
> success.
> 
> 1. It encourages non-english speaking participation.  Guix's manual
> is
>    a work of art that has been translated into a few languages:
>    German, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese?  Honestly my font
> in
>    my browser can't read the last translation...but I think it's
>    Mandorin (spelling?)
IIRC, it's simplified (Han) Chinese.  Mandarin is afaik not a writing
system.

>   Anyway, guix has a strong push to NOT be an
>    American only project.  It also has some email lists for
>    non-english speakers.  That is awesome!  I had never thought about
>    non-English mailing lists, but there certainly are non-english
>    speakers that would love to get help.  Also the website is
>    available many languages.
Please note, that English is not only American.  I for one, encourage
the use of any gratuitous "u" in any word, that allows it.  Fear my
colourful language!

> 2. Guix's leadership is non-political.  I recall on the mailing list
>    an issue raised about freedom of speech concerns.  Many emotion
>    emails went back and forth over this issue with guix developers
>    expressing a variety of opinions.  I actually felt encouraged that
>    Ludo did NOT say anything in this email exchange.  That signaled
> to
>    me that Ludo doesn't care what your political views are.  Anyone
>    and everyone is free to contribute to guix regardless of what you
>    believe!
I strongly disagree in on this in two points:
2.a. free software is inherently political
2.b. being political is not a bad thing
I think there's a strong tendency to equate politics with "people being
mad at you on the Internet" or "companies wearing a rainbow flag during
pride month", especially among American conservatives.  Those are not
the same and never have been.

Of course, "free software" does not completely dictate what ideology
you are allowed to have, but for the sake of everyone involved
(especially in heated debates), know that there are limits on what is
(or at least should be) allowed in our mailing lists.  If you want to
know why freedom of speech must be limited in such a fashion, please
read up on the paradox of tolerance.

> 3. It has great marketing.  I think this really ought to be stressed
> a
>    lot!  Guix has numerous blog posts that demonstrate that the
>    project is alive.  And they are really well written.  And
> engaging!
>    I absolutely love guix's blog!  And the website is hip!  And it's
>    got great artwork!
I don't know enough about marketing to give you a good answer on that,
but when it comes to what we're competing against, it seems to be a
rather uphill battle outside of the small bubble, that we've carved
out.  According to distrowatch we're still far away from Nix and back
when I was using Gentoo I thought that was some super niche distro.

> 4.  Some people work full time on guix (and get paid).  There are a
>    few guix developers who develop A LOT for guix.  I think the main
>    source of income for several prominent guix developers is from
>    cluster deployments as seen here: https://hpc.guix.info/about/
> Also
>    some developers get grants to work for guix as well.  This is a
>    personal view, but I do believe that free software ought to
> somehow
>    pay some developers.  That's how they can continue to develop the
>    software.
I think you'll find full-time workers in any project of a certain size,
Guix being no exception to that.

> 5.  Guix's leadership lets the best idea win.  I personally think
>    Ludo's last line on his email is genius: "Thoughts?".  It's a
> great
>    idea to solicit feedback, and I believe that Ludo genuinely wants
>    your thought and opinions.
There are a few variations of this, but generally when we ask WDYT,
it's because we've raised some points to think about :)

> 6.  Guix has big goals!  What is org-mode?  Emacs?  Guix?  The
>    GNU/Hurd?  All of these projects are sometimes hard to define.
>    There are so many things that you can do with guix!  Declarable
>    operating system.  Bootstrapped distro.  Portable distro.  Server
>    manager.  Soon maybe a guix home manager. This maybe violates the
>    unix philosophy of small programs that do things well, but perhaps
>    because guix dreams big it can dare crazy things!
Guix may perhaps not be the smallest package manager (to be honest, I
have no way of telling as it's the only one I'm involved in), but I can
definitely say, that it does things well, so your point about violating
Unix philosophy is invalidated :P

Also, Guix does not yet write email for you, we still have to offload
that to git.

> 7.  Guix is NOT linux development!  Guix encourages newbie developers
>    by sometimes fixing their really AWFUL code (or documentation).
>    AND NOT being angry at those trivial errors.  For example, some of
>    my documentation "fixes" were me pointing out an tiny issue with
>    the manual.  Then I sent a diff that didn't work.  And someone
> else
>    submitted a patch on my behalf that did my suggestion.  It's nice
>    to know that you won't be needlessly insulted while contributing
> to
>    guix.  A great example of this can be found in the irc log.  I
>    recall one such instance of a newbie asking about a silly
>    bug/feature.  In a moment of frustration I thought about saying
>    something rude (I did not say it).  Ludo actually responded to the
>    question with something like, "That's a great point.  Why don't
> you
>    open a bug report here, so that we can properly discuss it?"  That
>    was very kind/smart!
Which ties back to point 2.  Guix aims to be inclusive and being
inclusive means toning down the rudeness.

Btw. since we're on the topic of politics, let me point something out:
>   https://propernaming.org
I'm well aware, that virtue signaling does not help anyone, but
1. "we donate to non-profits" is literally virtue signaling
2. the way they insist on certain terminology out of "tradition" (and
it is mostly tradition) reminds me strongly about "the T-slur means
something else in this context" (you'll know which slur and which
context if you've been involved in or followed such debates)
3. creating a controversy out of people trying to make computing a
little more inclusive by changing a few things in our vocabulary sounds
pretty reactionary as a whole

To the words themselves: 
- black/white: This one shouldn't even be up to debate.  I've already
seen papers and projects using red/green instead, which has less
unfortunate implications while still being colours (of course, the old
thing with red being a lucky colour in China applies here, but oh
well).  If allow/deny is not to your taste, what about good/evil,
nice/naughty or shall_pass/shall_not_pass?
- cracker/hacker: this doesn't seem to have been written in response to
an actual suggestion, so I assume it's just them trolling
- execution etc.: making unfunny jokes based on one's own improper
understanding of latin
- fuck me harder: I don't kinkshame.
- foo/bar: how conservative do you need to be to find bars offensive?
- gb: Literally just there to have more sex on the page
- git: Wie Ihnen dieses Projekt auf dem Deppendrehkreuz[1] zeigt,
wissen wir Deutsche sehr wohl, wie man Deppen beschuldigt.
- I'm starting to get hacked off by the number of sex references they
deem to be absolutely necessary.  Are those folks horny on main?
- KISS is silly salespeak
- master/slave: wow, we're back to an actual suggestion.  What's funny
about this one, is that some projects (*cough* Python *cough*) think
it's morally acceptable to s/master/manager/ and s/slave/worker/. 
Really tells you something about the world we live in.  I think
(effectively) enslaving parts of our system runs somewhat counter to
what we as free software advocates should strive for, but given their
post record so far it could also be that propernaming is really hard
into BDSM, in which I would contradict my earlier point about not
kinkshaming.
- Red Hat is also not worn by the clergy of the Catholic Church.
- RTFM: Yeah, don't use that, there are nicer ways of telling people to
read the appropriate sections of an info file.
- Why does "virgins and people who have not had sex in years" sound
like it could accurately describe the people behind propernaming?
- I don't think anyone has ever been offended by trees – it's usually
the other way round – but there are (some reasonable and some less
reasonable) arguments to support one's fear of spiders, both physical
and digital.

Regards,
Leo

[1] https://github.com/danielauener/git-auf-deutsch