Re: Guix (and Guile's) promise, and how to (hopefully) get there

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Ekaitz Zarraga <ekaitz@elenq.tech> skribis:

> On 2024-10-26 22:22, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>
>> We have enough money, about 50k€ currently at the FSF plus a couple
>> thousand € at Guix Foundation⁰.
>
> So we rely on the FSF for the funding, mostly.

To be clear, the FSF is not sponsoring Guix or funding its development;
it is acting as a fiscal sponsor (read: a bank) here.

[...]

>>> - Is the Guix Foundation the way to do it?
>> It is one way to do it, yes.
>
> Should we invest on making it **The Way**?

My personal take: yes, we should do that.

> 0. Is the donate page in guix.gnu.org up to date? Maybe we should make
> sure it is, and maybe include the Guix Foundation?
>
> 1. Adopt an RFC process. I think it's valuable.
>
> 2. Decide if we want to invest on the Guix Foundation:
>   - What is the status of it? Is it a fully functional organization?
>   - Can we use the Guix Foundation for, for example, Tax exempt
>     donations in the EU? And the US? Maybe some famous streamer could
>     use their platform to make fundraisers for the Guix
>     Foundation. (see what the Zig Software Foundation does)
>   - Could we use the Guix Foundation to make a minimal Business (I
>     hate that word) model to make a Guix-based product to get funds to
>     improve Guix itself? Say, make a Guix hosting service? Currently
>     most of us are throwing money to corporations for our small
>     servers and would be happy to redirect that to something we love,
>     while also having a great Guix based workflow.
>   - Or maybe some of us could make that model and donate all or part
>     of the profits to the Guix Foundation? (I think owning the
>     hardware helps a lot)
>
> 3. Once we have money we can use, choose some people to maintain the
> infrastructure and pay them.
>   - Can we really afford our machines? (are we paying for all of them?
>     what are we going to do with the ones that are in a basement
>    somewhere?)
>   - Is Guix sustainable?
>
> 4. Maybe decide if we want to have paid
> maintainers/security-maintainers or committers (or teams!).
>
> 5. Relieve weight from people that have too much on their shoulders. I
> won't name names, but some of you are in the border to the burnout.
>   - How could the rest of us mitigate that? Maybe it's time to speak
>     and ask for help.
>
> 6. Propose more committers. Encourage committers to review patches,
> and also non-committers! (Steve, you are doing a valuable thing)
>
> 7. Add documentation about Guix's infrastructure to the Contributing
> section of the manual, so anyone can pay attention to that part of
> Guix too. I'll try to do that myself, if someone else is committed to
> commit it ;)
>
> Those points we could act on in the short/mid-term, or at least give
> us some direction.
>
> What do you think, am I missing something?
> Maybe some of the calls to action you don't like? Are they practical enough?

I have reservations regarding #3: we have enough money for machines but
not for people, and we’re not set up to pay people apart from
bounties/stipends maybe.

But really: all good directions to invest in and points to address,
I agree!

Ludo’.