About SWH, let avoid the wrong discussion

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

For the record, the Software Heritage initiative is supportive of the
Guix project since years.

It means that members of Guix community have or had interactions with
Software Heritage (SWH) teams since years.  For example, the blog post
“Connecting reproducible deployment to a long-term source code archive”
[1] published in 2019.  And more recently, the scientific communication
“Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment” [2].

Almost 6 years of friendly interactions and shared values.

Could we avoid to express definitive opinions based on partial
considerations about multi-dimensional topics?

Since years, several members of Guix community are helped in one way or
the other by SWH team members in improving free software ecosystem.

Well, I speak for myself: I have been invited to several events
organized by SWH and it’s up to you to trust me when I say: SWH team
works very hard to embrace all the diversity of FOSS communities.  For
example, I recently attended to a talk organized by SWH about Commons;
that talk had been a very good food for thought and maybe it could feed
our current discussion about governance/sociocracy via comments here or
there I could commit, I do not know, maybe.

Well, I am very grateful for the opportunity to interact with SWH teams.

For the record, SWH provided various supports for the organization of 10
Years of Guix, back in 2022.  Please remember that SWH team members were
there and some stayed all the three days; probably because we are a nice
community?  All the video stream and good videos of the 10 Years of Guix
event you probably watched or maybe watch again is because the tireless
work of multi-hats person (Debian Developer, Debian Video Team, … and
working at SWH) helped by Guix community members.

Please check the Copyright header for the subcommand “guix locate”.
Yes, it had been partly written by one SWH team member because, yes they
run Guix.  Yes, their day-job is at SWH and they are also part of our
Guix community by contributing to Guix source code.

Now, you take it as it is: I am sad by what people are concluding!

Yes I understand why people are angry.  Yes discussions must happen.

However, I was expecting more benefit of the doubt considering history
and track record.  Hum, even, maybe, I am asking myself if Guix
community is indeed nice or if this time the community is just harsh and
unfair.

Do we forget the track record and the common history?

Then, for what my opinion is worth, fighting against SWH while thinking
it’s fighting against LLM/AI is the wrong fight.  Because 1. we are all
in the team.  And 2. because SWH could be a facilitator for helping in
some regulations, maybe, I do not know.  Somehow, I agree with Ekaitz.

You take it as it is: I was expecting more humility by Guix community
members.  Do you really think that a collective of people involved in
various FOSS communities with different roles, dedicating their free
time to free software or open source movements, do you think they are
the bad actors here?

My humility tells me, as I expressed several times, nothing is ignored.

Yes I also got the point about the lack of transparency.  As I said
above, FWIW, I am in touch with SWH team.  Well, I do not have special
information from SWH and I trust them to have listened or are still
listening various communities.  So my understanding is: work is in
progress…  Somehow, wait and see.

Yes I know we cannot wait forever.  Again, do we forget the track record
and the common history?  Do we consider that a multi-layers topic
involving legal or ethics questions is straightforward to articulate?

My humility tells me to wait to have clear and better understanding
about SWH motivations, their rationale, the measures and
counter-measures they maybe have in mind.  Be patient and tolerant as I
am with my friends.

Long enough email and thread.  That’s all from me! :-)

My last message.  Not because I am bored but because one week of
holidays is starting now for me. ;-)

1: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2019/connecting-reproducible-deployment-to-a-long-term-source-code-archive/
2: https://hal.science/hal-04586520v1

Cheers,
simon