Re: Next Steps For the Software Heritage Problem

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

Am Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 09:36:29AM +0100 schrieb Dale Mellor:
>   No, it's not.  I use Guix as a tool to develop my own projects, private and
> personal for reasons I'm keeping to myself.  As part of that I write package
> definitions for them, and use the Guix machinery to build and test.  I *cannot*
> have Guix just giving my code away to anybody, that is just fundamentally wrong.
> 
>   I think at least there should be a /restricted/ license type available to
> package definitions, and the system absolutely should not give source code away
> from packages which use this (of course, they won't get into the official
> distribution, but that's fine).

Is there a misunderstanding here? The Guix software framework does not
communicate software that you work on to outsiders. As I understand it,
SWH looks at the Guix packages that are publicly available in the Guix
git repo, and then archives the corresponding source code of these packages.
By definition, this is free software (otherwise we would not package it),
and available from elsewhere on the Internet (the "uri" part of the
"source" field). So I think Guix does not actually do anything in this
context, and all this discussion is moot. (Well, I suppose we may encourage
SWH to archive these sources, and am personally very much in favour of it;
but they do not need us for archiving the sources.)

The goal of SWH is to archive all free software in the world, and if you
want to prevent your software from appearing in their collection, the only
reliable solution is to not publish it as free software (which apparently
is your approach, Dale, for the software you are talking about).

Andreas