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

[Steve George <steve@futurile.net>]

On 31 Oct, Tomas Volf wrote:
(...) 
> I do not want to speculate on what I would do in case of such a split,
> but at the end of the day the GNU and FSF "brand" is why I am here
> today.
> 
> Few years (oh boy the time does fly) back when I was deciding what weird
> thing I should learn next, both Nix and GNU Guix were considered.  While
> most of my friends recommended Nix, after some cursory research I
> decided to go with GNU Guix, to a large degree due to the perceived
> "guarantees" provided by both the GNU and FSF brands.
> 
> Would I make the same choice today even on purely technical points?
> Probably.  But I sure did not know enough to make qualified decision as
> a new potential user back then.
> 
> If such split would to happen, it would be great to have a better
> justification than "it makes some people uncomfortable".  Because the
> split (at least if not justified enough) would *also* "make some people
> uncomfortable" (well, at least me).
(...)

That's definitely achievable. The most well-known example is Debian's Social Contract:

https://www.debian.org/social_contract

As Christine said Debian as a project can be a bit special cased, I continue to be very impressed by the work Gentoo did (as a much smaller team). They picked up the Social Contract idea:

https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/philosophy/social-contract.html

With both, these days we'd probably separate 'how you behave' (code of conduct) from 'what we do' but it's nicely short and to the point.

Hope that's food for thought

Steve / Futurile