Integration with QubesOS & FSDG

Integration with QubesOS & FSDG

[Skyler]

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Hello,

Would you be able to accept pull requests which add packages to integrate Guix with QubesOS as a guest? I ask because QubesOS does not (and does not intend to) comply with the Free System Distribution Guidelines, the primary problem being that their dom0 includes binary blobs. Guix maintains the FSDG standard, which is a good thing. But part of the FSDG says that the distribution cannot "steer users towards obtaining any nonfree information for practical use, or encourage them to do so". I could see a reasonable argument that providing compatibility with a non-free system steers users in that direction, but it seems like a grey area.

Projecting further into the future, I would expect that packaging all of QubesOS infrastructure in Guix, so that Guix could run as dom0 with Guix guests, would be fine, because then users would not need to install any non-free software in order to use these features (the code developed specifically for QubesOS is free software, mostly GPL2+ from what I've seen).

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,
Skyler

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Re: Integration with QubesOS & FSDG

[Tobias Alexandra Platen]

If we run QubesOS on POWER9 or future PowerISA 3.1 hardware, no non-
free blobs will be needed. I do not trust Intel and AMD anyway, so I
plan to migrate away from Radeon to a future freedom respecting GPU.

On Fri, 2023-10-27 at 23:41 +0000, Skyler wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Would you be able to accept pull requests which add packages to
> integrate Guix with QubesOS as a guest? I ask because QubesOS does
> not (and does not intend to) comply with the Free System Distribution
> Guidelines, the primary problem being that their dom0 includes binary
> blobs. Guix maintains the FSDG standard, which is a good thing. But
> part of the FSDG says that the distribution cannot "steer users
> towards obtaining any nonfree information for practical use, or
> encourage them to do so". I could see a reasonable argument that
> providing compatibility with a non-free system steers users in that
> direction, but it seems like a grey area.
> 
> Projecting further into the future, I would expect that packaging all
> of QubesOS infrastructure in Guix, so that Guix could run as dom0
> with Guix guests, would be fine, because then users would not need to
> install any non-free software in order to use these features (the
> code developed specifically for QubesOS is free software, mostly
> GPL2+ from what I've seen).
> 
> Any feedback is appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> Skyler