Re: Sustainable funding and maintenance for our infrastructure

[Felix Lechner via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org>]

Hi Jonathan,

On Tue, Aug 13 2024, Jonathan Frederickson wrote:

> the trouble is identifying "independent" seeders.

Thank you for your valuable perspectives on this important topic.

The serving someone else's substitutes could also arise more innocently,
for example via a technical misconfiguration or because of an incentive
system that rewards the contribution of substitutes.

> you would want this to be an indication that multiple individuals were
> able to reproducibly build the same packages bit-for-bit.

> You may want a way for someone running a substitute server to
> additionally attest that they had individually built the derivation in
> question.

Is it possible for someone to reliably attest that they individually
built a reproducible work product?  I believe the needed variation in
inputs, like a hash, is incompatible with the goal of reproducability.

Kind regards
Felix