Hello guix developers!
Guix is brilliantly fantastic! I thought I would write down some of the things that make guix such a great community and a powerful free software tool. I intend this email to encourage guix developers and perhaps encourage other free software projects to copy guix's success. 1. It encourages non-english speaking participation. Guix's manual is a work of art that has been translated into a few languages: German, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese? Honestly my font in my browser can't read the last translation...but I think it's Mandorin (spelling?) Anyway, guix has a strong push to NOT be an American only project. It also has some email lists for non-english speakers. That is awesome! I had never thought about non-English mailing lists, but there certainly are non-english speakers that would love to get help. Also the website is available many languages. 2. Guix's leadership is non-political. I recall on the mailing list an issue raised about freedom of speech concerns. Many emotion emails went back and forth over this issue with guix developers expressing a variety of opinions. I actually felt encouraged that Ludo did NOT say anything in this email exchange. That signaled to me that Ludo doesn't care what your political views are. Anyone and everyone is free to contribute to guix regardless of what you believe! 3. It has great marketing. I think this really ought to be stressed a lot! Guix has numerous blog posts that demonstrate that the project is alive. And they are really well written. And engaging! I absolutely love guix's blog! And the website is hip! And it's got great artwork! 4. Some people work full time on guix (and get paid). There are a few guix developers who develop A LOT for guix. I think the main source of income for several prominent guix developers is from cluster deployments as seen here: https://hpc.guix.info/about/ Also some developers get grants to work for guix as well. This is a personal view, but I do believe that free software ought to somehow pay some developers. That's how they can continue to develop the software. 5. Guix's leadership lets the best idea win. I personally think Ludo's last line on his email is genius: "Thoughts?". It's a great idea to solicit feedback, and I believe that Ludo genuinely wants your thought and opinions. 6. Guix has big goals! What is org-mode? Emacs? Guix? The GNU/Hurd? All of these projects are sometimes hard to define. There are so many things that you can do with guix! Declarable operating system. Bootstrapped distro. Portable distro. Server manager. Soon maybe a guix home manager. This maybe violates the unix philosophy of small programs that do things well, but perhaps because guix dreams big it can dare crazy things! 7. Guix is NOT linux development! Guix encourages newbie developers by sometimes fixing their really AWFUL code (or documentation). AND NOT being angry at those trivial errors. For example, some of my documentation "fixes" were me pointing out an tiny issue with the manual. Then I sent a diff that didn't work. And someone else submitted a patch on my behalf that did my suggestion. It's nice to know that you won't be needlessly insulted while contributing to guix. A great example of this can be found in the irc log. I recall one such instance of a newbie asking about a silly bug/feature. In a moment of frustration I thought about saying something rude (I did not say it). Ludo actually responded to the question with something like, "That's a great point. Why don't you open a bug report here, so that we can properly discuss it?" That was very kind/smart! Thoughts? Joshua P.S. If this email is not really suited here, please let me know. I know I've sent a few emails to guix devel that may not have been suitable. Please let me know if that is the case. :) -- Joshua Branson (joshuaBPMan in #guix) Sent from Emacs and Gnus https://gnucode.me https://video.hardlimit.com/accounts/joshua_branson/video-channels https://propernaming.org "You can have whatever you want, as long as you help enough other people get what they want." - Zig Ziglar
