Hi Hugo, On Tue, 14 Jul 2026 at 14:46, Hugo Buddelmeijer via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <[email protected]> wrote:
> Oleg pointed me to the excellent article by Konrad about "conviviality": > https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/07/06/conviviality.html > > It explains so many things, for example why I got drawn to Guix, and why > most of you despise genAI. It does a better job at describing the risks > of genAI than the GCD does; and it is more convincing than Konrad's own > message about the GCD (perhaps because the article is decoupled from any > specific technology). Please consider my very first comment about GCD 008 was a call for integrating this term of “conviviality”. Quoting [1]: I propose to add: —primarily backed by large corporations. This hurts the conviviality of our tools. And then still quoting [1]: The current wording is plain English and thus understandable as-is and in the same time it honors the trajectory of such deep questions; all that isn’t new from nowhere [2]. ;-) It applies equally for conviviality and non-power. About conviviality, see [3]. Where Illich’s book “Tools for Conviviality” was specifically referenced, see [3]. Somehow, I’m happy if Konrad’s post helped you to jump into the “conviviality” concept. However, I’m a bit sad that this proposal of wording had been overflowed by all the rest; because it appeared to me one important knot of the discussion. Anyway. :-) > In fact, we are doing *worse* than other ecosystems. Half of Konrad's > article is about the poor state of the Python world. Yet adding > packages to PyPI or conda feels far more convivial than adding them to Guix! This is inaccurate, IMHO. Guix is designed to be simple which does not necessarily mean easy. For the difference, please watch Rich Hickey’s talk [4]. Concretely, PyPI or Conda aren’t convivial, they are easy. PyPI isn’t convivial at all because it’s the “radical monopoly” of Python ecosystem. And Conda is less convivial than Guix because, for instance, it does not provide all the Guix mechanisms as fallback to Software Heritage, source-binary transparency, etc. Moreover, quoting [5]: We can go further and claim that an ethics of conviviality requires a combination of virtue ethics and ethics of care Then, this ethics is encoded inside one of the very first GNU document: its manifesto “Why I Must Write GNU” [6], I consider that the Golden Rule [7] requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. GNU is, since the very beginning, rooted in a variant of the “ethics of conviviality”, IMHO. And Guix follows this path, again IMHO. Contrary to Conda, which is not. Conda does not hold such “ethics”, to my knowledge. Obviously, Conda does very well many things but it’s not “convivial“ by Illich definition. > How exactly we should revive conviviality As underlined by “Conviviality for Digital Degrowth” paper [5], the concept of “conviviality” leads to degrowth, and quoting: Illich identified five main systemic threats to conviviality in technologies: […] (v) obsolescence, which refers to the excessive and engineered rate of obsoleteness of a technology and of the associated human knowledge for its development, use and maintenance. Therefore, revive “conviviality“ is probably by preferring stability over the most fresh around. And yes, “conviviality” implies to be less popular under the current fashion. Well, there is no out-of-the-box solution for reviving “conviviality”. IMHO, the first thing to read and re-read “Conviviality for Digital Degrowth” [5], in addition to Konrad’s blog post. And the second thing is probably to re-think our own personal relationship with computing and automation as a hobby and how such relationship fits into the collective picture – why do we build Guix all together? Cheers, simon 1: Re: Submitting GCD 008: “Standing up for human crafting” Simon Tournier <[email protected]> Mon, 18 May 2026 16:12:15 +0200 id:[email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2026-05 https://yhetil.org/guix/[email protected] 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_Nowhere 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality 4: https://youtu.be/SxdOUGdseq4 5: https://doi.org/10.4000/16954 6: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
