On Wed, Mar 4, 2026 at 2:26 AM Nguyễn Gia Phong via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution. <[email protected]> wrote: [...] > In my mind Guix has two keys properties: a complete dedication > to free software, and reproducibility. This dedication > is why I contribute to the project, and I assume that reason is shared > by many other contributors. [...]
Simon addressed our incomplete dedication to reproducibility, so I will address our incomplete dedication to free software. Some free licenses are more free than others. Our community has not restricted packages to "copyleft" / GPL but also includes permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0. Permissive licenses satisfy but do not preserve the four freedoms as derivative works can be distributed under a non-free license. Wars were fought, with the battles mostly won by permissive licenses. We may not like the outcome but have come to repeatedly relearn that RMS was right. The permissive argument is that your use of the original software has not been diminished: the actions of others are not limiting your freedom (as noted earlier by Ekaitz). The same is true of LLMs. Some will use them, some will avoid them, and the next generation will be AI-native and some day replace us all. If the concern is PR slop, I think we can agree that the solution to Guix suffering under the weight of version updates and minor edits is not more PRs but improved and further automated processes. We would do well to focus on what we need to build rather than argue over whether the labor should be manual or machine-assisted. Greg
