Re: conflicts in the gnu project now affect guile

[Todor Kondić]

Dear Andy,

As a subscriber to the guile-user list only, I got wind of this discussion 
indirectly. If you already want a thorough discussion about future from the 
community members, perhaps including its less technical members (users) would 
not be such a bad idea (ie guile-user list, too). Consider it an investment.

Let me start by stating that this kind of ego shitstorm (RMS scandal, joint 
statement, and now Mark; oh and pardon my words ... I do write this email away 
from work in ten minutes that I have left until the lunch break is over, so 
it's kind of okay) I have not seen for ages. It was disconcerting to watch the 
tidal wave expanding trough the entire GNU universe, even our little galaxy.

In the discussion so far people start with platitudes about past work and then 
pour the worst kind of stuff over the recipient, so I'll skip that.

Now to the topic. The thing that concerns my skin the most.

Believe it, or not, after long time as an avid supporter of GNU Social movement 
(because this is what GNU means to me) and its core values, I am finally in a 
position to introduce GNU based software, including Guix and Guile into the 
research environment where I currently work. I have a Guix-based distro in the 
works which will encompass the set of tools we as a group develop and I will 
ship it to our collaborators and already have students using the development 
versions of it. There are various data processing scripts written in Guile and 
I can imagine the corpus growing. Isn't this amazing?

So, lets stop here and think for a moment. A month ago, free software movement 
was on the surface of it in a never better position. There are companies 
producing laptops, even phones based on fully free firmware ... i mean, i 
ordered a phone that will run FSF certified GNU Linux distro. This was 
inconceivable even just five years ago (at least to me). There are serious 
alternatives to proprietary communication apps, even for voip, etc.

And then, that medium article happens.

You know, there is a big IT department within our institution and telling them 
I will base some serious work on technologies such as GNU  Guile and Guix did 
raise a few eyebrows (those not raised are probably the cause of their 
proprietors not being informed enough).

I think the IT folk shall sooner, or later start laughing in my face. Also, I 
am starting to question my initial somewhat-risky decision to go the Scheme 
route.

So my message to maintainers: get your shit together, focus on the core values 
that brought all of us into this boat, understand we're all imperfect beings 
and lets keep working on cool stuff. Know that you have users and we're trying 
to expand your good work. Don't make that harder.

Couple of notes:

1) Are there any ladies on these lists? I am *dying* to hear from them
2) Related to (1) ... a brief look at the maintainers who signed the Joined 
Statement gives an impression that it leans heavily to the politically Western 
hemisphere; just a comment, maybe food for thought
3) The RMS scandal was brought to my attention by a female coder colleague who 
previously knew nothing of RMS's, or FSF's or GNU's work in the "Open Source 
Community"; another nibble for thought


Now gotta go, sorry for the long email, but I hope that knowing someone in the 
world tries to put your tools to practical use in
a production environment make you all understand how magic you
produce is more important than what sets us all apart.