Guix

GNU Guix receives donation from the Handshake project

Ludovic Courtès, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice, Ricardo Wurmus — 3. december 2018

Just a few days after it turned six, Guix received a great birthday present: the Handshake project, which works on the design and implementation of a decentralized naming protocol compatible with the Domain Name System (DNS), made a large donation to the GNU Project via the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Of this donation, 100,000 USD go to GNU Guix.

This donation will allow the project to guarantee its independence, invest in hardware for its build farm, and develop new features to benefit all our users.

We will be able to grow the performance and reliability of our existing infrastructure. We also envision better support for new and liberating architectures, and more resilient long-term storage of binaries and source code.

It will also allow us to continue our outreach efforts and attract new interns, for example through Outreachy, to further improve and promote the project.

The project funds are held by the FSF and spending is overseen by a committee currently consisting of Ricardo Wurmus, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice, and Ludovic Courtès, all core Guix developers. The FSF is the fiscal sponsor of free software efforts, including Guix, as part of its Working Together for Free Software fund. Other recipients include GNU Octave, the GNU Tool Chain, and Replicant. Congratulations to them as well!

Above all, a big thank you to Handshake for its support of free software and GNU! The least we could do to show our appreciation was to add a package definition for the Handshake resolver daemon, which we just did.

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager for the GNU system. The Guix System Distribution or GuixSD is an advanced distribution of the GNU system that relies on GNU Guix and respects the user's freedom.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. Guix uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, except that packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language. GuixSD offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management, and is highly customizable and hackable.

GuixSD can be used on i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and aarch64.