[Nix-dev] Re: Porting NixOS

[Arie Middelkoop]

Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> "Daniel Clark" <dclark at pobox.com> writes:
> 
>> I'd also like to know if there is any interest amongst the NixOS
>> developers to make NixOS a distribution that would be compliant with
>> the FSF/GNU Project's Guidelines for Free System Distributions [1] and
>> thus recommendable by the Free Software Foundation, and if not if
>> there would be any major objections to someone creating a NixOS
>> variant that would be (as far as I can tell the Nix package management
>> system would make such a fork much less disruptive and able to give
>> back to core NixOS than other package management systems).
> 
> I for one would be very interested in it.
> 
> Currently, Nixpkgs contains a fair amount of non-free software, some of
> which gets installed by default.  I would personally like it if we would
> gradually separate non-free software from free software in Nixpkgs, so
> that users can more easily and clearly choose whether or not they want
> to have non-free software installed.

Hmm, why would you want to mark software like that? For example, if I as
a user want to install Skype, I just want to have it installed. What use
is it for me if the system first says: "Sorry, Dave, can't do that. You
first need to sign with your blood that you are not a true open source
extremist"?

Even worse, with Gentoo, you nowadays have to download closed binaries
manually ...

Cheers,
Arie