Support GNU Guix!

A little over six years ago, the GNU Guix project was announced. Since that first email, the project and the community gathering around Guix have grown steadily.

Around 265 people have collectively contributed tens of thousands of commits to the project. In the past year alone, we have received close to 11,000 commits. More than 8,700 packages are now available, and Guix is supported on five different CPU architectures. Guix has made inroads in the field of scientific computing, and we have been able to secure institutional support for parts of our build farm providing binary substitutes to users. As a welcoming community, you have spent countless hours introducing Guix to new users, to help them when they experienced bugs, and to remove those bugs from Guix.

In addition to all of that, your generous financial contributions in the past year have been instrumental in bootstrapping and maintaining our new build new farm, for which we experimented with hardware that has been stripped of Intel's Management Engine, and which is running Libreboot instead of a proprietary BIOS. While it turned out to be not quite as simple as we had expected, we have learned valuable lessons from this experience. Your contributions have also paid for server hosting fees, for hardware replacement and maintenance costs, and for additional ARM build hosts.

For all this: thank you very much!

Reflecting on the past year's successes and missteps, we (the maintainers) have come up with ideas for the coming year that will need your support.

• We want to better support users of non-Intel hardware. This will necessitate growing our distributed build farm. Currently, professional server hosting fees are an ongoing monthly cost, and this will also be the case in 2019. With additional servers and build hosts in data centers across the globe, your donations could help pay for these increasing costs.

• As powerful ARM-based server hardware becomes more affordable, we would like to extend our build farm to more quickly provide binary substitutes for users of low-power ARM hardware. We are looking into buying at least one Softiron Overdrive 3000 rack server to build packages for both armhf and aarch64.

• We would like to increase our efforts to welcome more people from communities that are currently underrepresented in tech into the circle of Guix contributors. To that end, we want to continue to participate in Outreachy, a successful internship program for applicants from underrepresented backgrounds. Your contributions could help us pay for the stipends that would be paid to interns working on Guix-related projects for three months.

• Past experience has shown that regular in-person meetings are often very productive and beneficial to the community. In the past, we have sometimes piggy-backed on other meetings, but we think that it is worth organizing independent meetups and hack sessions. In 2019, we could use additional funds to pay for expenses relating to such meetings.

The Guix project was very lucky to receive a large donation from Handshake a few weeks ago. Unexpected funding like this can certainly accelerate the realization of some of our planned activities in the short term. However, the continued support of donors like yourself remains crucial to cover recurring expenses in the long term, to ensure the project's financial stability, and to allow us to plan ahead with confidence.

Can you match our average contribution of $110 (not counting the large gift we just received)? We appreciate any size donation you can make at https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=50. We can also accept contributions by wire transfer in USD, Euro, and GBP -- for that, please write to donate@fsf.org asking for the account details. If you can contribute $500 or more, you'll receive a special public "Thank GNU" appreciation from the FSF.

Thank you!

P.S. The FSF is also currently holding its major fundraiser of the year. 10% of donations for GNU Guix go to the FSF to help sustain the services they provide for us -- please help to get the word out!