Maxim Cournoyer writes: > I think that goes against the spirit of the GNU project: it's a tool > that helps finding licensing concerns for proprietary software, with the > end goal of weeding out GPL components. I see this completely differently: this is a harm-reduction tool for those who would violate GPL, possibly unknowingly. By adding compliance auditing abilities to Guix, developers can avoid that. > I think I'd rather not see this tool in Guix, but I think it could live > happily as a channel or as an extension. Yes I am making this patch (and a couple other compliance features) into Guix extensions out-of-tree. I would like to upstream the extensions as a package when they are ready, since the extensions would be FOSS. So I think this issue can be closed. > We may be better off if no such > tool exists and more companies embrace the idea that is GPL instead of > helping them spot GPL dependencies so they can rewrite them under some > non-copyleft license. Making companies rewrite GPL software is a good thing. It forces them to pay programmers, then those programmers can contribute to Guix in the evenings :-). Not many people can work on open source full-time, unfortunately. That said I understand the concerns with merging this patch, thank you both for taking the time to look at it.