First of all, you and all other of my fellow FLOSS developers have my respect. We may disagree on major or minute aspects of software design and philosophy, but ultimately we are a force for good in this world. I also admit that there are – as you say – nuances between GNU projects.
> I'm sick and tired of the religious vocabulary being applied to people who work on replacing proprietary software with free software
Well, I should have used quotes (“heresy”) to highlight the fact that I do not consider the usage to be entirely appropriate. But maybe instead of turning outwards it may be better to turn inwards and ask oneself why people such as myself, that have written less than about 10,000 lines of proprietary code in our entire lives, still draw upon such analogies to describe our GNU brethren?
One may think that following the Free System Distribution Guidelines only leads to the base system not shipping with proprietary nonsense. However, as you point out, there is also the fact that a chunk of the developer base find mentions of proprietary software offensive (?) and this necessitates shielding them with the #guix and #nonguix distinction. Perhaps naively, I find this counterproductive as I would rather have the “sinners” (sorry, I could not resist) on board and empower them to control the proprietary software that plenty of times is forced upon them because they have to make a living in a partially proprietary world. I want to allow them to transition cleanly to what we must ultimately turn into better non-proprietary alternatives. For example, I am happy that I can control and proud to have managed to keep my exceptions down to:
nixpkgs.config.allowUnfreePredicate = pkg: builtins.elem (lib.getName pkg) [
# “So Nvidia, fuck you!”
"cudatoolkit"
"nvidia-persistenced"
"nvidia-settings"
"nvidia-x11"
];
Accommodating a user’s ability to do this, in my mind, makes us stronger as we acknowledge a reality where compromises have to be struck. Yes, one could bring out nonguix to accomplish this, but it is very clear from how Guix is structured as a project that these people and the software they rely upon is at the very best a secondary concern to the project’s goal and the software they produce. In summary I
want to engage with users of proprietary software rather than to shield myself from them, as I think this is more likely to lead to long-term success of and superior free software.
Note that all of this is regardless of whether you are a card carrying FSF member and my general dislike for the law-based approach that the GPL takes to free us from proprietary software.