Guix is drifting away from free software

2026-07-21T12:00:00Z

GNU Guix is drifting further and further away from free software, something I suspected would happen in the end and which has now taken shape in the Guix Foundation's own 2026 document¹.

Regarding the firmware problem, they put forward three options: improving the documentation so that users learn about Nonguix, offering Nonguix as an option in the official installer, and creating their own equivalent of Debian's rules (the DFSG) with a separate archive for non-free firmware. Any of the three approaches means abandoning the GNU FSDG, or to put it another way, beginning to place users' convenience above their freedom rather than resting on freedom alone, from which everything else should follow. As if that were not enough, the document states that 66% of users resort to Nonguix, which means that 66% of users curtail their freedom while running a GNU distribution covered by the GNU FSDG.

This turn of events is not really a surprise, since Nonguix has on occasion been mentioned on the official IRC channel as an alternative for those users who claim to need something proprietary (Wi-Fi, GPUs...), and it would not be the first time Nonguix has been named on the Guix blog either. Naming it at all pointed towards what is now happening, especially naming it without rejecting it outright or advising against its use.

In a world that is ever more controlled, ever more dominated by proprietary software, with ever less freedom in general (and not only in software), cooperating with the spread of malicious hardware from within a GNU-based project strikes me as a deplorable stance.

The justification rests on the claim that the hardware in use requires proprietary software: the real problem is acquiring that hardware and then demanding that the software adapt to it. The answer is not to give in, but to encourage users to buy hardware that works with free software. Making it easier to use hardware that depends on proprietary software (blobs) encourages precisely the opposite.

In an ideal world, no proprietary software would be distributed and all hardware would work out of the box with free software, with no backdoors, no Intel ME or AMD PSP, no proprietary bootloaders and no proprietary embedded controllers. We are not in that world. But let it be clear: for a user to have freedom, none of those elements can be present in the device; it is not enough for the software running on top to be free. That said, this post is about Guix, so I will focus on that (the rest would be worth another post).

The counterargument is familiar: without those blobs, many users' Wi-Fi or GPU would not work. In the case of Wi-Fi the solution is simple: replace the network card with a compatible one where possible, or use a USB adapter that works with free software. With the GPU there is no fix, and that points to the root of the problem: the better course would have been not to acquire that hardware. Anyone who already owns it can discard it, sell it for parts, or donate it to whoever is trying to reverse-engineer it. A free distribution's answer cannot be to bundle non-free software to paper over a bad purchase; it is to name the problem where it lies, in the hardware, and to steer users towards machines that do not impose the use of proprietary software.

Nonguix should never have been mentioned on IRC or on the blogs, and much less should its integration as a repository inside Guix even be under consideration.

Guix Foundation, Fundraising & Future, 2026, pp. 20 and 29. ↩

Matías Buzzo

Guix is drifting away from free software