We've Been Awarded An NLnet Grant for GNU Taler Packaging!

We are happy to announce that Guixotic has been awarded a grant by NLnet as part of the NGI TALER Fund! This grant will fund our work to bring the main components and extensions of GNU Taler, a privacy-friendly payment system, to GNU Guix.

If you haven’t heard of TALER before, you might be curious what this all means. NGI TALER is a European-funded project to make a new electronic payment system, built on the GNU Taler free software, for everyone. TALER’s goal is to be a fast, easy payment system with low overhead, that puts buyers' privacy first, both as a principle and as a practical concern. Payments are blindly signed and structured to be low-cost across different currencies. TALER is designed to be a private, auditable, trustworthy, open, and transparent payment system. This effort is part of the Next Generation Internet initiative for a sustainable and open internet.

Our grant is a part of this larger project, and our work is to package GNU Taler components for Guix, so they can be used on any GNU/Linux distribution. In addition to helping make Taler more widely available, our work will also bring the strengths of Guix with isolated, reproducible builds completely from source code through the entire dependency chain. We've identified 15 total packages from GNU Taler to bring to Guix, setting the stage for the larger goal of NGI TALER to make this new payment system a reality.

As part of the NGI TALER fund, we are joining a larger group of projects working on bringing Taler to various existing payment platforms, banking systems, and software ecosystems. In addition, several other members of the Guix and Guile community have had projects funded by NLnet, like recent grants for work on a reproducible bootstrap for Node.js or 64-bit Hurd. We are pleased to be joining these projects in helping further Guix as a leader in user-freedom respecting technology. Our many thanks to NLnet for their continuing contributions to Taler and the Guix ecosystem!