Apply for funding for China Guix mirror

[Peng Mei Yu]

Hello everyone,

My name is Peng Mei Yu.  I am the maintainer of mirror.guix.org.cn.
mirror.guix.org.cn provides HTTP cache service for ci.guix.gnu.org and
git mirror service for git.savannah.gnu.org.  It helps Chinese Guix
users accelerate download speed.  It was an experiment project of me but
has since become an essential service for other Chinese Guix users.

When I started this project, my original intention was to maintain a
mirror service temporarily and lobby Chinese academic mirror sites to
add Guix into their support list before I shutdown my mirror service.
However the lobby process is not successful in the last two years due to
the uniqueness of Guix.  Chinese mirror sites only support a project if
they can periodically pull files with Rsync and publish files with a
static HTTP service like Nginx.  The reason is complex and not suitable
to discuss here.  After that, I sent an email to the guix-devel mailing
list to discuss if we can change the way guix publishes its packages.
The email thread can be seen here:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-11/msg00100.html
There was some positive feedback but the final result is still unclear
and I feel the process will be very long.  That means I will have to
keep maintaining the mirror.guix.org.cn service for Chinese Guix users
in the next two or three years.

Maintaining mirror.guix.org.cn requires money.  I payed the bills
personally at first.  Then I successfully raised some donations from
other people during the last year.  The financial accounts can be seen
here: https://guix.org.cn/donate/.  I published details of every
transaction.  It's in Chinese though.

Within the discussion in guix-devel, someone suggests me to send an
email here and discuss if the Guix project can financially support the
China Guix mirror project.  Therefore I composed this application in the
name of the Chinese Guix community.  It would be great if the Guix
project can grant some funds for the Chinese Guix community.  It's also
fine if there's difficulty in doing so.  So please don't feel any
pressure.  The money will be used to improve user experience for Chinese
Guix users.  It will mainly be spent on buying bandwidth and storage for
mirror.guix.org.cn.  If possible, I expect a fund between 100 and 1000
US dollar.  Although any amount will be appreciated.

On the page https://guix.org.cn/donate/, I wrote the donation terms as:

#+begin_quote
  We promise that all the funds you donated will be used to help the
  development of the Guix project, including but not limited to
  maintaining the China Guix mirror service, promoting the Guix software
  in China, and lobbying the free software community to support Guix.
  In case our community closes down, we will donate all the remaining
  funds to the GNU/Guix project.  In case the GNU/Guix project also
  closes down, we will donate all the remaining funds to the GNU
  project.  In case the GNU project also closes down, we will donate the
  remaining funds to appropriate charity organizations in accordance
  with the Cy-près doctrine.
#+end_quote

I wrote these terms in stead of simply saying "all your money will be
used to maintain the China Guix mirror service" in case in the future I
need to spend money on incentivizing other China free software mirror
sites to support Guix.  If you have specific requirements on how the
money should be used, please state it.  I will be happy to comply.

Thank you for considering this application.


--
Peng Mei Yu