> should not be hidden/removed after the fact by asking the user to run > a clean-up program after downloading the source, even if that has > been automated by the package manager. What is sent to the end user > to compile should itself be 100% free software and FSDG compliant > from the beginning. If not it still amounts to distributing non-free > software to the user when they want to, for example, do guix build -S > chromium. I should probably add on that this position comes from my interaction with the FSF in 2010: When LibreWRT was founded in 2010 (before it later merged into libreCMC) we submitted a similar question to the FSF, as to if it was sufficient for the LibreWRT build scripts (which would be run by the person building the firmware image from source and would have completely automated, just like how someone might instruct Guix to build from source) to download Linux and then run the Linux-libre deblobbing scripts on it vs having the build scripts instead download tarballs that were already cleaned up. I can't seem to find the email from back then but the response was that we needed to use already cleaned-up tarballs, not ask the user to clean up the software after ward even if automated. So that was what we did. Guix should do something similar.