Distributed GNU Shepherd NLNet Grant

[Juliana Sims]

Dear comrades,

As some of you already know, in December I submitted an application for 
an NLNet grant to fund porting our beloved Shepherd to Spritely Goblins 
[1]. This work would represent a radical evolution in the capabilities 
of not just Guix's system layer, but of GNU/Linux system layers in 
general; and would also be the biggest real-world test to date of the 
Goblins library and its capabilities (pun not intended). Materially, it 
would allow Shepherd dæmons running on different machines to securely 
communicate and interact with each other, going so far as to control 
one machine's dæmons from another machine.

I am happy to announce that this grant application was approved! [2]

While there remain some administrative tasks to complete before work 
can begin, I wanted to make the community aware of this upcoming effort 
and to invite you all to collaborate in this process. My hands may be 
the ones on the keyboard, but I want this to be a community project. I 
welcome questions and feedback about the project's goals and direction.

You can learn more about object-capability security, the basis of 
Goblins, from Spritely's "The Heart of Spritely" whitepaper [3] as well 
as erights.org (which the whitepaper cites heavily). You can learn more 
about Goblins and this specific project at the links cited above.

Thank you to everyone who supported the application process. Ludo, I 
wouldn't have the courage to attempt this if I didn't know I have your 
support. Also, this grew from your idea of integrating Goblins and the 
Shepherd in the first place. Christine, I couldn't do this at all if 
not for your and Spritely's work, and I wouldn't have applied for this 
grant without your encouragement. Thank you as well to everyone who's 
talked with me about this project, shared ideas and excitement, or just 
not gotten mad at me for emailing them questions out of the blue - I'm 
sure you know who you are. Knowing the community supports this work 
only increases my desire to do it. Last but most assuredly not least, 
thanks to NLNet for funding this project. Y'all are an incredible 
positive force in free software and thereby the world. Keep up the good 
work!

I look forward to working together with all of you over the coming 
months!

Solidarity,
Juli

[1] https://spritely.institute/goblins/
[2] https://nlnet.nl/project/DistributedShepherd/
[3] https://spritely.institute/static/papers/spritely-core.html